Comments on: Google ranking Queensland Senators

By: Graham Young

Graham Young — Mon, 23 May 2005 15:15:14 +0000

Chris, I’m told that Brett used to joke to colleagues that his staff were writing his PhD. At least I think he was joking! Maybe Chrenkoff has been doing more extracurricular work than just blogging for the last 5 years.
He’s a good blogger, whatever the case.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 23 May 2005 14:03:19 +0000

Graham,
Arthur Chrenkoff has been a Liberal staffer for over 5 years. I thought that he had worked for Brett Mason for the entirety of that time but perhaps he has moved around.
Chris

By: Mark Bahnisch

Mark Bahnisch — Mon, 23 May 2005 11:00:41 +0000

On Benno’s point, I wasn’t meaning to imply Andrew blogs just to improve his google ranking. He’s indeed performing a useful service to constituents by blogging, and what’s more, he’s a good blogger.

By: Andrew Bartlett

Andrew Bartlett — Sun, 22 May 2005 15:23:41 +0000

It’s a rudimentary measure (albeit one that makes me look good), but given the occasional mention of politicians having to improve their productivity like everyone else, things like this that examine output is worth assessing. Of course, quantity doesn’t always equal quality.
In regard to the Rehame Top 40, they ceased putting that out about a month or so ago – I saw an email from them announcing it, but it didn’t anything much by way of a reason. I found it a bit like Google measures – a useful rough guide, (although seeming to be a bit counter-intuitive at times, especially in the middle rankings), but somewhat limited, as it just counted mentions, regardless of whether they were positive, negative, detailed or fleeting.
FWIW, I dislike his politics but I think Chrenkoff does an admirable job with his blog.
(of course I’m only responding to this so I can boost my Google count)

By: Graham Young

Graham Young — Fri, 20 May 2005 17:08:27 +0000

Yep, we’re right across that Ghandi. Just look a couple of comments down. Mind you, I think Chrenkoff has only recently gone on staff. I also think that staff are entitled to a lot more free-time than their masters – they’re not paid nearly as well.

By: gandhi

gandhi — Fri, 20 May 2005 15:44:21 +0000

You may also be interested to know that one of Senator Mason’s employees, Arthur Chrenkoff, maintains a blog and publishes an extensive series of “pro-war “Good News” propaganda pieces.
How does he find the time?
I have emailed both the senator and Mr Chrenkoff but no response.
See my blog at http://bushout.blogspot.com/2005/05/battle-for-australias-soul-i-had-bad.html for details and links.

By: Benno

Benno — Fri, 20 May 2005 13:24:57 +0000

I am guessing but I think that most of the blog related Google hits would be from other bloggers sites. So that the content published needs to be good, rather than just drivel to get your number of mentions up. Otherwise they wouldn’t mention you. For interest my google search on “Andrew Bartlett” senator had 17,900 hits and the same search but for pages without the term ‘blog’ scored 13,700.
Crikey used to reguarly publish a list of the top forty polticians by media mentions compiled by Rehame as you know. I haven’t seen this list since last year, maybe they only thought it relevant during an ‘lection year, or it has something -I have no idea what- to do with the threatened legal action from both sides.

By: Graham Young

Graham Young — Thu, 19 May 2005 18:07:40 +0000

It does, however, give ambitious representatives an opportunity to boost themselves in the google rankings just by publishing a blog. So if this sort of comparison actually took off as a measure of output we can look forward to many more politician bloggers. I should have done a search on Arthur Chrenkoff, one of Mason’s staffers, to see how he fares. In fact, I just have, and Chrenkoff manages a rating of 97,800 which is a little too close to ["john howard" mp] which is 101,000, and Howard is the top ranked member of the Australian Parliament. Ah, the powers of blogging.
And I’ve no idea about Crikey and Rehame. I thought they were still doing it.

By: Benno

Benno — Thu, 19 May 2005 17:12:33 +0000

But by having a blog Andrew is doing a service to his employers and legitimately increasing his media profile. So in that case I don’t think the results are skewed, this is of course measuring a different quantity to what Rehame measures. What happened to the Crikey updates on them?

By: Graham Young

Graham Young — Thu, 19 May 2005 15:43:12 +0000

You’re probably right. There’s no other reason for “Mark Bahnisch” to come up 3,180 times apart from blogs!