Internet-era politics means safe seats are a thing of the past

Tools such as I'll Vote Green If You Do mean isolated pockets of resistance can unite to become effective agents of political change

It's always election-time, of course. From the moment the polls close, party strategists are scheming about the pre-ordained date, five years hence, when they will close again. But there's election-time and there election-time and this is the latter - election-getting-very-close-now time.

Figuring out how to use the web to get elected - and to get elected again the next time around - is a problem without an all-purpose answer. The particulars of online electoral campaigning are specific to the party and its situation and the nation in which it is running, but there has been a trajectory in the history of electoral campaigns that we can follow out to get a sense of what our near-term future (the next election) and the one after that (2020, assuming parliament hasn't been dissolved and replaced by a Star Chamber that rules behind closed doors and will not open them until everyone who's ever done or thought anything even a little terrorist-y is dead or locked up in an offshore black site).