It was with great anticipation that I surfed to www.mic.org.my to view MIC’s new website (it was first mentioned last year April). Well, at first look, its not great. But for me function is more important than form and I lowered my expectation. It has a poll sections, blog section, video and photo gallery. I’ll say its still work in progress, maybe 50% complete.

By the way, first time I browsed the URL, there was an error, but it disappeared when I refreshed the page.

The new portal was launched by Information Minister Rais Yatim.

Samy has high hopes for the portal:

Meanwhile MIC president S Samy Vellu stressed that the content of the website must be made most attractive to the younger generation.

“The most important and challenging aspect of the MIC portal is the content. It must be constantly updated with real-time news so that the portal will capture the minds of the people, especially the youths.

“The MIC portal will now be the centre of information for the Indian community to attain the latest and accurate information on MIC,” he said.

Samy Vellu, who has come under attacks by many after the party suffered a devastating loss in the general election last year, lashed back at his critics that the website will regain MIC’s glory.

“The community can now interact and communicate with MIC officers any time and anywhere in real time. We want to hear from the community, we want them to tell us what they want and how we could assist them.

“When we do mistakes, we want the community to let us know, to advise us and make recommendations,” he said.

“This is the kind of relationship we want to have with the community… even before this, the MIC was able to read the pulse of the Indian community but perhaps there existed a gap, and this led to many Indians, especially the younger generation keeping away from the Barisan Nasional.

However he said tha this gap could be bridged with the launch of the portal.

If indeed the portal is able to be a focal point – an OSC – for the community, it will be great. For that, it must look something like www.gov.my, but at the the moment, the site needs a lot of rework. Also, there’s a problem of coordinating information from various sources. It requires huge resource. Not many Indian-based websites are able to arrange such information and cater for the community.

For example, if you browse the Education section under Opportunities menu, you will find Scholarship by MARA, (!) plus few other entries that have expired.  Its not easy to run a portal. Definitely need at least 3 full time staff – one designer, one content manager, and one programmer/developer.

Anyway, the portal has a e-community and e-feedback function whereby makkal can write in their problems/complaints etc. I think  one should give it a try and see if its effective or not before passing judgement. I know I will be trying it soon.

Oh ya…forget to add, I was being quite lenient and generous when evaluating the website. I can already hear it coming – WHAT??? No Facebook? No Twitter? No Youtube? Want to attract younger generation??? No RSS also??? Want to attract Internet savvy generation? Who are they trying to kid?