With the election now nearly five weeks away, today's Media section in The Australian shows that online political activism is alive and well in Australia. And this Not Happy John! website is setting a few goals of its own (and the Liberal Party can't be too happy with their (sorry) web presence!) Thanks for your continued support.

Traffic builds on election hit meter

Sally Jackson

A FEW voters, mainly left-leaning ones, are turning to the internet for information on the federal election campaign, but not many, judging by website traffic figures from Hitwise. Visits to political websites almost doubled after Prime Minister John Howard announced the October 9 poll date on Sunday. However, this was off an exceedingly low base, with visits to sites in the political category that day accounting for just 0.153 per cent of all visits to the roughly 450,000 Australian websites that Hitwise tracks, up from 0.08 per cent the weekend earlier.

According to Hitwise, anti-establishment sites such as nothappyjohn.com and greenleft.org.au usually dominate the category.

But with the federal campaign finally under way the official ALP and Liberal Party websites immediately moved to the top of the list, behind only the ABC election site (abc.net.au/elections).

Of the visitors to the ALP site (alp.org.au), 27.3 per cent were directed there by a Google search. A quarter of visitors then clicked through to truthoverboard.com, an anti-Howard site, while about 8 per cent went to the Liberal Party site (liberal.org.au).

By the end of Tuesday, the ALP site was ranked No.1, claiming just over a 13 per cent share of all visitors to political websites. The Australian Greens Party site (greens.org.au) was No.2 and the ABC site No.3.

However, visitor numbers to liberal.org.au had slipped, bumping it to seventh spot behind greenleft.org.au, johnhowardlies.com and nothappyjohn.com.

Rounding out the top 10 most-visited political sites were onlineopinion.com.au, the Australian Democrats site (democrats.org.au) and the website of the ALP Victorian branch (vic.alp.org.au) -- which rocketed to prominence from a lowly 53rd ranking on Sunday, for no immediately apparent reason.

``With the election finally confirmed, we will continue to see heavy online activity from anti-establishment and anti-war websites,'' says Hitwise's Tessa Court.

``However, in a close election such as this, we will also witness a dramatic increase in traffic to the primary political party websites, as constituents do research on policy and use information provided on these websites as the basis for choice.''

POLITICAL WEBSITES

.................................................... Market share (%)

1 ..... Australian Labor Party ................. 13.44
2 ..... Australian Greens ....................... 12.59
3 ..... Elections ABC Online .................. 6.97
4 ..... Green Left Weekly ...................... 5.95
5 ..... John Howard Lies ........................ 5.95
6 ..... Not Happy John! ......................... 3.74
7 ..... Liberal Party of Australia .............. 3.74
8 ..... On Line Opinion .......................... 3.23
9 ..... Australian Democrats .................. 2.55
10 ... Australian Labor Party - Victoria ... 2.55

Source: Hitwise