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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Google and naming inconveniences

Filed under: Internet, Politics, The News — Tags: , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 22:34

I have made a discovery on the Internet. It is Very Very Interesting. So Very Very Interesting in fact, that I have decided to write a blog post about this Very Very Interesting topic. That said, I won’t do a Jeremy Clarkson style “I had a look on the Internet this week, and I found this! <audience laughs, gasps in shock, groans in revulsion>”. It is simply a Very Very Interesting topic.

As you may well know if you live in the Glasgow East parliamentary constituency, there will be a by-election tomorrow. Labour are expected to perform poorly, and the Lib Dems are expected to come either third or fourth.

Most agree that one day, the Liberal Democrat candidate, Ian Robertson, will become a successful politician. Indeed, I hope he does: the Liberal Democrats are currently the least BS-filled political party about.

However, whilst looking for information on him this evening, I found something Very Very Interesting.

I decided to use a FWSE* to query “Ian Robertson” in said FWSE’s index. The FWSE returned a results page, which I found Very Very Interesting.

There are no less than eleven other Ian Robertsons who appeared before the Mr. Robertson’s little corner of the WWW protocol network. These Ian Robertsons include a psychology professor, a sports newsreader on BBC Radio Five Live, an obscure actor, a Kiwi photographer, a landscape gardener, and, perhaps most bizarrely, a man who is a masseur, yoga teacher, photographer and Unix expert all at the same time. The last actually lives in Scotland.

This is, of course, not a new phenomenon. James O’Malley fashioned an entire post out of name-sharing, entitled Picking on people who share names with bastards. However, with him buried so deep in Google search results, it’s no surprise he’s not likely to win the by-election tomorrow.

Interestingly, Mr. Robertson has a Twitter feed. Is the image of ‘over capacity’ and ‘unreliable’ and ‘cute’ one Mr. Robertson wants to portray to voters? Oh, well. Barack Obama’s going through it too.

*Don’t get this? You haven’t been reading the New Scientist for long enough.



Sunday, March 9, 2008

Nick Clegg

Filed under: Politics, The News — Tags: , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 19:09

Nick Clegg

Oh dear. After ruining the chances of us having a referendum on the EU treaty, now Nick Clegg seems to have made an utter fool of himself at the Lib Dems’ spring conference.

From reading several posts (such as this one) around the Internet, and my own observations, I can only fathom that Clegg tried to copy the style of David Cameron, Hillary Clinton and others (that is, reading without a script). Several people, however, spotted some backup autocues off-stage.

His presentational style, in a nutshell, was cringeworthy. “Will I be part of a Conservative government?” [X Factor style fourteen-hour pause for effect] “No.” It sounded as though he was hesitating, still to decide whether he would be part of a conservative government.

Several hours later, it mystifies me as to why he talked about what he’d do in the extremely unlikely event of a hung parliament. It will almost certainly be irrelevant: simply an excuse to push style over substance, from what I can tell.

Another crucial mistake is the fact that he’s claiming the Lib Dems may push tax cuts at the next election, following a trend started by Ming Campbell. Before Campbell, in particular after the SDP-Liberal alliance, the Lib Dems were the only party honest enough to say that they would raise taxes. But this has stopped since Charles Kennedy’s ousting, and my concern is that Clegg will fall into the New Labour trap of making unreasonable promises.

True, Clegg has charisma. Clegg has good looks. Clegg has a strong conviction. But he has failed to endear himself to me. He seems to me to be another style-over-substance politician, and that is why I believe he won’t be a strong leader for the Liberal Democrats.

And if it is style-over-substance, then his style being as awful as it is, I can’t even begin to imagine what his substance is going to be. Perhaps it’s time we had a politician with the presentational style of Steve Jobs.



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