Twitter may be downright dirty (see Friday's piece), but it's not the only front in the online campaign. Online ads, primarily on YouTube, have become a staple of local campaigns. They're infinitely cheaper than television ads to broadcast, but it takes a particular type of video to gain widespread attention - people who aren't likely to follow the debates aren't necessarily going to be that much more inclined to watch the YouTube equivalent. It's no surprise, then, that the most popular (and successful, if views are a measure of that) video is a silly parody attack ad from Vision-affiliated WeBackTheJuiceMan.ca. Funny will only get you so far, of course. Vision and COPE have several polished party policy planks, while the NPA have a slew of shorter pieces. Meanwhile, NPA candidate Jason Lamarche seems to have outproduced his own party and Sandy Garossino has been able to keep up as an independent. Campaign videos are carefully scripted, to be sure, but how the message is delivered is just as important as what is said - and what isn't said. The top video for each campaign so far, in descending order of views, is after the jump.

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[caption id="attachment_3839" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="A selected image from the Spacing Vancouver Flickr pool. Image courtesy of Rick Forgo."][/caption] Since you're the kind of person to read online election articles, you probably already know that the three major parties - Vision, COPE, and the NPA - are all strongly represented online, along with independent candidate Sandy Garossino, veteran of the casino fight, and others. This is the election where social media finally becomes the make-or-break campaign tool, say the pundits, just as they've said for every election in recent memory. I disagree, and I disagree as someone who recently managed a election's "social media candidate" (the exact race is not important, but I have never had any role with any Vancouver party or candidate). On Facebook, we had the most friends, and both a page to "like" and a discussion group to join. On Twitter, we were one of the most prolific campaigns, but also the most likely to engage in an actual dialogue. Our YouTube videos allowed comments, as did the in-depth blog posts we were constantly rolling out with detailed links to relevant articles. We answered pretty much every question directed our way on the local forum while most candidates ignored it, and we did an in-depth interview with a local blogger in addition to all the surveys we knew would end up online.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Long-time supporter of Spacing, Robert Ouellette, wants residents of Canadian cities to take part in his new project called MESH Cities. Whether they knew it or not, anyone who followed Toronto’s Port Land debacle over the last few weeks got a first-hand introduction to the power MESH Cities have to shape our communities. Let me explain. We’ve been hearing a lot about so-called “smart” cities in the news recently as the major computing and infrastructure players like IBM, Cisco, GE, and Siemens look at the next frontier in the trend towards ubiquitous computing. That new frontier is our cities. Whatever you might think about a computer-driven modernity, MESH Cities are not just smart cities. MESH Cities go beyond the management of infrastructure to the heart of what makes cities worthwhile—their livability. Metaphorically, MESH Cities are the offspring of an improbable marriage between Jane Jacobs' ideals and ubiquitous city computing. Their kids, in this context, are named MESH: M=Mobile, E=Efficient, S=Subtle, H=Heuristics This is how the www.meshcities.com website introduces the concept.