Following on from Barack Obama’s successful use of Facebook as part of his Presidential campaign last year, and the National Union of Students’s victory over HSBC 18 months ago, John Prescott has launched a group on Facebook to call the British public to action to protest against the Royal Bank of Scotland’s planned bonuses.

On his blog Prescott recognises Obama’s use of Facebook. He said:

“He has also been very successful in creating an online army to support his fiscal stimulus package through Congress – and we should use that people power here.”

“We must utilise these same online grassroots tactics to force these greedy and indifferent banks that the taxpayer bailled out to give up their bonuses.”

But can Prescott replicate Obama’s success in the UK?

With just 4,991 people signed up to the Facebook group so far things don’t look too positive. Especially if you consider that the average tax payer in the UK has paid £1,000 to the banks in tax. Therefore the tax paid the by all of the users in Prescott’s facebook group equates to less than half a per cent of the £1bn that the Royal Bank of Scotland plans to give away to its employees as bonuses. That said there were only 4,955 people signed up when I started writing this blog post.

I shall watch how this campaign evolves with interest. (No pun intended)

I’ve picked out a few interesting facts.

• 133 million blogs have been indexed by Technorati since 2002
• 76,000 blogs have a Technorati rating of 50 or higher
• 41 per cent of bloggers use Twitter
• Technology is the 2nd most popular topic for bloggers
• Corporate blogs make up 12 per cent of all blogs
• Professional blogs make up 46 per cent of all blogs
• 50 per cent of bloggers are aged between 18 and 34
• 44 per cent of bloggers are parents
• 42 per cent of bloggers spend 3-10 hours blogging per week
• Only 15 per cent of bloggers spend less than an hour blogging per week
• ‘Blog’ is the 5th most popular tag
• ‘Technology’ is the 11th most popular tag
• 83 per cent of blogs are listed on Technorati
• Just 4 per cent of bloggers pay to advertise their blog
• 46 per cent of blogs don’t feature any advertising
• Bloggers spend twice as much time online as U.S. adults 18-49,
• 82 per cent of bloggers post brand and product reviews
• 89 per cent of bloggers post about brands that they love or hate
• 37% of bloggers have been quoted in traditional media based on a blog post
• Half of bloggers believe that blogs will be a primary source for news and entertainment in the next five years
• 1 in 5 five bloggers don’t think that newspapers will survive the next ten years