Colin Charles Agenda

Yesterday, local politician, Khairy Jamaluddin was given some advice about his usage of Twitter, from a senior media figure:

has been given unsolicited advice by a senior media figure to stop tweeting if I want to be taken seriously as a politician. :(

Khairy is not just any ordinary politician. He’s young (33), the leader of UMNO Youth (the youth organisation for the largest political party in Malaysia, that creates the majority of the component party Barisan Nasional), overseas educated from young, and seems like a smart chap. He’s tomorrow’s leader. He’s got a pretty lengthy Wikipedia entry, if you want to know his credentials.

The media in Malaysia has painted nothing but a fairly negative picture of Khairy. When his father-in-law was the Prime Minister, he was widely criticised. When his father-in-law left, the current Prime Minister decided not to pick him for a position in the Cabinet, despite being the leader of the UMNO Youth (first in history, I believe). So to be fair, I myself have never held Khairy in high regards.

OK, let’s go back to the fact that Khairy is young. And he’s the leader of the young guns (aka future voters). So he’s more versatile to adopting to the communication mediums of the young. And that’s something the rest of his archaic party members just don’t seem to get.

Thanks to Twitter, I’ve seen the human-side of Khairy. He appeals to me more as a politician now. In fact, if more from his party do that (and more importantly, do it correctly), there’s going to be a swing to getting more people voting for the Barisan Nasional.

Politicians have never really been very accessible. With Twitter, even though Khairy only follows 55 people, he has 2,589 followers. Why? He reads his @reply queue. He occasionally responds to them (in a very politically correct fashion — he never engages in anything that may seem detrimental quite naturally). So even if he doesn’t respond, you know he’s reading your comments. So you can choose to be snarky, you can choose to have your own opinions, and he’s going to read them (short of him blocking you).

Anyway, back to the point. I take Khairy more seriously as a politician because he tweets. Another Twitter user @kamal, basically said: “Fox Communications is just being a spoiled sport you are handling your own PR”. That could very likely be it. Eight minutes later, Khairy tweeted: “Notwithstanding +ve tweet replies from tweeps, KJ is re-evaluating tweet career in case “seriousness” is KPI at next reshuffle. :p”. Good to note that people told him to continue using the social medium, known as Twitter.

Oh, and I’m young. The other youngsters aren’t bothered about listening to government propaganda. They’re getting information off the Web. They want to be interacted with. Perils of the Gen Y voter, eh? And Khairy understands them… because he himself is a Gen Y voter (I should think).

Kudos Khairy. Continue Tweeting. Continue utilising social media. And good luck in your political career.

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For those interested, I’ve started a list with regards to Politicians in Malaysia Using Social Media. Its far from complete, but you can help!

The Home Ministry has decided to censor opposition newspapers like Harakah (by PAS) and Suara Keadilan (by Keadilan/PKR?) for a period of three months, with immediate effect, since their reporting is “wrong, sensational and sensitive in nature”. Malaysiakini also reports that DAP’s Rocket is having issues renewing its annual publishing permit, as well.

Why do I get the feeling that its just another slap in the face for the BN-led government. After all, before this hoopla, I’d have never read these dailies. I probably still wouldn’t.

However, if you did, there’s a good chance you’re going to read them online. HarakahDaily.Net and Suara Keadilan are all online, and free for all to read. The latter even comes with an RSS feed. DAP’s Rocket doesn’t seem to be online yet, but Lim Kit Siang himself is an active blogger.

The BN-led government will retort saying “but everyone reads it in print” (which is what they can control). Nay. Now, those that don’t get the print versions, will get information from their friends that read the online versions. Soon, you’ll get a scenario like Chinese whispers, which will probably only anger more people.

So, I don’t read dead tree newspapers (dislike newsprint, think I get more unbiased news online, anyway), but I wish I had got The Star from a few days ago. Why?

Because Anas Zubedy published an amazing ad. He spent about RM40,000 on it. The gist of the message?

Please stop the power chase, call for a truce and focus on the economy.

Malaysia is about the only country that seems to focus largely on political power plays in this time of day. Every other country has a news service and a government that focuses on the economy. Our economic news seems to hardly cover the mainstream — lowering interest rates, losing value to the USD, job loss, and more. Politics though, still the focus.

Stop the fighting. Its childish. We didn’t elect a government to lead us into more screwups. Fix the economy. If you’re Malaysian, read the ad. If you’re not, realise that we might say we’re “Truly Asia” and multicultural, but that’s just on the surface — finding a “Malaysian” is hard (note: I feel for Zubedy, because I too like to call myself Malaysian — but I’m a rare breed), so maybe you’ll get a true picture from reading the ad.

And if you want to know more about this colourful character, there’s an interview with Zubedy, where he focuses and strives on unity. We need more forward-thinking Malaysians like Zubedy. We need Malaysians, period (you know, stop focusing on racial lines — stop race based parties, etc.).

Check out VoteMatch USA. This idea was developed in the Netherlands by the Institute for Political Participation, I saw it on CNN today, and now they’ve got it applied to the US Elections.

I always felt I liked Barack Obama, but now I know that I am skewed to his policies, by about 83%. I really like the idea of VoteMatch.

In 2008, Malaysians showed Barisan Nasional that they’ve had enough. March 8 2008 is a day that will go down in history books. The next general elections, Malaysians will be ready for something like VoteMatch Malaysia. By 2012/2013, there will be so much Internet penetration, even more young guns who’ve been exposed to more freedoms, and even more that will want change.

VoteMatch is a propaganda fighting machine. No matter how many adverts there are in the media, how much parties embrace social media, there’s just been no way to show clearly, whom one would want to vote for. VoteMatch seems to be the answer

spotted in riga, latvia, at the university, during software freedom day 2008.

Its great to see that the Obama campaign in America are after folk that dig open source. They’re after folk that can write software for nation-wide voter contact and mobilisation (something like Twitter?), fund-raising, and social networking and online organising at My.BarackObama.

They’re a LAMP shop. They’re after:

• Experience scaling large LAMP applications
• Posses deep knowledge of MySQL performance and query optimisation

I once wrote:

If they can waste your ringgit on buying proprietary software licenses, when there are clearly open source alternatives, can you trust them with spending and budgeting for a country?

It may seem extremely naive to correlate the use of open source software to creating a better budget or spending wisely, but I think its a start.