Monday, March 23, 2009

Jusuf Kalla & Bloggers

When Barack Obama won the U.S presidential election last November, the news media reported that one of the main factor for success was the ability of his campaign team to master the use of internet social network, including the blog.

This success has inspired some candidates for the Indonesian parliamentary elections that will be held on 9 April, and presidential election on 8 July 2009, to establish rapport with bloggers. One of them is Jusuf Kalla (JK) incumbent Vice President, Chairman of the Golkar Party and candidate for the presidential race. According to senior Indonesian blogger Ndoro Kakung, JK has met with bloggers on Thursday 19 March, at Pisa CafĂ©, Jalan Mahakam, South Jakarta. The meeting runs from 20.15 to 21.20 pm and attended by around 130 persons consisting of bloggers, journalists and JK’s staffs. JK, who wear short sleeve batik shirt, explained that the reason he wants to meet bloggers because he thinks that bloggers are part of the present information freedom who have created the free information. And in the dialog that follows, JK answered questions, but only mentioned the name Golkar once.
Further, Ndoro Kakung wrote that JK has invited senior blogger and founder of political blog Politikana i.e. Enda Nasution to attend JK’s campaign.
In order to maintain his image, Enda Nasution explained in his Tweeter as follows :
“ To make it clear. I am not campaigning for JK nor a kader partai. Just invited on the campaign trail. I’ll welcome invitation from others ”.

The above news shows that bloggers have now been acknowledged by very important person in our country as a respectable community that provide free information to our society. And as such, bloggers should always be fair, neutral and positive.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Although bloggers community is very small compared to eligible voters here, but they can spread information to many others.

Unknown said...

Joni,
You are very right.