Check it out - I’ve got a sneak preview of the latest service from everyone’s favourite search engine:

Okay, only joking, but here’s an interesting piece in the Guardian today about new media behemoth Google’s first forays into politics, sponsoring candidates in the States (so far a Republican who’s in favour of net neutrality - admittedly an endangered species) and cosying up with Dave in front of the webcam over here.

The Google name itself has already done more than money could for the Tories - adding instant modernist kudos to their conference and the webcameron adventure. This new NetPAC sounds odd though, getting its funds from Google staffers.

Wonder if it will start to open any schisms at the Googleplex, where many of the hip young things are also of a fairly lefty bent. Heaven forbid the footsoldiers could start doubting the company’s “Do no evil” motto - something they may well be doing already, given the company’s wavering stance over its China operations and censorship.

Just back from Gdansk, where I was visiting the trade union Solidarnosc. Never been to Poland before, and Gdansk was a very nice place, but I’m knackered, so in lieu of any genuine cultural commentary, here are three things I found half-way funny:

1. The plane we flew in on (once SAS had lost my baggage and nearly lost me in Copenhagen) was the smallest I’ve ever been on (70 seater propeller plane), so I found it quite amusing that it was called “Huge Viking”. Apparently, Huge is an old Nordic name, so he was an ancient Viking hero. The name Huge means (well, duh…) “The big one”.
2. We had lunch in the main square, which was very nice, and just about warm enough (though not enough to tempt anyone else). I chose from the special vegetarian menu: “Vegetarian dumplings with sauerkraut, mushrooms and cottage cheese (with meat)”.
3. Best of all though was the free tourist guide and map I picked up at the hotel. I quote the very first paragraph: “If you’ve arrived by train your journey into the old town in straight forward: sidestep any drunks mumbling to themselves, then put your head down and speed straight through the subway full of women selling cut-price underwear. Then presto, there you are: the historic centre.”

Very happy to see Thabitha Khumalo in the Torygraph this week, pictured looking very well. After the crackdown in Zimbabwe, she was almost insanely brave to fly back home from TUC Congress in Brighton, as the country’s most senior trades unionist outside jail, to help organise bail and medical help for her colleagues. She knew full well that she might herself be arrested and beaten (she has been before), and I was very concerned we might never see her again.

She’s been back in the UK though, to receive a UK Woman of the Year Award, for her work with the ZCTU and her “Dignity, period” campaign. It’s very good to see her getting some of the recognition she is certainly due. Can’t imagine that a medal from the UK will endear her to Mad Bob’s Anglophobe regime though.

Meanwhile in Zimbabwe, the charges against Wellington Chibebe seem to have been bumped up to actually assaulting police officers (”Yes, your honor, he sustained those severe head injuries when he repeatedly headbutted our officers”).

After my post on political geekery, I thought it only proper that I should put up my own homage to the WWW - so here is “Camsterdance” (wtf?):

Play music - courtesy of Hampton the Hampster at Juno Records

Now, who’s for Dave Çagri “I kiss you!” - or would we get a case of the Sion Simons?

I’m not (too) ashamed to admit that I’m something of a geek, so there’s pretty much nothing I enjoy more than a good political/webby in-joke. As such, I *love* the nerdtastic “Hate my Tory” - an excellent Hot or Not spoof. Rather disappointingly, there’s not an awful lot of Tory hating going on, and the current front bench get away very lightly - the best scores are Jonathan Aitken on 7.6, Douglas Hurd on 7.2, and Chris Patten on 7.0. Looks like the charm offensive is working!

Let’s hope though, that much much more of the same comes out of the designers, Transpero (Aren’t they the ones behind Keeping The Faith?).

Also arcanely techy is MySociety’s Telnet text based adventure “MP Fight”, a kind of Politkemon, where you play your MP in a quest to reach Sedgefield by top-trumping all the Hon members in your way. Hat Tip to Antonia for this one!

Still a lot of speculation about who will get the union votes in a Labour leadership contest - Amicus are cheering for Brown, and the non-affiliated RMT declared for McDonnell - Everyone else seems to be waiting to see the final cut, and maybe see what they might get from any of the candidates.

Whoever gets it though, and whoever promises unions the most, it’s nice to see we’ll all know very clearly who’s promising the least for people at work. This sort of thing should focus minds nicely come the next election:

Ridiculous Politics: David Cameron: I’ll make it easier for companies for fire you

I’ve been lurking in a lot more corners of the blogosphere of late, thanks to the almost-wonderful OnSpeed Mobile. As a result, any dead time - mainly on the train in my case - has become blog time, and I can easily check out the Bloggers4Labour what’s new page, and thence on to hundreds of articles.

OnSpeed is a little browser program you download to your smartphone, and which connects to OnSpeed’s clever internet proxy servers to surf the web. Once you’re connected, all requested pages and images are compressed before they’re sent to you, dramatically speeding up your internet connection, and crucially, using up less of the precious megabytes that you get with your contract.

I use a HTC Magician touchscreen smartphone on GPRS (sold by Vodafone as a VPA Compact), which has a nice big screen for reading posts, and handwriting recognition for writing comments, whilst not being so large that I look too geeky in public (I hope).

The downsides are legion, and it’s had me really cursing it (and considering whether to get my £25 back on the 14 day guarantee). It’s a truly horrendous piece of software (though this may be due to having to develop it to work on any phone, not just smartphones like mine): Clunky start-up, terrible browser functionality (compared to my normal Internet Explorer for Pocket PC), fiddly form filling, confusing error messages, incompatibility with some sites, bad page layout options, occasional cacheing of word verification images (not handy when trying to comment), and a tendency to compound the already regular crashes of my wobbly Microsoft phone.

However, it *does* actually let you read and comment on blogs, which is something I just couldn’t do without it. I can now read at the blistering speed of normal landline dial-up (anyone remember that?). As anything slower is just unworkable for blogs, flitting back and forth through posts, links and comments, this make it viable for the first time. The smaller file sizes make it work a lot cheaper too.

If you’d like to try it out (with a 14 day money back, which you might well want to use) , you too can do so at www.onspeedmobile.com

And no, this wasn’t posted from my phone - I’m not *that* keen!