Last weekend's election was unique for lots of reasons. One of them was the way that social media played such a huge part in it. Twitter in particular was a hugely powerful resource for updating people around the country and getting everyone's responses to what was happening.

On the channel 7 set we had a whole team of guys monitoring the Twitter responses, looking at the trends, posting the news. Mel and I were busy during the breaks on our iPhones sending out tweets. If ever you needed a signal of it being the way of the future, this was it. And Australia jumped on board.

Huge amounts of people wrote in saying that they were getting their election coverage purely from the Twitter and Facebook updates. The Twitter homepage keeps tabs on worldwide trends and what is being tweeted the most. Well at one point, "Wyatt Roy" was the most tweeted keyword around the whole word! This is a spot usually held by Justin Bieber or whoever is in the news with 14 year old girls. He was followed by 5 other keywords related to our election making up the top 10 most-tweeted worldwide.

Towards the end of the night we got thousands of tweets coming in asking what a hung parliament was, so we were able to respond to the questions on air. It worked very well and was great fun being able to interact with the viewers around the country.

We weren't alone of course. Plenty of media, journalists and political experts were tweeting all night. Some were great, some were funny. Here are a few of the best tweets from the night, plus the Taiwanese youtube vid that everyone was laughing at:

@craigthomler "Australian Sex Party celebrating well-hung Australian parliament #ausvotes"

@DavidCampbell73: I know I am a new father but I want to burp Wyatt Roy... #ausvotes

@_sarahwilson_ No sign of the Ruddbot. Kevin07 the human is back. Nice to see!

@fifi_box is in hospital - has had a severe allergic reaction to a spray tan... red all over like a lobster.

Financial abuse is a powerful and dangerous form of intimidation which is a lot more common is Australia than you think.

What makes financial abuse even more insidious is that that the abuser often justifies their actions as caring.

But the bottom line is that financial abuse can leave you extraordinarily exposed.

This sort of abuse often takes the form of a partner in a relationship, or a parent over a child, or an adult child over an elderly parent where the abuser completely controls the finances of the other person and refuses to share any of that responsibility or information.

Financial abuse could be:

Oh dear, I seem to have upset Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast real estate agents with comments in our 2012 investment predictions. In those predictions we warned to avoid the property ‘catastrophes’ of the Gold and Sunshine Coast markets. It didn’t go down very well.

The local real estate agents took to the Sunshine Coast Daily and Gold Coast Bulletin

to ‘correct us’ with some stern comments about our views (see below for a snapshot of what they said). They told me I should do a little more homework before making statements like this.

Well let me assure you I had already done my homework and have the necessary fodder to back up my statements.

In any survey of trustworthiness real estate agents and journalists always appear at the

bottom of the list. So dear reader you haven’t got much to choose from. But please note that I have no reason whatsoever to be making inaccurate statements. I have no issue with this area, but it’s my job to tell it how it is. And the bottom line is that property investments in these two locations are historically volatile, and right now in pretty bad shape.

Here are the facts:

-       Gold Coast house prices are down 15.1% from their peak in March 2010, falling from $568 000 to $482 500

There are many things Aussies love about being, well, Aussie. The first things that come to mind are beaches, cricket, snags on the barbie, and of course a nice cold beer. While we do love all of the above, when the Herald Sun conducted a survey to see people's top three favourite things about being Australian, the most common word from 15,000 responses was 'freedom'.

The ususal suspects were also on the list, but it's nice to see that our bogan stereotype aside, what we value most is the important stuff that is too easy to take for granted. Here's a clever word-cloud they made up with the top ranswers.