While I was at the PhoCusWright Bloggers Summit at ITB, something very important was happening in my home country – a revolution was taking place in blogosphere that would change the course of Malaysia’s future.

Everyday, I was receiving emails from friends back home in Malaysia alerting me to what was being said in the blogs.

What they couldn’t express through the government-controlled mainstream media, Malaysians were saying it in their blogs.

Their mission was clear: Deny the ruling party two-thirds majority.

And they succeeded. For the first time, the party that had been in power since independence in 1957 lost two-thirds majority and not only that, five states ended up in the opposition’s hands.

This week, embattled Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi admitted that his government made a blunder by underestimating the power of the Internet.

“In the last election, we certainly lost the Internet war, the cyberwar,” he told an investors’ conference, Invest Malaysia 2008. “It was a serious misjudgment. We made the biggest mistake in thinking that it was not important.”

He called it a ““serious misjudgment” on the part of the ruling National Front coalition to rely solely on government-controlled newspapers and television while the opposition “wooed young voters with cellphone text messages and blogs”, according to a report in the IHT.

“We thought that the newspapers, the print media, the television were supposed to be important, but the young people were looking at SMS and blogs,” he said.

In the absence of a free press, Malaysians have taken to blogs in droves. There’s even a National Alliance of Blogs which represents the 50 or so top blog sites in the country.

And two well-known bloggers, Jeff Ooi and Elizabeth Wong, even won - the former in a parliamentary seat in Penang and the latter a state seat in Selangor.

Moral of the story? Don’t ignore the bloggers.

It's more the cry of "Makkal Sakhti” (People's Power) that brought the political tsunami to Malaysia on March 8. Malaysians uniting, regardless of race, religion and culture, to together deny the ruling party its two-thirds majority and create a better tomorrow for all Malaysians.

The term "Malaysia Boleh" (Malaysian Can) could not be truer in its meaning than on March 8 when most Malaysians shed their apathy to create a new dawn for their country.

Malaysians Boleh!