Simple is the Reason of My Heart

The Economics about Banning Political Films

I have been thinking about the political films discussion that took place during the Seminar on Internet Regulatory Reform. Two of my colleagues, Alex Au aka Yawning Bread and Gerald Giam have voiced their opinions about section 35 in the Films Act and their reaction to the comments made by Mr Cheong Yip Seng, the Chairman of the Advisory Council on the Impact of New Media on Society (AIMES). Alex Au is worried that AIMES may be trying hard to justify why section 35 should stay after hearing Mr Cheong's point about the high impact factor that a political film can sway how people think after his visit to a conference in Canada. To reinforce his point, Mr Cheong also cited that Japan and Korea were the other two countries that banned political films. On the other hand, Gerald took a different position by arguing that the political films act benefit PAP more than the other opposition parties. In this post, I adopt the relationship between the demand & supply with the impact of a political film to explain why banning section 35 is a worse option for the PAP to stay in power.

Community Moderation: Thoughts from the Internet Regulatory Reform Seminar

Organised by the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, the seminar on internet regulatory reform happened today at the URA Centre. About 50 people attended the event, excluding the organizers and the bloggers who are involved in the drafting of "Proposals for Internet Freedom in Singapore". The aim of this seminar is to present the proposals and at the same solicit some thoughts and comments from the public. Together with Cherian George, Alex Au (Yawning Bread), Choo Zheng Xi, Ng Ejay, Arun Mahizhnan (Institute of Policy Studies) and Mohan Gopalan, we presented the various aspects and sat on a panel to discuss the proposals. In the process, we drew interesting comments and questions from the audience.  After a vibrant discussion, I will like to outline some ideas about the formation of Internet Content Consultative Committee (IC3) mentioned in the community moderation section of the proposal.

Global Trends on Blogger Arrests for 2008

I came across a report from BBC News regarding the increasing number of arrests of bloggers in the world. The statistics and trends are reported from the World Information Access Report 2008. Since 2003, 64 bloggers have been arrested for publishing their views on a blog. It might be interesting to look at some of the trends. The bloggers are arrested for the following reasons: (i) exposed corruption in government, (ii) abuse of human rights or suppression of protests or (iii) they criticised public policies and took political figures to task. The average prison sentence for the bloggers who are arrested is about 15 months, and the longest sentence served is 8 years. Currently, about 30 countries have imposed technological restrictions on what people can do online. There seemed to be an increasing trend of countries broadening legislation on online media. 

5 Random Ideas for Social Media Breakfast

For a while, I have been attending the first two social media breakfast events in Singapore, organized by a group of social media enthusiasts namely, Daryl aka Unique Frequency, Sheylara, Derrick Kwa and Brad. I appreciate the efforts of the organizers in trying to bring together different social media players together and meet up. While it is a time to catch up with old friends (Jerrick, Farnelli, NTT, Daniel, DK, Peter Du, Michael Cheng, Preetam, Coleman, Priscilla, Melvin, Meimin, Simply Jean, Nicole, Tianhong, Ridzuan, Yuhui, Daphne, Claudia, Shannon, Rinaz, Hisham and if you are not mentioned, my humble apologies), it is also a time to meet new friends (Enning, Tinana,  Dominic,  Nadnut, Jayden, ....). In the aftermath, I read about the successes and failures mentioned by Daryl and the vision of what SMB is to be by Derrick. I thought that it might be interesting to offer some ideas on how to position the social media breakfast for the future and derive some ideas from other interest groups that might turn the whole event towards something different.

The Geek Goddess Show episode 3: Producer's Notes

Finally, after a week break, we finally got the 3rd episode of the Geek Goddess show out for public consumption. I have a confession to make. Don't blame Peter Du for the content of the show being too China-centric. For a general view, the producers thought that it might be easier to start off with content in China so that the show will not be Singapore focus but Asian focus from the start. We will be moving out of China soon, since I have done more work to research about web news in other parts of Asia. In fact, our poor Peter got hit by the pillow 12 times and that's because Estee often forgot what to say after the pillow flew onto him. The production set was brimmed with laughter and I thought that it was the most enjoyable episode to film and produce so far. Yeah, we still talked about virtual worlds in China: HiPiHi, NovoKing and UOneNet. do see our little tease with Bjorn Lee, one of the co-founders of E27 Singapore. To spice things up and taking audience feedback, this episode did just the opposite. We have finally sieved in a Singapore start-up (First Meta) and also the web 2.0 scene in Malaysia. I have to thank Daniel Cerventus Lim (founder of Ideapreneur.net) across the causeway who was down to give a talk in the Singapore PHP User Group May meetup.  He offered us some time to sit down and talked about the web 2.0 scene (together with the recent WCIT event there where Guy Kawasaki turned up). He offered Blinklist as an example of an interesting Malaysian web 2.0 start-up. We are still continuing our iterations for the show to ensure the quality of the show gets better and better. Anyway, I should also thank my co-producer, Michael Cheng for tolerating my perfectionist streak about making the show a high quality one and spending a lot of time doing post-editing to match what I am looking for. In any case, I should also thank Podfire for the support.

Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by Social Technologies

At least, I know that Nicholas and I are among the first few people to get our hands on Groundswell: Winning in a World transformed by Social Technologies (a book about social media by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research), since we have ordered this book a few weeks back (before it is officially released in May 2008). In a simple definition by the authors, the groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations. In actual fact, the tipping point for a product or news happened not because of a lot of people, and usually, it started from a groundswell in the ground and attribute to several factors in a complex situation. After a quick read through, the book is specifically targeted for executives in companies or organizations who might want to adopt social technologies (or media) that integrate along with their present business functions.

DigiMarketing: The Essential Guide to New Media and Digital Marketing

I picked up this book while browsing through a stack of business books in Borders some time back. After reading bits and pieces, I have decided to buy the book since I need a reference for social media. The book DigiMarketing: The Essential Guide to New Media and Digital Marketing written by Kent Wertime and Ian Fenwick is an interesting read for me. Coincidentally, while reading the profiles of the authors, I realized that they are based in Thailand. Being a practitioner of social media, it offers a freshly different perspective for me, particularly in learning how people (working in the traditional media space) approach new (or social media) to effectively market out ideas and products to the world.

The Geek Goddess Show 2nd Episode: Production Notes

Finally, the second episode is out for the Geek Goddess show. Episode 2 focuses on the video sharing sites and how to construct a facebook clone in China, particularly Tudou. In fact, Kevin Lim has provided us some initial feedback for the show.  Definitely, somewhere in the future, I do hope to get him come on as a guest to the show. While Michael concentrate mainly on post production and filming (which we co-share the roles), most of my time is focus on sourcing out interesting news in the Asia web 2.0 space, writing parts of the script  and also working on technical direction of the show during filming (like finding the best filming angle for Estee). As for the content, I get some assistance from Peter (one of the co-hosts of the show and I am responsible for giving him the nick of "Geeky Prince") who spends a considerable amount of time reading on the development of the web 2.0 in China. One of my favourite blogs for news is the China Web 2.0 Review which I highly recommend for those who want an introduction or some sense of the web scene in China. Before I forget, I have to start working on the next episode now. For other interesting social media shows, do check them out at Podfire. So, enjoy the 2nd episode of the show.

Official Reply from Government on the Proposal

For those who wonder about the progress of the proposal, Ms Bhavani from MICA representing the Minister of Information, Communication and the Arts have responded to us on the proposals and said that they will review the suggestions made on the proposals. There is a ST report "Government looking at Lighter Touch"  by Zakir Hussain narrating about the responses between MICA and the bloggers on the proposal. The engagement between MICA and us has been cordial and positive and that's a good starting point for proper debate in our society. From reading the response, my opinion is that they would at least review what we have proposed.  We have to wait and see what their eventual policy decisions may be, given that the report by Advisory Council on the Impact  of  New Media on Society (AIMS) is about to be submitted. In any case, both groups (the bloggers and AIMS) have been in contact, and have exchanged notes among each other through various closed door sessions on regulation issues in Institute of Policy Studies or private emails. Meanwhile, check out Alex's article on "The pigeons are among us already", Clarissa Onn's "Bureaucratic ambiguity and Internet freedom" and Mohan's "Maintaining Racial and Religious Harmony through Criminal Law". The full text for official email reply can be found in E-Jay's SGPoilitics.net. I have attached a copy here.

The Geek Goddess Show finally launched in Podfire

Finally, after a few months of procrastination, planning and production, together with Michael Cheng, Estee Teo and Peter Du, we have finally launched the first episode of "The Geek Goddess Show" into cyberspace through Podfire.sg. Geek Goddess came about through a conversation between Michael and I that we should do a tech show which features the internet trends in Asia (similar to CommandN and Geek Brief). So, we put it to test and we are thankful to have Estee and Peter to come onboard as the stars for the show. Doing a videocast is definitely more challenging because it takes usually ten times the effort to produce the amount of footage that will finally become what we made of the show. At the moment, I prefer to take a hobbyist approach on this new project (unlike what I do with investing and incubating interactive digital media start-ups in Thymos Capital LLP).  After looking at the final product, I still think that there are lots to improve. Finally I am really glad and thankful to my friends (Paddy, DK, Nicole, Gwen, Jean, Ridz, Daniel & Fairnelli from Tech65, Reuben, Daryl Tay, Min-Tea, Daphne Maia, Nadnut, Claudia, Kien Lee, Tianhong, Joanna, Shannon, Jarius, Damien, Shaun and many others whom I might fail to mention) who attend the soft launch of Podfire yesterday to offer their support and encouragement. Also congrats to the other 2 shows Blogger's Treat (Aaron and Sabrina) and Channel 65 that are featured yesterday. Oh yes, I have placed the show in this post (Check out the production notes from Estee's perspective), do check it out. :)

Proposals for Internet Freedom in Singapore

The paper "Proposals for Internet Freedom in Singapore" is now submitted to Dr Lee Boon Yang, the Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts. For those who want to a download of the paper, you can download it from here. As spoken earlier, it will be great to hear more feedback from fellow bloggers. 

Community Moderation as an alternative to Internet Regulation in Singapore

Community moderation is an alternative solution to Internet regulation as compared to the heavy hand approach adopted by the authorities (particularly in clamping down matters with law enforcement too quickly). I sketch out a few arguments to support the advocacy of this solution and present the summary of the proposals by the group of 15 bloggers led by Alex Au and Choo Zheng Xi who will be submitting a set of recommended proposals to the Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts within the next few days on the subject of Internet regulation. 

Fact Checking on Press Freedom/Stability in Singapore

Recently, an article from Channelnews Asia talks about Singapore's press freedom. The main gist of the article is to indicate that Singaporean citizens have a stronger preference for stability over press freedom as compared to the other countries in the world. This claim was based on a finding conducted by research firms GlobeScan and Synovate and was commissioned by the BBC World Service to mark its 75th anniversary. A few interesting findings are conveyed through the local press, for e.g. "Some 42 per cent of Singaporeans gave a 'good job' rating to government-funded media in accuracy and honesty, compared to 32 per cent for non-government funded companies. However, 51 per cent of Singaporeans were of the opinion that "ownership (of the media companies) is a major issue because you often see owners' political views emerge in the news'" (quoted from ChannelNews Asia article[2]). Of course, if you go to BBC [2,3] and download the actual report, you find that the local press did not report some additional information. So, what did they leave out?

A Contrarian View on the MDA Video

Yes, I am a bit late to talk about the infamous MDA Video. I have a confession to make. I have actually watched the video in MDA a few months ago before it went public. As far as I know, the video was made for an internal corporate retreat. I held my promise not to talk about it (given that I was getting one good laugh by someone showing me the video for a bad day) unless the video is made public. I was surprised why the video made her way into the public domain. Honestly speaking, most  people are right to say that the video was bad because we have to endure the  agony of watching middle aged men and women (high level executives) doing rap. Once you bypass that phase of bad taste, you will say that it's pretty funny and hilarious. Although my first reaction was not as bad as most people in the blogosphere, I did made one comment to a couple of friends working in MDA. Actually I suggested to them many times that they should have promoted the video out to the internet. My reason is simple, I am a firm believer of good and bad publicity is better than no publicity. A few interesting things have happened given that many prominent bloggers have declared their distaste for the infamous video.

The Cult of the "Expert" Journalists

Recently, intrigued from reading the blog posts from the media socialists: Ivan Chew, Siva and Van Tan, I managed to get my hands on Ong Sor Fern's article "Clearing away the cobwebs". She was drawing from the hype coming from Andrew Keen's book "The Cult of the Amateur"  and confessing that "I HAVE never, nor will I ever, read blogs." Yes, unlike most of us who are the new advocates of social media, she prefer her writing to come in published formats in traditional media and trust that there is quality control in that delivery system. In her myopic view, she seemed to be convinced that only the journalist is subjected to a code of ethics while the rest of the citizen journalists or online commentators don't. In her own words from the article, she made a caustic remark about blogs, "Blogs, however, are a Wild West frontier, a welter of undifferentiated information that blends fact with opinion with merry disregard for consequences." So, here lies a couple of assertions she made without adequate information or knowledge from not reading blogs.

Making Video with a MacBook and a Video Camera

Yesterday I was invited by Estee, Peter and Todd to do an interview in Geek Terminal. It's for a video project which they are doing. In the end, I did not manage to do the interview because I need to rush off for another meeting. However, with Brennan as the model , I managed to experiment a filming technique that I have conceived some time (thanks to my past experience as a producer in theatre). With Todd's professional video camera, I created the 2nd camera using the Mac Book, and making some adjustments to an enclosed space, we successfully make a small studio viable for filming video in Geek Terminal. I thought I might share how this setup can be done here.

How to be an Effective Live-Blogger in 10 Ways

Recently during the ChillOut event, some members from The Digital Movement have consulted me about how to live-blog for an event as I have managed to transcribe conference events efficiently (unless the network is totally out of commission). I have done live-blogging  and have a good track record for several events, for example, Nexus Conference 2007 and the IX academic conference (with Gwen, my fellow colleague from SG Entrepreneurs). So, I decided to offer the ten lessons on how to be an effective live-blogger for major events.

Singapore should consider Creative Commons

Recently, in a talk "YouTube and Beyond" by Kevin Lim (see also the post-event coverage by Rambling Librarian), the topic of creative commons has been brought up. If Singapore is seriously pursuing the digital interactive media industry, it is important that the citizens need to find alternatives to the present intellectual property system. Particularly, with the increasing trend in the west to adopt creative commons, if Singapore wants to be an advanced nation, the government should look at the creative commons issue seriously.  Interestingly, if you look at the drafting and eventual adoption of jurisdiction-specific licenses worldwide, Singapore is not in the list of countries (although in the website, the person in Singapore who is working on this is Professor Samtani Anil, Deputy Director Nanyang Business School). In this article, I will provide a short introduction and why Singapore needs to consider Creative Commons seriously.

Tipping Point for New Media in Singapore?

Yesterday, I gave a talk about the business landscape of web 2.0 and virtual worlds in  the Gananan Forum (Singapore Chapter). My talk focus on the different types of mindsets in the web 2.0 and how that is translated to look at businesses in the new world. A lot on the talk is drawn from discussions with the experts (Chris Anderson, Nathan Torkington), the media socialists (Kevin, Ben and Preetai), the technologists (James) and even people from the mainstream media. Of course, I brought up an interesting issue by a graph I plotted using the web traffic tracking site, Alexa. Does that mean that we have reached the tipping point for the new media in Singapore?

Bloggers' Code of Conduct

The death threat to Kathy Sierra has once again spur the calls for adopting OpenID. Interestingly, Tim O'Reilly, the man who coined the famous term Web 2.0, has now called for a blogger's code of conduct.

The Future of the Web

Recently, I have been involved with the Nexus 2007 Conference organized by The Digital Movement. The event was held in NTUC center last Saturday. It was a very successful conference, organized by a group of dedicated students and it gave us the feeling that we are in Silicon Valley for a few hours. The title of my panel is "The Future of the Web" and I have written a narration about the panel in the SG Entrepreneurs. Speaking on the panel are: Andeas Weigend (Former Chief Scientist of Amazon.com), Bobby Napiltonia (Senior Vice President, Global Business Development and Alliances,Salesforce.com), Reza Behnam (MD of Yahoo! Southeast Asia) and Nathan Torkington (O’Reilly Radar, Perl Foundation Board - who is one of the authors of the Perl Cookbook which I happen to have it on my working table everyday).

Although the discussion is built on the current development of internet technologies, there are interesting implications that will change the way we think and work in the future. It will be interesting to examine them from the perspective of bloggers who write about social and political issues in Singapore.

OB Confidential

Recently I have an interesting discussion with several academics about freedom of speech in Singapore. One central issue which often pops up in such discussions is the definition of a OB marker, the short term for out of bounds marker. The OB marker is a term used in Singapore to denote and demarcate what topics are allowed for discussion. Often in any conference and symposium concerning the freedom of speech, the academics, the critics and the writers (journalists and bloggers) will start the OB marker from square one and by the end of the day, they return to square one, i.e. nothing insightful about these markers turns out.

The most interesting thing about the OB marker is that everyone don't really have a clear idea what they really are. The establishment have made it really difficult by not going down to specifics and made it a shifting target board for the practitioners, be it journalists, bloggers and opposition politicians. The practitioners want these OB markers to be clearly defined so that they are aware of when they broke the law. Try to think of this from an economist viewpoint, both competing parties (the establishment and the writers) are in a negotiation about what these markers are. One party has complete information and the other don't. Of course, if you don't want to be trapped in a situation of perverse incentive, the writers will definitely want to solicit more information possible to make an informed choice.  The reason is that the practitioners do not want to have the uncertainty of falling into a black hole without realizing that they have crossed the event horizon. So, that is the question which I want to pose from the practitioner's point of view, "Is it really necessary to define so clearly what the OB markers are? If so, what is exactly the thing we want to demarcate?"

The First and Last Word

A Game Theory approach in tackling the Mainstream Media in Singapore

Recently, during the interviews with Pei Juan (the honours student working on a project about social-political bloggers, mentioned by several bloggers) and Linda (who is doing a case study on Singapore Angle), I summarize a strategy how bloggers can handle the mainstream media without the fear of being misquoted. The strategy is a pragmatic example of this so-called "power" that Kitana and Aaron purported about citizen journalism and new media. Of course, the strategy is successfully deployed on my previous engagements  with the political roundtable and the BlogTV.SG. On both occasions, if you have read between the lines in both my posts on the issue, they are deliberately constructed to ensure that I will not be misquoted or allow a particular interesting segment to be aired.

In essence, the strategy is a collective effort using the wisdom of crowds (another web 2.0 concept) from my colleagues in Singapore Angle and rely on simple game theory on how the bloggers can circumvent the mainstream media even if they may have the first word to distort your quotes. The catalyst that led me to coin the term the "last word strategy" came from a conversation on citizen journalism and web 2.0 with Kevin, Preetamrai and Benjamin Koe in the recent E27 event IV: You are the Media. In fact, Benjamin Koe provides a pedagogical viewpoint on how I casually called it the last word strategy.

I will explain why the last word strategy works so well on both occasions. If you are afraid of being misquoted by the mainstream media in Singapore, you can adopt two approaches: one, taking the stone wall defensive approach to disengage with the MSM (which is what Mr Wang believes, and I call this the old paradigm which the nay-sayers, critics and pessimists loved) or two, leverage on the weakness of the mainstream media to create the most optimal and rational outcome.