Events

Happy Many Pingings, PPS!

By Sharizal ⋅ June 23, 2005 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Happy 2nd Anniversary PPS. I simply can’t believe how long it has been since we’ve had the founding members, the Beta testers and now the neophytes.

Reading the excerpt of a conference paper that mentioned PPS on Jeff Ooi’s site, brought tears to my eyes:

It could be argued that Project Petaling Street is one giant echo chamber comprising of elite, well-educated, English speaking and technologically savvy Malaysians. Unfortunately, this is a serious criticism which cannot be overcome easily in a country like Malaysia where many languages are spoken.

It does not seem feasible to construct a monolithic and multi-lingual blogging movement as bloggers and their readers would naturally tend to write and read in the language that they are most comfortable in. Despite this criticism, the creators of Project Petaling Street seemed to have stumbled on a strategy to ameliorate the effects of the creation of a further echo chamber within its community. Project Petaling Street by collating the titles of a huge number of blogs (all with very different perspectives) on a single website forces the blog owners and readers to move out of their own respective echo chamber. This is because a reader who clicks on a title and blog shown in Project Petaling Street has no idea what the blog is really like.

Further, the interaction among bloggers and readers have often lead to very lively and sometimes heated debates which is the converse of an echo chamber. Another important lesson to be learnt from Project Petaling Street is that we should encourage all forms of blogging not just libertarian bloggers. Even mundane personal journals do encourage a democratic culture since they promote the sharing and exchange ideas. And as demonstrated above, personal journals might take on a political flavor at certain times.

Thus, the experience of Project Petaling Street clearly shows that the setting up of a national blog aggregator is immensely beneficial to encourage blogging activities.

Here’s to many more pings, PPS!

And to those who still have not made their pre order and wish to do to so, please email me soon before 7.30pm today!

See you tonight people!