When Mr. Rudd was campaigning for Prime Minister, he was new. He had a younger look than that of John Howard, PM of the time and Liberal Leader, and brought a seemingly fresh outlook on the issues we hold dear; water, fuel, internet, and how many friends we had on Facebook.
In a bid for popularity points and appeal to the more technologically dependant generation, Kevin Rudd had his own Facebook page. Unlike all the various John Howard pages for Facebook and Myspace floating around, this wasn’t made for the lulz, but was an official page for the Opposition Leader. It was talked about, made the paper as a filler article, and even had the piss taken in the hit ABC show The Chaser’s War On Everything.
This and more contributed to Labor’s 2007 victory over the Liberal party, and while they may already be in power, the government isn’t ditching the Internet as a viable medium for communication with the public, and keeping ‘up with the times’.
Today, a new Twitter profile was made for none other than our Prime Minister. Obviously Twitter has been recognized as the latest thing in social networking, and the government is trying to show it can evolve with the times. Whether this is just a minor political stunt, or a genuine attempt at reaching out to a wider audience, time will of course, be the best judge. Either way, I look forword to seeing what Mr. Rudd is doing.
Kevin Rudd joining the Twitter community coincides with me only just learning why more and more people have been tagging #nocleanfeed onto the end of their tweets. I queried one person who posted the unusual tag, and he linked me to nocleanfeed.com for information.
I’d heard about the government’s plan to try and censor the Internet for our country by filtering what websites are viewable to Australian citizens, and which are not, by word of mouth, and from a rant by the AngryAussie on his YouTube channel. #nocleanfeed works as a form of “twitter petition”; doing a search for the term effectively brings up a list of everyone opposed to the idea of Internet filtering.
The obvious flaws (new websites appearing all the time makes it impossible to monitor and ban 100% of all illegal content at any one time, good sites accidently being mistaken as having illegal content, etc) are enough to make you shake your head, but apparently the proposed plan, apart from costing a lot of money to implement and maintain, will slow down Internet speeds “by 30%”, which, being one of the most primitive countries when it comes to Internet plans, means we’ll be going the complete wrong way to what we need. Wasn’t one of Kevin Rudd’s election promises to bring our Internet up to par with other countries? It looks like we can only have one or the other, and I pick my (FASTER) free speech, thanks.
Posted by zombieplan 
Zombie Bites 