Met John Key for the first time a couple of nights back. I'll cover what he said about our broadband future in the Monday instalment of this blog, not wishing to scoop our sister publication Computerworld, out Monday.

A couple of interesting titbits: Key said he'd been looking to new UK Tory leader David Cameron for ideas about online campaigning. One he's keen on is how Cameron has replaced weekly email dirges with a brief, preppy video. Key said people like video better, because they can decide whether they trust someone or not (visual appeal is sufficiently important that political focus groups are always shown TV news clips or ads with the sound turned down, Key said).

After an extended honeymoon period, Cameron has had rather a bad time of it recently, with disastrous results in the first two byelections of Labour's new Gordon Brown era.

So perhaps wisely - if surprisingly - Key is also looking to the online best-practices of a more successful politician, US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. He likes Hills' cloying 'join the conversation' line, and particularly her online poll to choose her theme song.

On a side note, Key said his daughter had no trouble surfing the web for free, piggybacking on their neighbour's wi-fi. That's in Parnell, so I dare say they can afford it. If you're more fiscally prudent, make sure your wi-fi connection has security enabled (learn how here).

AOL's Compuserve exits NZ
Got a letter this morning saying that PC World's Compuserve internet account was going to be terminated this month. Compuserve's parent - an ailing giant of an ISP called AOL, part of Time Warner - is pulling out of New Zealand, Australia and South East Asia.

In fact, AOL's local profile was so subterranean I'd forgotten they were even represented here, let alone that PC World had a complementary account.
Though certainly, once upon a time back in the mid-90s, we very much appreciated our free Compuserve connection, given that regular punters had to pay $70 (yes $70) an hour for its dial-up crawl.

(Our publisher has never had a complementary connection for our everyday internet use, incidentally. We pay, and suffer, like everyone else.)