Dnosauria

Yesterday's Crikey carried a piece by Paul Gilchrist entitled Memo to Australian Politicians: Young Swinging Voters Use the Net. Gilchrist noted that most of our pollies have standard, static web sites and there was not one blog, discussion forum or piece of video content among them. He finished off the piece thus:

Our politicians are simply not up to speed and it's time to embarrass them into getting serious about web based campaigning. Really, the parties should consider this when they select candidates at the next election for marginal seats, which are probably full of aspirational, internet-savvy voters.

The politicians are always desperate to get the doorstop and 5 second item on the TV news. Why not promote your website and talk directly to your electorate? The internet media "revolution" has been a promise for years, but I think it is now happening, and life could be very different by the time of the next election.

I can see it now; a blog/livejournal/msn space for every candidate, with AV content on demand by way of torrents, Google Video, Flickr and podcasts kicking the on-the-hour news networks in the guts, staffers getting their Flock freak on, pollies chanting the webmaster's prayer "May my PageRank be high and may incoming links be devoid of nofollow", and Helen Coonan hitting a doorstop with "Oh do we have to talk about Telstra again? Let's talk about Skype...". We won't hear Fran Kelly asking Howard about the latest Morgan or Newspoll, but rather what he thinks about the relative rankings of the johnhoward and kimbeazley tags on Del.icio.us and Technorati* as a polling indicator.

I'd love to see it. But likely at the next election? Not so sure about that (and not just because Coonan might not be MinComms then; rumours from up on the hill are that there'll be a major cabinet renovation - not just a reshuffle - soon). I'm not sure that enough of the voting public is there yet, and if they're not there's no reason for the pollies to go there.

* - At time of publication: JH=8/KB=1 on Del.icio.us and JH=0/KB=4 on Technorati.

UPDATE: Bob Brown is Bobcasting (via).

technorati tags: Politics, Election, Australia, Internet, Web

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I really hope politicians won't get too much into the Internet biz... isn't TV enough? Maybe because I'm not very keen on politcs.

Imagine pop-ups with their faces and claims all over the web... one should get a real good pop-up blocker in that case!

Posted by  Anonymous @ Friday, January 13, 2006 5:51:00 am #