Get Blogged @ Cybergate9.Net

Well even though we don’t have an election yet (it hasn’t been formally announced) Google has put its stake in the ground to extract some advertising revenue from the whole thing by launching their 2007 Australian Federal Election site. Cynicism aside, they intend to ‘mash up’ a whole host of stuff including party video channels (YouTube), maps of election boundaries (Google Maps/Earth) with linkages through to candidates information, news and the like, linkages to search hansard and MPs websites, and a ‘trend tool’ attempting to show ‘relative interest’ in topics using Google metrics.

They managed to attract two relatively junior players from the major parties to the launch in Sydney – Joe “I can sneer at anything, I’m on the front bench” Hockey & Peter “I’m a sell out bastard” Garrett – both who managed to feign an appropriate amount of enthusiasm for the Internet and to provide Google with some free endorsement whilst they were at it.

Rob Shilkin, Google Australia’s Head of Corporate Communications & Public Affairs (predictably) MC’d the event and came out with this ‘google belief’ – ‘democracy on the web works’ and proceeded to extrapolate that, therefore, they (Google) would like to see ‘the web work for democracy’. Given Google (in)famously colludes with the Chinese government to censor web content I find that a bit hard to stomach.

Let’s just remember (a topic I’ve touched on in a couple of other posts – here, and here) – these companies exist to make profit for their shareholders, that is their right and function. Don’t get confused as to why they undertake these types of initiatives – for publicity and, in Google’s case, to drive traffic and thereby drive advertising revenues.

All that aside, one cannot ignore that Google has massive amounts of capital and is still doing some of the most interesting things on the web.

Overall, in relation to the 2007 election site, I suspect most people would have far more fun with the Google Earth Flight Simulator – if you want to fly around Canberra you can start here at Canberra Airport Runway 30.

After thought…
google, verb. to google
(article)