Simple is the Reason of My Heart

Sic Transit Intelligent Singaporean

I read the last post of the Intelligent Singaporean with surprise  yesterday. Without doubt, IS has served the community well for the past year, by navigating everyone to the relevant blogs that discuss issues affecting us in Singapore everyday, be it the GST hike, the cost of living, the economy, PM Rally Speech's 2006 & 2007, and others etc. In the history of the Singapore blogosphere (in my own humble opinion), it has definitely occupied an unique position and has done a tremendous service to many in Singapore by offering a gateway to the many out there talking about their own perspectives and views about the bits and pieces of life in Singapore.

Personally I wish InSpir3d well for the future. Good luck for your future endeavours and may there be many happy returns in your life.

Bloggers' Code of Conduct II

Recently, because of the Kathy Sierra death threat incident, Tim O'Reilly, the man who coined the famous term "Web 2.0" decided to suggest a code of conduct for the bloggers. The debate is now propagated into the mainstream media, for example, BBC reported the story and offered the view that this might be the time to start thinking whether the blogosphere should be completely uncensored. What really struck me as I traced through the whole debate with a summary post from Tim O'Reilly entitled "Code of Conduct: Lessons learnt so far". He talked about the various viewpoints brought up from his earlier point, particularly arguing against the detractors' view that it is censorship. In some sense, by starting the debate going, he attracted different feedback and criticism that can now help to frame the issue better, for example, do we want to have a badge for a blogger code of conduct? do we need civility in the way how the bloggers and the commentators hold their discussion?

Sometime back last year, in Singapore blogosphere, the topic on a bloggers' association and a code of conduct is discussed. I earlier argued that  even if someone draws a code of conduct, not everyone will adhere to it. That's the beauty of the blogosphere which a lot of people do not appreciate. Even if something is drawn up, every blogger has the freedom to choose whether to follow the code of conduct. The Creative Commons license is a good example of how people decide to follow a code of conduct pertaining to copyright in the internet. Hence the argument that having a code of conduct equates to self-censorship is not a valid one. What the code of conduct really does is to ask the individual blogger to decide whether freedom of speech should come with responsibility.   

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.

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.

"Big Boys Blogging" at Brewerkz

Well, my fifteen minutes of fame with Gayle Goh, Flying Dutchman, Xue Ling and Mr George Yeo (Minister for Foreign Affairs,  Singapore). One of the first few interesting moments for me in the beginning of the year. I have written a short piece on  Singapore Angle: Perspectives. Trust me, I will tell you how I feel after the whole thing when the show is out.

The whole Singapore Angle team has already obtained my long story on what issues are discussed during this event. To be honest, I think that the discussion before and after the actual event was actually more interesting than during the discussion because of the camera and lights. At least one thing I did do, is to bring Intelligent Singaporean to the attention of the minister but that was done not during the interview. I am pretty sure that IS will buying me beer the next time round for the advertisement. I can also tell you is that on both occasions I met George Yeo in person, his position on certain issues are consistent, including his views on other politicians' blog. Well, I did fumble in one question, I think, but then again, it's actually my first time on BlogTV. One last thing, I am the person (mentioned in George Yeo's blog) who commented whether Gayle is allowed to drink in her age.

 

Note: Picture is taken from Ephraim's blog.