Recently in Blogging Category

It’s hard to imagine I started this blog 10 years ago.

It was the weekend of Martin Luther King holiday, and all the dormitories were empty then — everyone had gone home for the long weekend. The weather was cold, and I was suffering from the worst fever of my life. I had back spasms; it hurt to stand up or to lie down and my whole body was trembling non-stop.

There, thousands of miles away from home, I seriously thought I was going to die.

I wanted to tell the folks back home of my plight, and instead of calling home, I decided to haul my very sick body on to my chair, learn HTML, and wrote my first blog entry. The first design had notepad lines and was adorned with animated Calvin and Hobbes gifs.

Blogger hadn’t existed yet, so we all coded our online journals by hand.

The seemingly stupid decision to craft HTML instead of seeing a doctor that day changed my life. More than the fact it led to my current profession, the small blog community was close-knit. Folks like Nick Pan and Jimmy Liew were my first comrades into the field of web standards. Nick’s wife Pearl drew the most stunning illustrations at Pearlpan.com. Dawn Mikulich had the most subtle and beautiful minimalist blog “A Life Uncommon”. There used to be a young teenager named Sarah who always left comments of encouragement in my guestbook (we didn’t have comments then).

It’s really been a while, and we’ve lost a lot of great bloggers along the way.

The blogosphere feels different these days. You could say that the loud blaring voices of PR agencies killed what we had going. When blogs hit the mainstream, followed by social media, it heralded the end of the living room and ushered in the marketplace.

At the risk of sounding too geeky: I miss how real and authentic online connections used to feel.

Probably an act of misinformation I should have corrected earlier, but the last two weeks of my life was replaced by a flash of green, the smell of musty army equipment and the absence of any decent computing input device.

The Nokia E91 is a window of freedom, but its tiny keypad makes Twitter’s 140 character limit a godsend.

So a couple of weeks ago I blogged about the premature demise of my favourite teacher in all the world, only to receive an email from same said teacher, a Facebook invitation to connect and a comment to the blog entry.

He is alive and well.

My initial reaction wasn’t to panic that I had perpetuated “news” of his passing on to what could be a sizable number of people. It was one of relief.

Then my inner geek took over and I began analysing how misinformation is spread. My initial source of information was credible: a personal friend and a student at the same school, many years my junior. But names are tricky, and it was another Mr. Ng who suffered an untimely demise.

This probably won’t be the last time I blog, tweet, facebook or transmit misinformation, especially emotive pieces that spur one’s instinct to react. But if anything, it is a personal case study on the importance of triangulating information versus the trigger-happy gen-y tendency to broadcast.

A story based on discussions at last night’s Open Room. An analogy of the relationships between storytellers (old and new), their audience and advertisers.

You could say I’m blessed. I’ve been coming to the same watering-hole for the last 2 years. The lounge lizards still turn and stare at me whenever I walk through the doors, all of them hungry for my attention. I know the game; I offer them fleeting glances from time to time, feeding their hope. Some do get lucky, but mostly out of my whim. It is amusing to watch them scramble about, wondering what it is they did “right” that night. As if my choice were a direct result of their action. The guessing keeps them busy, and I get to maintain the titillation of intrigue.

Many people ask why I keep coming back to this place. Simply put, there is no better bartender in the next 4,000 miles. Oh, and the drinks are free. Or at least they were.

You see, John, the huge bloke sitting in that corner, used to pay for all my drinks. I used to give him the time of the day, but less so these days. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know why I’m not as into him as I used to be. It’s probably because of all the new guys in town: all interesting in their own cute way, and terribly distracting. Not all of them were good guys, a couple tried to get Bill the bartender to slip pills into my drinks.

It was embarrassing the first time I ordered my usual vodka martini (twist of lemon rind) and was asked to pay up. Didn’t Bill know who I am? I was infuriated that he would quibble over so small an item. For god’s sake, it’s just a bloody drink. Not wanting a scene, Bill finally caved and continued giving me free drinks.

That was 6 months ago. Now Bill says he needs to close down the bar because of financial reasons. Stupid bloke should have seen this coming before he set up shop in this god-forsaken town where I’m his only customer. I only hope I can still hit him up for a few more freebies before he heads out of town.

Pay for drinks? Are you friggin’ kidding me?!?

Our story begins, as many stories do, with the fury of a woman scorned. It was Ping.sg’s first anniversary, and they held a blog awards ceremony. An up-and-coming blogger, Jayne had secured 4 of the 11 awards, a remarkable feat by any standards. However, as the ambitious are wont to do, Jayne threw a hissy fit when she didn’t win the largest award of them all.

Depending on whose account you heard, you either came away with the conclusion that people ought to learn how to lose graciously, or that the people in “power” were abusing their godlike status.

Fast-forward to present day. Jayne announces the registration of the Association of Bloggers (Singapore):

“Association of Bloggers (Singapore) is a non-profit association. It is dedicated to promoting, protecting and educating its members; supporting the development of blogging as new media. I hope eventually it can help to provide legal assistance to bloggers too. It is a professional body for bloggers in Singapore.”

This association was created, if anything, to coalesce power.

“[Singaporean bloggers were] easily manipulated and even banned for standing up against the foreign tyrant from self-proclaimed ‘community meta weblog for Singapore bloggers’.”

And if Jayne’s own blog posts are anything to go by, the association has a maniacal leader at its helm.

Personal disclaimer: I am a civil servant, a fact made publicly known numerous times in all my online discussions. I find Jayne’s broad sweeping attacks on public servants extremely hurtful and uncalled for.

I believe that a person who judges another by the place he is born (Chua Uzyn … is a ‘foreign talent’, educated in Singapore, enjoying our subsidies) should not be in a position to educate anyone.

It is my hope that the Singapore blogosphere would evolve to be an environment that fosters creativity and intellectual discourse. Starting behind a web of hypocrisy and an insatiable thirst for power is a bad place to start.

One of the reasons why its been hard to keep Tribolum updated is that I’m stretched a little thin over too many blogs. There’s Websg, where I keep the more technical stuff going (currently also terribly neglected) and my photolog, which has been a zen garden for me. Photography packs so much without the bustle of superfluous words.

There’s so much I want to say, but even more I want to feel; want you to feel.

To me the best thing about all this web 2.0 fanfare is the push towards open information. RSS, mashups, Google - all made possible because of information sharing.

The tricky bit arises when drawing the line between sharing and stealing. In his latest post, Greg Storey from Airbag calls theft on Flickr user Allig8torx for poaching photos from File Magazine (see FM’s Untitled by Byron Barett and Allig8tor’s astica3). Several Airbag readers defend Allig8tor (the nick is becoming such a pain to type), as it is possible that he’s just using Flickr as an online repository, rather than passing the photos off as his own.

Regardless of intention, the publication of someone else’s photos are a violation of intellectual property rights, unless permission is sought and obtained.

But what of aggregation? Surely there is added value when these individuals scour and collect the best resources out there and compile them for the rest of us. Patrick Haney’s Web Design Inspiration, also hosted on Flickr, is an invaluable resource. The works displayed aren’t his. I doubt expressed permission was sought in these cases as well.

The main difference is that Patrick attributes his sources. The URL of every site is listed; nothing was done to obscure the brand of the website. Not only does Allig8tor not name his sources or attribute the creators of the photos, he renames them in his set. It’s not exactly claiming them to be his own, but it removes all trace of ownership.

It’s Wednesday evening, and I’m so wishing for a nice long holiday.

I spent last Saturday doing housework, upgrading all my sites to Movable Type 4 and coding Photolog.org. After some years of neglect, I decided to brush off the dust and put the pictures up again.

I’ve been playing around with the Movable Type 4 beta quite a bit and here’s the verdict: It will rock your socks.

The user interface is slick, bugs are being quashed in record time and MT4 is becoming the full-fledged content management system all of us wanted.

I am so glad I stuck it out. Thanks MT folks!

I’ve used MovableType since you guys started, but nostalgia isn’t an extremely compelling reason. I’d really love to stay. Please tell me you’re working on some really cool stuff for MT.

I’m getting comment spam in the thousands. Anyone out there has a solution?

Last Saturday, we met up and played gods in our little social media sandbox. No one paid much attention, not even after we took out our toys.