All-day vigil keeps an eye on the Idols

By ALAN PERROTT

It started with a laptop on a couch in a West Auckland house and has become one of the biggest sidelights in the race to become NZ Idol.

Idolblog.com has become the round the clock NZ Idol fix for thousands of young New Zealanders, and has incurred the wrath of the programme's makers.

The no-frills fan site run by Rachel and Regan Cunliffe has since last December recruited 4000 members and attracted 145,000 visitors.

Now, Idolblog.com is the font of all things Idol-related - thousands of messages on hundreds of subjects, providing a ridiculously detailed history of the series.

An Idol mastermind thread has become an endless 24-hour game of trivia tag.

The Cunliffes update the site at 6am every day, then monitor it until about 11pm.

"It's been simply amazing," said Rachel Cunliffe, a 26-year-old Auckland University statistics teacher and web-designer.

"It was an experiment. We wanted to see would happen if we set up a community website, away from the big corporates, that was dedicated to the fans. We never expected it to get this big."

The couple have nothing nice to say about the NZ Idol producers at South Pacific Pictures.

Rachel says they have been threatened with legal action for reproducing NZ Idol pictures available on other sites, and were ordered to change their site's domain name.

SPP overruled their permission from music label BMG to presell the Idol album, she says, and SPP staff using false names, but identifiable by their email addresses, have gone on to the website to criticise and create arguments.

Idol executive producer Andrew Shaw dismissed suggestions of a row between himself and idolblog, saying he thought it was a good website.

"What they do is great," he said, "but I will not apologise for defending copyright owned by the people who made Idol."