the 2008 Canadian Web 2.0 toolkit

I'm not going to comment about the Canadian election here, but I do think it is useful to survey the web tools they're using, I think we can see a bit of a "2008 consensus" among the parties, not on policy but on how to reach Canadians on the web.

The winners (of Canadian social networking) are two US sites: YouTube and Facebook.
(Facebook is more popular in Canada than MySpace.)

Usual suspects Flickr and Twitter are also prominent, and to my surprise, even FriendFeed is being used.  Flickr was created in Vancouver but is now part of Yahoo (USA), the other two are also in the US.

Just to be clear - this is a quick look at what Web 2.0 / social network sites are prominent on the individual sites, it's not a comprehensive survey.  It's mostly what I could see on the home page or the "social networks" page, if I could find one.  Pretty much all of the parties are on all of these sites, just it's not as obvious with some of them, or it may be an individual candidate rather than an official party presence.

Prime Minister (Conservative Party) - official government of canada site
* YouTube
* Facebook
* Flickr
* Twitter

Conservative Party
* Facebook
* Digg
* Flickr
* Twitter
* YouTube
* FriendFeed
* MySpace

NDP
* YouTube
* Flickr
* Facebook
* Twitter
* FriendFeed

Liberal Party
* YouTube
* Facebook
UPDATE 2008-09-14: Liberal Party Social Networks section now also shows
* Twitter
* Flickr
* MySpace
ENDUPDATE

BQ
* Facebook (but not easy to find)

The BQ seems to have an emphasis on blogs, to the point of "Blogue Québécois" being a big link on their front page.

Green Party
* I wouldn't dare leave out the Green Party, but they seem to only have blogs (although many individual candidates have Facebook pages buried in a list somewhere on the site).