Ireland’s first Twittering Taoiseach to tweet to the nation

1 Apr 2010

The Taoiseach of Ireland Brian Cowen TD is about to follow the example of UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and US President Barack Obama and start writing his own blog and send tweets on Twitter.

Sources have told Siliconrepublic.com that Cowen is extremely interested in making use of social media and is planning to construct a blog using WordPress.

It is understood that Cowen and his aides have been mulling over the best approach to take and aides have been working on setting up the WordPress blog and Twitter feed from the Taoiseach’s office.

Cowen is believed to have been inspired by the Downing Street website and the “forward thinking” use of open-source software.

Earlier this week, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown revealed a tranche of plans for building a digital Britain that included a stg£30m Institute of Web Science that will be directed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web.

“Each week, I record a podcast and use Twitter most days. Number10.gov.uk carries out daily conversations with more than 1.7 million followers,” Brown laconically revealed.

“There have been almost 2 million views of our images on Flickr and 4.3 million views of our films and videos on YouTube,” Brown said.

If Cowen follows suit, perhaps he’ll become known as the ‘Tweet’-seach.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com