Posts Tagged ‘ Politics ’

Online population vote YES to AV

Tweet Today (Thursday 5 May) polling stations have opened across the UK to decide whether to change the electoral system from first-past-the-post (FPTP) to the alternative vote (AV) system, under which voters rank candidates in order of preference. The majority of online searches relating to AV in the last four weeks have been very generic, [...][ READ MORE ]

How the Budget could affect new business start ups

Tweet Tomorrow Chancellor George Osborne will deliver his first March Budget to outline the government’s spending plans for the next financial year. A lot of the focus of the Budget is likely to be around fuel duty and interest rates, but Prime Minister David Cameron has also promised that the Budget will: “tear down the [...][ READ MORE ]

Egypt protests swamp holiday search terms

Tweet The recent political unrest in Egypt has had a dramatic effect on search term behaviour online and could cause a severe backlash to the Egyptian tourism industry. Protests in Cairo against president Hosni Mubarak and warnings from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to avoid all unnecessary travel to Egypt’s capital have deterred travellers from [...][ READ MORE ]

2010 Online: the year in review

Tweet I can scarcely believe that a whole year has passed since I was sitting here writing the 2009 review, but 12 months to the day here we are, and it’s been another fascinating year in the digital world. Once again I have cherry picked the best blog posts from the year which have either [...][ READ MORE ]

Ed Miliband wins online majority as well as Labour leadership

Tweet With the Labour leadership decided last weekend it’s interesting to see how the popular opinion of the public through online Internet searches was reflected in the eventual triumph of Ed Miliband. Much was made in the media of the sibling rivalry between Ed and his brother David, but searches over the last four weeks [...][ READ MORE ]

Cameron’s Big Society prompts big traffic spike

Tweet Last week the Prime Minister set out his vision for the “big society”, the flagship social policy of the Conservative-LibDem coalition government. The initiative aims to take the emphasis of responsibility away from the government and instead empower people to run local services such as schools, post offices and transport networks. The idea of [...][ READ MORE ]

Budget 2010: the online response

Tweet As expected, yesterday’s budget, presented by the Chancellor, George Osborne, gained a huge amount of press coverage. Given the wide range of changes introduced, it is not a surprise to see that many people went online to research both the key points and finer details. Yesterday (22/06/10) 1 in every 179 UK searches was [...][ READ MORE ]

Election traffic: Tories gain at Lib Dems’ expense, but it remains close online

Tweet The general election is just two days away, and it remains close. The chart below illustrates the weekly market share of visits to the three main political parties’ homepages, with the Conservative regaining the top spot. The Liberal Democrats have fallen into third place, but it remains extremely close – especially when you consider [...][ READ MORE ]

Bigot-gate and the role of social networks in the election

Tweet Gordon Brown’s unfortunate gaff yesterday – already inevitably christened ‘Bigot-gate’ – was the big political story yesterday, and probably the second major event of the election (after Nick Clegg’s success in the first leadership debate). Accordng to our daily search data we tracked 400 distinct search terms containing the word ‘bigot’ yesterday; the day [...][ READ MORE ]

Tories back on top following second leadership debate

Tweet Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats were the big winners online following the first leadership debate last week, and based on our daily data their homepage has been picking up more UK Internet visits than either the Conservatives or Labour over the last 7 days. However, as the chart below illustrates, following last night’s [...][ READ MORE ]