Ian On The Red Dot

Ok. Yesterday while making milo at the office, an epiphany hit me. Don’t worry, I’m ok just a little bruised from the experience. In any case, I finally realized what Ping.sg is all about. I’m pretty embarrassed with this example and my sis will probably never let me forget it but I know what can be used as references for Ping.sg.

The MTV shows Laguna Beach and The Hills.

Ping.sg and its related community is reality TV. Seriously. Nothing else comes close to describing it. Instead of acting on a screen, the performance is played out on blogs and twitter and plurk and msn…

The only question, the most important question - who is the Heidi Montag of Ping.sg.

Anyway, reality TV is a waste of time. I stopped watching it a long time ago, even before the family stopped having a television. Reality TV brings out the worse in its participants and evokes the ugliest emotions from its viewers.

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.

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.

Two interesting posts today related to social media ( whatever that means ).

Jerry Springer For Programmers: Only A Matter Of Time

Giles Bowkett has this to say:

Advertizing-supported media gains much more from your attention than it does from your edification.

and the below paragraph is the one that ‘inspired’ the header of my post:

Blog ads encourage a fundamentally trashy form of “journalism.” Keep this in mind the next time somebody suggests building a business on ad revenue. To the extent that it functions as an economic incentive to useless, divisive gossip, ad revenue is fundamentally erosive to the communities which generate it. That makes it parasitic, and nothing to be proud of.

Are we building Universities or Amphitheaters? by Reg Braithwaite neatly separates the two extreme types of social media aggregators that can be built.

Such things quickly drive out all useful information, but they bring slavering crowds into the amphitheater to watch the Christians battle the Lions.

Universities of old: places of learning where people shared and debated ideas for the purpose of advancing knowledge.

So, do companies like Nuffnang, Advertlets and others providing blog advertising products and services destroy the social media aggregators like Ping.sg.

I make no reservations when I say that I hope Ping.sg will become more like a university than an amphitheater. So, when I use the word ‘destroy’, I actually mean ‘decrease its chance of becoming an university’.

Hmmm…I was thinking about the posts mentioned above. There is only one way to get attention - provide content that people want. Sadly, a good number of us enjoy lowest common denominator sensationalistic content - this is the reason why Britney Spears must die.

It is easier to provide trashy content than insightful, helpful and intelligent content.

I would like to believe that if you do not like trashy content, then after the first time of being ‘tricked’, the site will no longer have your business. It is the ones providing content that edifies you that will get your business. In this way, it is perfectly alright for individual sites to want to provide trashy content - let them attract their kindred spirits, those who are different can go elsewhere.

The problem is when there is a confluence of these 3 factors:

1. Many such individual sites sprout out because of the ease in providing lowest common denominator content.
2. The marketing of blog advertising companies that make you believe that it is desirable if not profitable to stick ads on your site.
3. Aggregaters like Ping.sg become popular and a community develops around it.

The openness of Ping.sg works against it in this case to becoming an university.

Which brings me to a message I posted on Twitter. The problem with a lot of social media filtering services is that for the service to be useful to one person, many people need to use it - think Digg. AideRSS works to solve this problem by using other metrics (like the number of comments left on a post) not dependent on its own users. The problem is that these metrics depend on other humans which to me seems like a rather big flaw.

Is there a way for social media filtering without relying on human signals. Without explicit human signals?

One of the many mistakes I made summarized well by Ridz:

On another note, I think sometimes bloggers make the mistake of discussing issues and also naming individuals as examples. I think isolating individuals when bringing up large issues is a quick formula for disaster.

from a comment on another blog.

I wanted to comment on this for sometime. Cobalt Paladin highlighted something which was part of what I wanted to say in his post DK is Power Blogger! Sometime ago, I wrote a post - Is There A Need For Ping.sg?

For those who might not remember the earlier days of Ping.sg and the leaderboard, entries entered the leaderboard based on the number of Pongs they got, just like now, except that then, anyone could contribute to a Pong. Now, you need to be a member and logged into the site to make your Read count as a Pong.

I’ve tried to look for stats on the site to see whether under the new system, the entries with the top Pongs are also those with the most Reads ( ‘Reads’ is the count of the number of people who click on an entry ). I couldn’t. If anyone knows of where these stats can be obtained, do leave a comment.

The earlier system gave rise to the practice of link-baiting to get the attention of the wider group of users who either are not members of the site or don’t log on when using the site. Link-baiting is definitely still going on but under the new system, they seem to rise less often to the leaderboard because the members of Ping.sg seem more savvy.

Based on my totally unscientific observations, the leaderboard has been exhibiting the DK-effect after the new system was implemented. What is the DK-effect? Simple really - it is where a core group of members pong each other entries until they get to the leaderboard and let the public (non-core group) take over. This is natural. If I know who you are, if we hang out, if we chat, if we msn, if we basically get social with each other, it is probably not presumptuous to say I’ll read your posts and more often than others.

This isn’t pong cheating in the sense of setting up multiple accounts and using them to pong entries of your own blogs.

However, this current state of affairs definitely reduce the effectiveness of the leaderboard being a filtering mechanism at least in the wider sense of what interests the readers of Ping.sg and probably more importantly, what are the posts worth reading. What the leaderboard has become then is a reflection of who the core members of Ping.sg are, maybe even who is the most popular people in this core group and their interests in the context of blog posts they read.

Which of course is perfectly fine.

Ping.sg never had any pretensions of being the community meta blog for ALL Singaporean bloggers nor was its main aim ( at least from what I have read about Ping.sg ) to be a tool for discovering and filtering. From the earliest post I can find on the blog, the aim was to build a thorough database of blogs and allow the bloggers to build communities.

Would like to digress and say there is nothing contradicting about the two aims of NOT building a community for ALL Singaporean bloggers and at the same time building a THOROUGH database of Singapore blogs.

Now, I’ve gone on a rather meandering path to get to this point. Ping.sg is now a place where a core group of people come together to play and the rest of the people are allowed to participate either as casual observers, people trying to join the core group or individuals trying to contribute to the community if not rise to prominence in the wider community without actually being part of the core group. This seems to me to be a natural progression of any type of group.

Yesterday I met up with Ridz at the Starbucks located at Raffles City opposite Chijmes. DK was there and I think Jean from simplyjean was also there. I witnessed ( wah..make it sound so dramatic ) DK asking for a little back-scrating from Ridz to get Jean a pong for one of her entries pong his entry about Jean.

Back-scratching among a core group of people from any community is natural. In politics, more specifically, in Singapore politics, we call these core group the elites and a subset of that group is people affiliated with the PAP. When we talk about back-scratching happening in other countries, we use the term nepotism.

So, here is the thing. If we do it at our level, why should we expect any different from the people above.

Just because of the stuff they say and the stuff they do? Just because of how they police us in what we can say and do. If you trace past discussions on Ping.sg, you would notice at least one case where the core members of Ping.sg were up in arms against explicit pong cheating.

Same difference.

So back to the actual point of this post. Ping.sg to me is an interesting example of how communities progress. Not that it is unexpected. Just that it is rather ironic, that bloggers, not necessarily those in the core group of Ping.sg tend to be more vocal about the government yet the two main aggregaters of content online which are blogger community powered seem to exhibit the same attributes and tendencies as the very thing we seem to be against.

You only hate power when you don’t have it.

I will make the concession that yesterday was a one-off. That no other member has ever or will ever pong a post just for the sake to register a pong instead of it being a result of being genuinely interested to read the post of a friend/fellow member. However, this only means Ping.sg might not be a convenient example to use.

Is there a need for Ping.sg? This is a question I’ve been thinking about for some time and that I have decided to blog about after reading xizor2000’s post “Back to using Mozilla Thunderbird’s RSS reader again…“.

Firstly, what functions does Ping.sg perform:

1. Alert Function - It allows us to know when a blog has been updated with a post.

2. Discovery Function - It allows us to discover new blogs.

3. Filter Function - It allows us to decide which posts might be worth reading based on the number of pongs received.

Alert Function

Most blogs have a RSS feed which can be subscribed to using an online reader like Google Reader or a desktop reader like Mozilla Thunderbird. If a blog has an update, the reader would capture this update, you would be notified of it when you use the reader and you can then proceed to read it.

I think this function of Ping.sg is the least useful of the three and one that can easily be obtained by using other types of software despite the site’s name.

Discovery Function

There are a lot of blogs out there but how do you find these blogs? You could go to Google and just type random keywords to see what you might stumble upon. You could just use StumbleUpon. You could surf to the usual sites and then use that as the base to explore outwards to the sites that they link to and to the sites those sites link to and so on and so on. You could see who comments on a blog and if they leave a link with their comments, discover new blogs worth reading.

Ping.sg helps with discovery because anyone can add their blog to the service and whenever the blog updates, Ping.sg displays on the main page the header of the latest post with a short blurb. You can discover new blogs worth reading by checking out what are the latest posts.

However, the design of the site is to emphasize the post and not the blog. Also, besides there being some blogs that flood the service by posting lots of entries in a short span of time, because the site was created to inform on blog updates, the chance of you finding a new blog depends on the time you visit the site. Visit the site when the header of a post from a new blog has been pushed down to the third or fourth page, it is likely you might miss that blog until the next time you visit the site when the blog has a post on the front page.

Now, you could of course subscribe to the RSS feed of Ping.sg, but the feed is worse than the actual site for discovery in the sense that there is no mention of the blog which posts the update just the header and blurb for each of the posts.

Filter Function

Each of us have only a finite amount of time in a day to spend reading stuff online so generally we would appreciate any help in finding things worth reading. Ping.sg helps us do that with its ‘pong’ system and leaderboard. Every time someone clicks on a header to read a post, that post gains one pong. The assumption is that the posts with the most pongs are usually the ones worth reading. The leaderboard shows the 10 posts with the most pongs over different timeframes - last 24 hours, this week, this month, this year.

Now, Ping.sg doesn’t have algorithms like Techmeme running to decide what’s the buzz online. Neither does it have editor(s) like Singapore Daily and Tomorrow.sg to help decide what is worth reading. In a way it is like Digg where people vote for the posts worth reading, however the difference is that in Digg, people have to explicitly vote for a post while at Ping.sg, the very act of reading is akin to a vote.

Because of Ping.sg’s system, there is the emergence of blogs using ‘bait-and-switch’ tactics. What they would do is try to capture your attention with a catchy header and interesting blurb - once you click to visit their site, you realize that the post is either full of shit, useless or doesn’t have much content beyond the blurb.

Now, why would there be such evil people who would want to waste your time? Simple reason and for this reason, I blame ad networks like Google Adsense, Advertlets and Nuffnang. These blogs are using Ping.sg to drive traffic to their site to earn ad revenues. The more traffic, the more money. Ping.sg instead of being a service that helps disseminate information and informs people of posts and blogs worth reading becomes a service to suck people into blogs to feed the petty greed of certain bloggers (petty because apparently earnings for most blogs are small).

Update:

I have learned why Ping.sg wasn’t helping me filter stuff out effectively. I didn’t realize that beyond just having a ‘My Favs’ utility, I could also block out updates from crap blogs. Maybe the name can be changed to ‘My Favs/Hates’? In any case, I gave the functionality a try. Once I said I didn’t like a blog, it seems that I won’t see any updates from that blog on the main page. However, if the blog somehow had a post on the leaderboard, I would still see that post on it. Sigh. Am I doing something wrong?

I guess this is an important lesson. If you want to use a service, login to use it so you get maximum benefits.

Is there a way to share ‘Hates’?  For example, if I respect the judgment of Kevin and he has blocked a set of sites, can I just copy-block those sites?

So, is there a need for Ping.sg? Despite all its flaws, it is the only service that I know of in Singapore that combines all these functions. It used to do these functions well but has become a victim of its own success.

I still like Ping.sg a lot and hope that whatever new incarnation Uzyn has for the site, it will become better at helping discover blogs and filter posts.

Some suggestions - Pay attention to tags. So, bloggers who want to help make Ping.sg better can start tagging their posts better. Tags help give additional context to the posts. Also, provide tools for members of the community to do some policing. For example, after reading a post, if the member decides the blogger only intended to do ‘bait-and-switch’ just for traffic, then allow the member to indicate that beside the post.

I haven’t really thought about how Ping.sg could be better but I hope it will be. Till then, Ping.sg is, like what someone close said, my little guilty indulgence. I read it just for the fun of seeing what noise we Singaporeans can make with the faint hope that maybe like how comic book gems can be found in the discount bin, I would find some new blog worth constantly reading.