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Malaysia goes viral on Twitter. Thanks #yorais!

25 January 2010 2,263 views 110 Comments
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You’ve heard the phrase, you cannot create something viral: it just becomes viral. And it’s absolutely true!

On January 16th 2010, the Malaysian Information Communication and Culture minister, Dr Rais Yatim stated the following, which was deemed as rather preposterous. This had the whole Internet up in arms against him, especially on the Twittersphere. Here’s an excerpt on what he said taken from The Star Online:

SEREMBAN: Malaysians, especially Muslims, must avoid being totally immersed in the internet culture, especially Facebook and Twitter, said Information Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim.

He added that facilities like internet could not be accepted wholly because it was a form of business introduced by the West and “Malaysians were just users.”

“We are not saying that they cannot use Facebook or Twitter but when using such facilities they must upkeep the values taught by Islam, Buddhism or Christianity to maintain our culture,” he told reporters after opening a Seminar on the 1Malaysia concept here on Saturday.

He added that Malaysians who used internet services on social networking sites should be careful with what they see and hear.

“We must be strong in our believes and culture because the identity and image of our country depends on us.

“They are just selling Facebook, Twitter, L-Band and various other services, even through space, as a product but we do not do such business. We accept all this in a state of cultural shock,” he said.

3 days after Malaysians started ranting to one another in every form, they took it onto Twitter in a big way, with the first playful tweets by @bongkerz and a hashtag he coined: #yorais. This kicked of a flurry of tweets that resulted in #yorais becoming a trending topic on Twitter (this is rather significant, as it shows that it’s one of the MOST talked about topics on the whole of Twitter, and that’s quite a big achievement, really!).

With some leftover time on my hands, I decided to choose some of these tweets I particularly liked and highlight them in this video below.

This video was crafted with the aid of “a lot of Keynote”, some Final Cut Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Quicktime Pro, Macbook Pro, mp3 music and time. Surprise, surprise, you can use Keynote to do a LOT of text animation and movement in a fairly short time frame. It’s built for creating slides easily and moving text, and the best part is, you can export it into .mov format which is perfect for Final Cut Pro to pick up and build on.

Do let me know if you enjoyed it.

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