Ian On The Red Dot

I read about this site called Chatterous getting funding over at VentureBeat.

Widgeo.us and Chatterous seems to be trying to solve the same problem.

I’m not sure how much Widgeo.us is getting but I wonder if Ridz will ever say a similar thing to me:

Cofounder Kenshi Arasaki just emailed me to confirm that the startup has raised an angel round of “less than $1 million.”

Really begs the question - how to compete?

Plurk user FoxTwo was musing about an idea to have an alternative shoutbox-like place. He even suggested on possibly one of the longest threads Plurkdom has ever seen that we could use a daily plurk as the shoutbox.

So….introducing Plurk user Singapore, first name Temasek, last name Singapore.

Not sure how this is going to work.

The idea I had was that each morning I’ll plurk “Good Morning Singapore” with some random lines and then we all can use it as a shoutbox.

Any suggestions how we could make this work?

I hesitated in writing this post like I told Daphne last night. But I decided to write it because I wanted to carry on the thread that Cobalt Paladin started regarding the healing process for Ping.sg.

I can’t say I love or care for Ping.sg at the level some of the other bloggers have expressed but this incident was relevant to me in a way. I want to share why it is relevant and I hope bloggers who are wondering if Ping.sg is a community worth being involved in will see that it is.

Sometime ago, I wrote what was deemed by some as a trouble-making post about Ping.sg here. I stand firm on the idea behind the post but I do admit I didn’t express my thoughts clearly enough and there have been other bloggers who have addressed what I was trying to say better.

One of the mistakes I made was conflating the words “elite” and “core” .

I still believe that every community will have a core group. The main differences between a core group and an elite group are these:

1. The elites only allow like-minded people into their circle.
2. The elites want to limit the number of people in their circle.
3. The elites look down on those not in the circle.

Ping.sg has a core group. They are the ones who organize stuff for all of us. They are the ones who talk more. They are the ones who help out on the shoutbox. They are the ones who think of ideas to gel the community.

But remember, core and elite aren’t two words that always go together.

Now…where am I going with this.

I understand why Daphne’s post stirred the reaction it did. Hell, I was about to pounce on it. See, I say got core group. I say got in group. I get slammed. Now, even the community manager say got. I win.

Then I thought about something that happened when I first joined plurk.

Daphne added me.

I know. This sounds trivial. But to me it wasn’t for a few reasons. She was the community manager of Ping.sg. I know for a fact that some members of Ping.sg thought I was only out to disrupt Ping.sg with my posts. I know for a fact that some of these members who are all about openness and engagement shut the door on my face when I tried to get to know them better.

Here is the thing. I perfectly understand the reactions of those other members. I didn’t exactly endear myself to them what with all the supposed shit stirring and criticisms.

The community manager didn’t ignore me when she could have.

For that matter, quite a few people I assumed would have just heck me didn’t.

I met a few of them at events. Talked to more of them online. Visited even more of their blogs and left comments on their blogs. Some left comments on mine.

Never once did I feel out. I had the power to choose how much I wanted to participate and at each level, it was fun and like part of something nice.

*** GROUP HUG ****

I’m being self-indulgent here. But bear with me a little more.

We don’t just know a person from the words they write. We don’t just know people from the words they speak. We don’t just know a person from their actions.

We know a person based on the sum of everything.

I have never met Daphne. We are at best online acquaintances now.

I can’t say I know her character. She might be mean. She might be nice. She might be a little of both.

What I do know is this, while I do believe words have power, we need to understand those words in the context of everything we know about the person who spoke or wrote it.

I guess that’s why I didn’t pounce on the post. Some people say there is only one way to interpret what she wrote. I beg to differ.

I beg to differ because of my little interactions with her. I took the words differently.

Some people would like to say Daphne ruined Ping.sg. I don’t think she did. I don’t think DK did either.

We all did. I know I am guilty.

Those who couldn’t resist watching the train-wreck. We kept ponging the entries concerning this issue to the top. Those who left comments. Those who kept commenting without the intention of making things better. Those who did have the intention to make things better but commented without restraint.

If you think our constant visiting of Dk’s blog and the comments some of us left didn’t egg him on to write those posts, some of which he has to live with in possible regret, I think you are foolish.

Sometimes we forget that blogs aren’t the only way to communicate. I feel a lot of us who blog regularly forget that sometimes we can just step out into the real world and talk.

Face to face. No need to assume tone. No need to second guess words on a screen.

So, yeah, I am ending this post with this.

Different, but equal. Equal but have different roles and participation level. Nothing is stopping us from changing our roles and participation level.

We are all in. At least that is how I feel.

We are all part of Ping.sg.

I understand that not everyone has the benefit of knowing Daphne or DK personally or have the benefit of interacting with them regularly online if at all so the only recourse is to judge them based on the words on their blogs.

Please don’t.

And please don’t give up on Ping.sg. Let’s build something better together.

Via metafilter, discovered these two videos which really taught me a lot about the Fifth Amendment and the Miranda warning.

Learned of this project called “The Innocence Project“.

The Innocence Project’s groundbreaking use of DNA technology to free innocent people has provided irrefutable proof that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events but instead arise from systemic defects.

I wonder…. How many people have been falsely convicted in Singapore. Do these individuals have any sort of recourse to right the wrongs done against them? Do we have such rights as stated in the video?

Anyway, back to the videos. I was wondering about what we write on our blogs as well as the information we sprinkle all across the different online services and whether we will ever see a case where the stuff we put online is used as evidence against us.

I’m not talking about a racist writing a seditious blog post. I’m talking about twittering an innocuous message at 10.15am saying that you are at Raffles MRT waiting for a friend and that is used as evidence that you were around the vicinity of a certain crime.

Or you write a Wall Post talking about how much you hate someone and then something happens to that someone. Motive?

I wonder….

We don’t exactly put everything online. And when we do, it isn’t always the truth - there are times when there are embellishments to the story we tell. What is truth anyway? Is it what actually happened or the way we remembered what happened?

Hmmm… Just saying that our online bread crumbs might lead people down the wrong path about who we really are.

I wonder if one day it can be used against us in court.

Last night I had dinner with an old friend and the conversation drifted to the topic of FYPs. She commented that she had the chance to read through a lot of FYP reports when they were being graded and she felt that they were of little substance. I shared with her about my own FYP experience and shared my perspective on the state of FYP in NUS. I’ll probably blog about what I shared another time.

Anyway, I came home and saw this post on Techmeme about video annotations. Kevin discusses the developments here.

When I first chose my FYP topic 3 years ago, I wanted to do something related to interactive television. More specifically, I wanted to work on a more accurate way in determining who was watching the television based on past viewing and channel surfing history. The idea was that if you could determine who was watching the television, the set-top box could fit in ads based on the viewer and not which channel the viewer was watching.

The project got sidetracked because even before I could do that, I ‘had to contribute’ to an almost abandoned open source project for an interactive television platform. There was a reason we were ‘advised’ to work on that platform but I won’t go into that here.

Somewhere after the first semester, I realized that online video sharing was going to be big. This was the beginning of 2006 and I decided to work on a web based video sharing platform. More specifically, I wanted to focus on a system of adding, viewing and distributing metadata linked to the video frames.

The support I got from my two professors were mixed. The main adviser, bless his soul, tried to be as encouraging as possible but I could tell this wasn’t his interest and there was mild disappointment in the change of direction for my FYP. While he tried to give good advice, one could always feel a small invisible hand nudging me back to his interest.

The other professor was someone I had really murderous thoughts about. He gave no constructive criticisms and made disparaging condescending remarks about the project. To say he was dismissive about the potential of online video sharing and the metadata it can have would be understating the palpable contempt he had for the project.

This post isn’t about airing my grievances and trust me when I say I have a lot more. What I actually want to focus is on myself. In recent years, online video has grown in ways I could never have imagined but when I track the developments, I see a lot of what I wanted to do in my FYP in these developments. And I wonder what could have been.

And I start analyzing why it didn’t be.

I shared with my friend that I had lacked the fighting spirit backed by deep conviction in my own ideas. I placed too much on my professors’ validation of my ideas. When I didn’t get the validation and support I wanted, I implemented those ideas half-heartedly just to get the FYP done. The FYP became less about fulfilling my own vision and more about just completing another project to graduate.

When I graduated, I still wanted to pursue my ideas. I told myself one day I will find the time to do it. The cliches are right - there are no new ideas under the sun and time waits for no man. As I allowed myself to get sucked into the daily grind of work, the vision slowly slipped away from me and others came to realize them.

I think my FYP experience and the aftermath is a very typical Singaporean experience. We fight and fight but never continue to fight. We allow ourselves to let authority in whatever form to put us in our place, we get drained and we chuck our ideas, visions, hopes and dreams into a drawer, always promising ourselves that one day we will return to them, dust off the cobwebs and make things happen.

It rarely does.

To talk about what went wrong is easy. It is harder to figure out what needs to be done to make it better. It is even harder to make the changes necessary.

This is why I believe in the importance of a team, and if you can’t find a team with a common vision, friends and a loved one who will always be there for you to recharge your batteries when you have been drained fighting the battle outside. Thinking your idea is good is different from having a conviction about your idea. How do you develop such convictions? It is a process that has to be self-sustaining. Sometimes your conviction can waver and you need to have a system in place to return your conviction to the proper state.

I don’t have the answers.

What I do know is this, at 27, I’m too young to let myself die inside.

I have never used any of the blog advertising networks so this score is given not based on how well they help advertisers using blogs or how they help bloggers make money. It is about this campaign first started on DK’s blog and which I have noticed on BLOG2u’s main site.

To me, it is one thing to say you are contributing to the community by hosting events for bloggers, it is a way different level when you spend valuable online real estate to promote a worthy cause. One is to keep the people making money for you happy, the other is totally not about yourself or your company.

Some cynics might say this is a cheap publicity stunt. I call bullshit on that.

I don’t know about you, but when I look at the different advertising companies’ main websites, a lot is said.

BLOG2u 1, the rest 0.

Sidenote: I expect the ever self-effacing Paddy not to think too much of his company’s effort but it is something.

Ok. Latest thing getting all the Singaporeans online excited and a little bit ashamed of our country- a possible Patent Troll. I have read through the patent and I think I understand what their claims are. It is amazing that such a patent got through. From reading the discussion over at Hardwarezone, it seems that Singapore’s patent system has a wee bit of a loophole that can be exploited.

BUT, Singapore isn’t unique in this case. We aren’t the only country blessed with patent trolling.

Go to Google and use this query term: patent trolling site:www.techcrunch.com

And from the investigations done over at Hardwarezone, this company may have an office in Singapore but the main characters in this story might not even be Singaporeans.

The patent system may be flawed in Singapore but this isn’t the only country having problems with the patent system. Go do some research and you will find out this is an issue in a lot of other countries which their regulatory bodies and businesses are having a tough time grappling with. Think about it - this patent was awarded in other countries too.

There is no reason for the online community to start using this as a reason to feel ashamed to be a Singaporean or bash Singapore.

Daphne Maia has expressed a crush on another blogger. A while back, another female blogger expressed her crush for another blogger. People…there is a reason it is called a crush. Not a lift. Not a release.

Anyway, why do I say the end may be near. Because love or rather the development of intense sexual and emotional feelings that resemble lust and love between individuals of a group is something that happens in the latter stages of a group’s lifecycle and usually a precursor to the disintegration or fall of the group’s glory.

Why?

Because love isn’t free and equally distributed even if the hippies say it is. The unequal distribution of attention and love has been argued as one of the reasons why hippie communes didn’t survive.

Note: I have been racking my brain about where I read about the group dynamics of hippie communes. I can’t remember. But if anyone of you do, please do leave a comment. Thanks so much!

It has been a joy to see the Ping.sg community develop and I have been living vicariously, and rather well I might add, by following the group’s progress through the forums, shoutbox and blog postings. This next stage of the group’s growth shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone.

But why is love entering the group dynamics such a bad thing? It is bad because it leads to the worse things in human nature especially when it isn’t equally distributed and there isn’t reciprocation.

Every group and its individuals will profess to be different. None ever is.

I’ll speculate that we will be getting this over time:

1. Many girls like the same few guys.
2. Many guys like the same few girls.
3. Girl and Guy like different people.
4. Girl/Guy wonder what’s so special about that another Guy/Girl - especially since that joker always post such crap on her/his blog.
5. Feelings of indignation of not getting enough attention.
6. Feelings of self-pity in examining why never get enough attention.
7. Girl/Guy get attached and break up causing massive headaches to the group in deciding loyalty to which party and apportioning blame. One person inevitably disappears from the group after the breakup.
8. Guy/Girl listens over msn/skype/coffee to Girl/Guy who likes another Guy/Girl and wonder, wtf is wrong with me when spending so much time being here for you, your mind is there with that joker who does not recognize your awesomeness like I do.
9. People drift from the group in the absence of reciprocation.

Simply put, life in the group won’t be so simple and carefree once ‘love’ enters into the picture.

The Age of Innocence is over.

Am I sounding the death knell?

Nah.

Just the bells telling people to get ready for the second act.

Good luck guys.

Update: I am changing the title of this post to reflect more accurately what I think. The original title of the post was “Problems Appearing With Podfire”. The reason why I’m changing the title is because it is not so much that Podfire itself has a problem with its videos (50% of which I like) or its concept or its implementation but more of people not dealing with internal issues using the proper channels.

Podfire launched a while back. I am totally partial about this - Geek Goddess Show is a guilty indulgent which I enjoy and Blogger’s Treat was a pain to watch. Whatever I feel about the shows, the concept was one that I liked. I was looking forward to this project having the same success as clicknetwork.tv.

Then I saw this post by Sabrina.

I am not sure if Podfire and its related shows were meant to be part of a business or the plan was to eventually grow into a business or just a fun-fun-try-try project. It doesn’t matter. Airing stuff like this between partners is, if not distasteful, rather dumb - no one’s reputation is done any favors.

Added: I leave no reservations when I say I think Miccheng has been a great contributor to the local development community and if you read my post, I hope it is evident that I do not appreciate the hitjob done on him. He deserves better.

This is a really simple yet great idea for people who love books and love to talk about it. The site is iwinkd. What it does is allows you to generate a code which links to a page with whatever you have written. You then can place the code anywhere you want, but the current usecase is to place it in the book you are reading. The next individual who reads the book can see the code and then proceed to see what you shared online.

I’ve always been interested in physical hyperlinking and this is a great usecase for it.