So, Kevin07 is here! Australian Labor leader Kevin Rudd has gotten all web2.0 and has a new portal website which integrates nicely with Labor and Rudd’s re-vamped MySpace page, YouTube and Facebook.  As I’ve discussed in the past month, Labor has already shown far more success in using MySpace and Facebook than the Liberal party.  Liberal leader and current PM John Howard has tried to use YouTube, but each video clip led to the deleting of comments and each video also seems to have less and less viewers.

Kevin07 was launched today, so for historical archival purposes, here is a full screenshot from day one:

The layout is fairly straight-forward and is clearly based on a the design of both the Hillary08 (screenshot) and Obama08 (screenshot) campaigns for the 2008 US Presidential election.  There is a little danger in Australia in pushing the individual (Kevin) over the party (Labor) since Australians are still less comfortable with celebrity politics (hence, among other things, no Australia President) but I’ve got to say I think the Labor media advisors have done a very decent job on this portal.  In an article in PerthNow, Rudd’s team certainly seem to be making the right noises about how social software would work during the election campaign:

“Kevin07 will encourage supporters to interact with one another, participate in blogs and stay in touch with what is happening on the campaign trail,” Labor’s campaign director Tim Gartrell said.

On the negative side, ABC News has a story about some very strongly worded responses from Liberal Party faithful:

But Assistant Treasurer Peter Dutton says voters will eventually see the light, and has labelled Mr Rudd’s approach as a “load of crap”.

“People at the moment are looking at Kevin Rudd like they’re looking at a promo for Big Brother,” he said.

“I mean it’s exciting, it’s fresh and when the big night comes, and people actually have a closer look and they look at the detail and they get a better understanding about what the show is about, they actually realise that the show is a load of crap.”

“The thing I say to Australians is please, don’t just look at the media tart, look at the policy detail.”

However, what Peter Dutton fails to understand, is that a generation who started watching Big Brother when they were 13 are old enough to vote this year.  More to the point, dismissing the web, which is a central social space for those in the late teens and twenties, is clearly alienating the majority of a key demographic group.  On more stable ground, The Age has tried to take Team Rudd to task for not registering all the possible Kevin07 variant domains (.net, .org etc) but if that’s the only issues the mainstream media can find, then I’d have to say Kevin07 is a winner in terms of design and its connectivity with voters.