An open letter to ‘youth blogger’ Kevin Rudd

Dear Prime Minister,

I am writ­ing to thank you for start­ing up your very own ‘youth’ blog. As some­one who has just writ­ten a book all about blog­ging it pleases me greatly to think of the Aus­tralian Prime Min­is­ter star­ing at a com­puter screen and scream­ing, ‘Why won’t this image upload? I keep press­ing ‘Upload’ and noth­ing hap­pens. And how do I make all my links flu­o­res­cent green anyway?’

How­ever hav­ing looked at your youth blog I thought I would offer a few sug­ges­tions so that your blog might be some­what more appeal­ing to the kids.

To start with I think you should include some ref­er­ence points for young peo­ple. And when I say ‘ref­er­ence points’ I mean lol­cat jokes. For exam­ple you could include a pic­ture like this:

It will demon­strate that you can make fun of your­self and that you can speak the con­tracted lan­guage of the young.

I like the way that on your last blog post you asked read­ers to tell you what they would do if they were Prime Min­is­ter for a day. You should know that while some peo­ple think you are a stern taskmas­ter with no sense of fun, I can assure you that ALL young peo­ple would love to be you for a day. Mainly so they could call Obama and have a chat with him on the phone.

Which makes me won­der – when you call lead­ers of for­eign nations do you use Skype? It’s cheaper than call­ing on the phone you know. Plus you could do video link-ups. Just imag­ine being about to see the looks on the faces of the Burmese junta when you tell them about new sanc­tions being intro­duced on their country!

I think that your blog would also ben­e­fit from some wid­gets. For exam­ple how about a wid­get to count­down to Mal­colm Turnbull’s birthday?

Noth­ing says ‘bi-partisanship’ more than get­ting the leader of the oppo­si­tion a present for his birthday.

Finally, I like a blog post that fin­ishes on a light note – some­times with a YouTube clip that gives me lolz.

Per­haps a clip like this one would be a good starter?

I think if you fol­low my sug­ges­tions and ‘funk up’ your blog you will imme­di­ately gar­ner a strong fol­low­ing from every mem­ber of The Youth demo­graphic. After all, The Youth are the future of this country’s fed­eral electorates.

Kind regards,
Andrew McDon­ald
Author of The Great­est Blog­ger in the World