Our minister in charge of among others, the ICT/telecommunications sectors in Malaysia, Dato Seri Dr Lim Kheng Yaik is among the most popular faces in the mainstream media having constantly been seen and heard criticizing the local telcos for continuously falling short in providing the best services to the end users. So I decided to check the ministry's website for any mentioning about today's world celebration on telecommunications. The website for Kementerian Tenaga, Air dan Telekomunikasi (KTAK) is nicely designed indeed, but why this: "No announcement for the time being!"?There is a link, however, buried in KTAK website for a one-year old PDF file (for last year's press release in the NST): http://www.ktak.gov.my/images/Telecommunication%20Day.pdf .
We don't have a digital bulletin from KTAK since early this year, so, I wonder what's 2007 's progress with the highly hyped National Broadband Plan.
No information about today's significance can also be found at the main website of MDeC's, the agency that overseas the development of Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor -- a major element of nation's ICT drivers. Oh well, MDeC perhaps have a good excuse: They are busy with on-going MSC-IAP meeting in Putrajaya.
KTAK also posted this stats at the website:
Statistic |
Visitors today : 198 |
Hits today : 779 |
Visitors yesterday : 247 |
Hits yesterday : 1029 |
Total overall hits : 27184 |
Hmm... only ~250 people (87.5% accessed the site from Malaysia) check this website during World's Telecommunications Day? And less than 30,000 hits so far? Don't we have like 30 million inhabitants in Malaysia and 70% or so of them have mobile phones? Looks like only 1 in 1000 Malaysians (0.1%) had even cared to check on what information the Ministry is delivering via the Web medium.
Mainstream media was very much alerted of this special day though. Pajamanation Malaysia commends Utusan Malaysia, a leading Malay language newspaper for having published a decently thick section in today's print newspaper with wide coverage on telecommunications with participations by major telcos including TM (and subsidiaries: tmnet and celcom), Maxis (introducing its mobile payment service) and Digi (on its dedication on the societies).
Utusan Online however, in addition to a nice reminder banner about various celebrations including Mother's Day, Teacher's Day and Telecommunications Day, published just ONE article that talked about this day on its website. Perhaps, the corporations are still not much interested or are trusting the online medium as a credible advertising medium in comparison to the traditional newspapers that gets several million readership each day. This in contrast to a couple of fresh online advertising companies that were established just recently: NuffNang and Advertlets -- two of which are betting on explosions of net-centric advertising in Malaysia, especially through the blogging culture that are starting to bite some control in media influence. For instance, several blogs published by Malaysian authors are more popular online than mainstream newspapers like the Sun, the Malay Mail and the New Sabah Times.
As I've said it earlier, I'll say it again: Webmasters of Government-owned websites need to keep up (in being more alert, informative and transparent)! Or simply, the ministers need to dedicate more attention on updating their websites!
- Read more about today at http://www.itu.int/wisd/2007
- See message from Dr Hamadoun Touré, ITU Secretary-General (or watch the video message)
Quick Links |
| Theme: Connecting the Young: the opportunities of ICT |
| Laureates 2007 |
| Call for action |
From Wikipedia:
World Information Society Day was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly as a result of outlines set by the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis in 2005 by way of resolution.
This day is set to take place every year on May 17. The day was previously named "World Telecommunications Day" as set by the International Telecommunication Union.
The first World Information Society Day took place on Wednesday, May 17, 2006.
The main objective of the day is to raise global awareness of society changes brought by the Internet and new technologies. It also aims to help reduce the Digital divide
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