Covering a General Election, Google style

Posted by Martin Stabe on 17 September 2007 at 12:17
Tags: Australia, BBC, Google, Google Maps, Google News, Wikis

Google Australia has launched a site to cover that country’s 2007 federal election using many of its existing tools.

As TechCrunch reported, the site combines links party-political YouTube videos, a Google Maps mashup containing information on candidates by constituency, “election gadgets” to let users of Google personalised homepage track statements from MPs and Senators, plus feeds from Google News.

Just a minute. This sounds an awful lot like the sort of election site a clever newspaper might produce. Some certainly think this is another creeping encroachment into content by the search giant.

The launch of the site “signals a significant strategic shift on the part of Google to become a primary web destination, as opposed to restricting itself to its historic role as a supplemental, though highly valuable, research tool,” newspaper editor-turned Silicon Valley insider Alan Mutter wrote on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.

Mutter argues that project Down Under is almost inevitably a trial run for next year’s presidential election in United States — an unwelcome development for US news sites just as the latest online metrics show that their traffic growth appears to be slowing.

Google could, of course, also apply all the same technologies could be applied just as well to the next UK general election. So Mutter is quite right that news organisations — the kind that do all the expensive bits of producing content — need to get smart about their election coverage to compete with the mashup artists from California.

A good start might be happening at BBC News, which is planning to use wikis to populate its constituency profiles pages at the next election.

Meanwhile, Google’s other recent eyebrow-raising innovation — its experiment with hosting comments about news stories on Google News — has hardly had the most auspicious start.

In its first month, the Google service appears to have posted just over 100 comments, noted PR blogger Steve Rubel. Could Google be struggling to keep up with the labour-intensive process of manually checking e-mailed comments?