Finland’s victory at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest showed the power of the Internet and its social interaction structures to generate support.

In their quest for victory – the first-ever for Finland – hard rock group Lordi conducted a massive campaign over the Internet to defeat the Eurovision’s legacy of pop and glitter.

As their message spread, more fans got into the spirit of the campaign and they set up the site www.VoteLordi.org.

They sent a message calling on those who live in a Eurovision country and think the Eurovision Song Contest is a joke, to do themselves a favour and vote for Lordi in the semi-finals on Thursday and the finals on Saturday.

The message was translated into 19 European languages, including Maltese, by enthusiastic volunteers and the site got over 60,000 hits in the first 12 days.

The site in its original form, including the message, had to be taken off following a request made by the Lordi contingent because of the constant media pressure they received on account of the VoteLordi.org site.

However, it still continues to attract visitors and has reached the 200,000 mark.

As the project team of VoteLordi.org site proclaimed: “One thing is for sure: the Eurovision Song Contest will never be the same again. They might as well stop having them, because nothing can ever top what Lordi achieved there.

“Of course, the post-Arockalypse (sic) contests will still go on ad infinitum, and we predict Lordi’s amazing success will inspire more than a few pathetic attempts from other countries at imitating them in some manner in the next years.

“Anyone with half a brain knows that it won’t work, but that won’t make any difference.”

And in Malta? Well, it seems that nobody smelt the coffee brewing. Except for technology-savvy Toni Sant, who had forecast Lordi’s victory in his blog on 9 May, 11 days before the final.

Dr Sant wrote that this song was a challenge to the Eurovision Song Contest’s “legacy” (that term is open to interpretation, of course) of the past 50 years.

Monitoring the latest developments on the Web, he said people were going to vote for Lordi to challenge this “legacy”.

“I told you so!!” was Toni Sant’s ecstatic announcement in a 26-point-size bold font on his blog on Sunday morning at 12.02am, just two minutes after the contest ended.

As for Malta’s Internet presence, Fabrizio Faniello has his official website, www.fabriziofaniello.com, operated by Cap Sounds, his record label. However, the level of interaction on the site was rather limited and it is used more as a vehicle to sell his albums.

There is a guest book, but it was closed “temporarily” after it was swamped with obscene words sent by people who were angry at Fabrizio’s performance.

Even more dismal is the Maltasong committee’s official website, www.maltasong.com, which promised “latest news from Greece” from 12 May, but has never been updated.

There are a number of Fabrizio Faniello fan sites, mostly set up by teenage female fans, but none had the impact of VoteLordi.org. There is also an unofficial forum, but it is practically inactive, with only two topics and four posts in all.

People therefore had to resort to the forums of local news sites to express their opinion. For instance, by Thursday afternoon, the www.di-ve.com forum on the Eurovision song contest had been viewed 25,964 times and 211 replies had been posted.

The Maltasong committee surely has one lesson to learn – not to underestimate the ever-increasing power of the Internet and use it to its advantage in the future.

Whereas only 9.8 per cent of the population had Internet in the home at the end of March 1999, by the end of March this year, 22.1 per cent had Internet at home.

People are spending more time on the Internet, as more are opting for broadband, which gives faster speed and more continuous access to sites than narrowband.