The General Elections on March 8 2008 was powered by the ceramahs, SMSes and the Internet blogs of the opposition while the mainstream government controlled media chose to hide behind the skirts of the ruling party.
My first encounter with a political blog was Screenshots by Jeff Ooi. Thanks to his bravado and those of fellow compatriots like Rockybru and Raja Petra Kamarudin, the Internet has become an increasingly influential medium for alternative views on various Malaysian issues.
The fact that Malaysiakini's servers were overhelmed by the huge traffic accessing their site is giving The Star paper, a run for their money.
When we started a business promoting Internet broadband subscriptions, we were lamenting the lack of local content to drive more subscribers to broadband. The rise of Youtube and entertaining video content on the local political scene added exploding sparks to the broadband fire and today we probably have over 1.5 million Internet broadband subscribers. While companies that rolled out portals and news struggled under heavy budgets to produce current and relevant content, user generated content steamrolled their way over companies with antiquated models. Even Internet companies such as Yahoo are struggling to find the best model for business on the Net.
Just the other day, we had 8 subscribers signing up in a single day at our shop where even during TM's broadband attractive promotion last year we had less. More and more Malaysians are signing up to have access to fairer new reporting on local issues, view opinions of local bloggers and starting their own blog as I have.
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