On Blogging Australia

Like many thousands of other Australians, I offered to become friends with Kevin Rudd on Facebook. Unlike most of them, I used to work with Kevin in DFAT, although to be fair he probably wouldn’t remember me in amongst all the other people that supported the well oiled machine that was the Australian Diplomatic Communications Network at the time.

How celebrities handle social computing (including Facebook and, well, blogging) is an interesting study. People need to interact, and politicians more than most - but there is a limit to the number of hours they have in any given day, and how much time they can devote to every one of their thousands of fans. I’m sure that there is some terrible un-PC analogy about the king with a harem of thousands going to emerge sometime soon - it will be accurate if distasteful. There will be some favourites, and many who don’t get any attention at all.

For myself, I get a lot of pleasure from social networking applications like Facebook when I have time to use them. And I’m just as thrilled to get a message or be asked to join in on some silly tagging application from a personal friend as I would to receive an acceptance from Kevin. I’ll work for him diligently if he becomes PM, as I have for the current regime, but I don’t expect him to interact with me personally via social computing.