Kiwiblog

Google have launched an online gadget for Kiwis wanting to follow 2008 election news. Quite a tidy little tool.

The Herald on Sunday reports on how Rochelle Rees has google bombed John Key so a search of NZ sites on “clueless” will bring up his website.

This isn’t terribly difficult to do, especially if it is for .nz sites only. It is far far harder to do it for all searches.

Anyway I found it interesting that the HoS reported:

Auckland computer programmer Rochelle Rees told the Herald on Sunday she emailed friends a year ago, asking them to put links on their websites to Key’s site with the word “clueless” as the link text.

“More than anything, it’s fun,” said Rees, who said she was interested in politics but not affiliated to any party.

I found that interesting. For I could recall two things about Rochelle. One is that she is involved in Auckland Animal Action. The other is I was sure she was a member of Young Labour. And sure enough a quick Google search, and I find the answer on my own blog!

So Rochelle just last year was not just a member of Young Labour, but was elected onto its National Executive. So how is that not affiliated to any party?

I also found it amusing that that they are trying to suggest with their Google bombing that John Key is clueless. The bombing works better if it is an attribute that many people will agree with. They should have gone with “swallowing dead rats” or something. Because look at Key’s achievements:

• Hugely successful career in the private sector
• Rose to the top job in his area (global head of foreign exchange) in a company with 60,000 staff, $100 billion a year turnover and assets in excess of $1 trillion.
• So popular with his staff, colleagues and competitors than the SST couldn’t find a single person to speak badly of him, despite the fact he was in an industry with legendary rivalry
• Appointed to the Foreign Exchange Committee of the New York Federal Reserve
• Successfully challenged an incumbent MP for the Helensville 2002 nomination
• Made Opposition Finance Spokesperson after just two years in Parliament
• Unanimously elected National Party Leader after just four years in Parliament
• Within six months of being elected Opposition Leader, overtook Helen Clark as Preferred Prime Minister
• Has consistently polled as the most popular Leader of the Opposition since records began over 20 years ago

Need I go on?

UPDATE: Rochelle, far from being someone just interested in politics, was a candidate for City Vision in the local body elections. Also she was endorsed by the Labour affiliated EPMU as a preferred candidate. And her e-mail address is @primary.geek.nz which is mainatined by Labour Party member and The Standard owner – Lynn Prentice.

I have no problems with Rochelle having some fun Google bombing. Good on her. But once again we see the traditional pattern of behaviour where someone is portrayed as just “interested in politics but not affiliated to any party”, when the reality is quite different.

UPDATE2: The Herald on Sunday have updated their story and Rochelle has commented below. She says she told the reporter she wasn’t currently affiliated. And Lynn Prentice happens to be her uncle!

The Herald calls Google the world’s most powerful 10 year old.

It brings back memories of AltaVista, the former number one search engine. It was amazing how quickly Google replaced it as the search engine of choice.

Google is powerful but not quite all conquering. When they launched Google Video, I thought that would dominate the online video market as they had the brand and resources of Google.

But You Tube kicked their butt, because they had a superior product. The “embed” function especially turned every blog into a gateway for You Tube and they gained massive market share over Google Video.

Of course Google then went and purchased You Tube. But it still shows that product is still more important than brand, and that Google’s dominance can not be assumed to last forever.

But having said that, I am a regular user of:

1. Google Search
2. Google News
3. Google News Alerts
4. Google Adsense
5. Google Analytics
6. Google Maps
7. Google Images
8. Google Toolbar
9. Google Calendar
10. Google Docs
11. Gmail
12. Google Talk
13. You Tube

I have also played with Google Chrome and check out Google Groups very occassionally. So it is hard to see an Internet without a dominant Google anytime soon.

I have to say I am impressed with BNZ’s netguard card. I had put off getting one for my Internet banking because I thought it would be one of the clunky electronic gizmos which flashes a new code every minute.

But it is just a credit card sized card with a 7×7 matrix on the back with a letter or digit in each square. They prompt you for three squares each time you login, which is very quick to do.  Hardly a hassle at all, and definitely more secure.

The chance of someone guessing the right responses on any given login is 1 in 46,656 (36^3). And the chance of guessing your entire card is 1 in 36^49 which is 1 in 1.81×10^76.

The other cool thing lately is that Google Calendar now has a plugin to sychronise with MS Outlook.  This means I can let people view my busy/free times in Google, have appts synchronise with Outlook (where I make most of my appts) and have them also transfer to my Blackberry to remind me of the appt when on the road.

The only bad thing is discovering this may have cost me a Blackberry. I have been looking for a way to synchronise Google Calendar and Outlook for months and tried every setting there was. So I casually remarked to one of my staff that if she could discover a way to do it, she’d get the Blackberry she had been pestering me for. By pure coincidence, Google had earlier that day released their Outlook plugin, and it was a front page link from Google Calendar.  So she is insisting I owe her a Blackberry for her two minutes of work.