17:39 by FoxTwo Sometimes, being indifferent does indeed have its advantages.
For example, I'm in mybloglog and blogcatalog. You do see people there making friends, talking to each other at the shoutboxes of each other, talking to each other at the forums, but I never did any of these. They are both supposed to be "communities", yes, but I never really "got into" them.
In Facebook, for a while, I was actively engaged in buying and selling, having fun and so on, with my friends, pingsters and non-pingsters alike. Slowly but surely, Facebook burnout got to me and I started to log in to Facebook less and less. In fact I hardly log in to Facebook nowadays and my friends have to SMS me to chase me to log in so I can hep them do some stuff or give them money to buy their pets etc.
When I joined Entrecard, I see similar levels of activity there. People there frequent the forums. They drop cards, they make friends. I did almost none of these, except for dropping cards and SELECTIVELY making friends by leaving comments on their blogs (I made some great friends this way, such as Aronil, Jasmine and Jade).
In all cases, the "community" was there, but I didn't really actively take part in it, since they are based so far away - in the USA. The selective people I befriended slowly via the means mentioned above usually are Singaporeans or based in Singapore, or at the furthest, Malaysia (Aronil).
I only decided to become more active in ping.sg, a local organisation, based in Singapore, with Singaporeans, or people living in Singapore, forming the core members. I thought it was be preferable to interact in this kind of environment compared to the others mentioned above.
Alas, recent events have shown that it was the wrong thing to do. Indifference which I have shown above in the other "communities" would have insulated me from the impact of recent events. Seriously, if I had been as indifferent in ping.sg as I was in the others, I'd probably be totally unfazed at what's happening within the "community".
Perhaps it's time I backed away and not invest anymore efforts.
Indifference is key, I guess.
Labels: blog, internet, ping.sg
22:01 by FoxTwo ... everything's quiet on the western front.
Not a mouse peeped.
Not a cat leaped.
And the atmosphere feels strained.
It's kinda like a wake. You know, where everyone knows what everyone else is thinking, but nobody's saying anything. To be polite, to attempt to move on.
I logged into Plurk today, after so many weeks of not logging into it. Why? Well many of the regular people disappeared from the usual place. Exactly what I feared. Exactly what I wrote - the harsh action taken will have an effect, and it may not be the one intended. But, I found them all there on Plurk.
Interestingly though, suddenly one of the Plurks became a mini-shoutbox. Everyone congregated there, and everyone talked.
Talked.
Something which should have happened before The Incident.
I still think it's not too late to Talk.
While I doubt things will return to like what it was "in the good old days", Talking will go a long way to help that process.
For now, the place feels like an empty house. Kids have all left home, and I'm just wandering around the empty halls.
It's a lonely feeling.
Labels: blog, internet, ping.sg
21:48 by FoxTwo
I Am Saddened By Recent Events In Ping.sg
Yes I do know cliques will ALWAYS form in any social environment. Humans are gregarious - we always seek out like-minded people and connect with them. That's how societies develop. That's how villages and towns and cities are built.
Giving a label to a group of people will always happen. The "popular", the "bad", the whatever. In your own email client, or even in hotmail and gmail, you can create your own distribution list. In this list, you normally put the people you connect with regularly on it, so you can share jokes, funny pictures, or anything with your friends, ALL your friends, by just typing a label. It's not a bad thing to get a label. Even among friends, you have "best friend" and just "friend" labels, to denote how close they are to you. Not everybody is your friend, and certainly you should have very little, or just one, "best friend".
I know Daphne meant no harm in her original post about "in-groups". She was just putting a label on something, to better describe a group of people. I mean, it's going to get tedious naming the said individuals time and time again. Was it a mistake? I don't know. I have no opinion on this. I just understand that Daphne was just attempting to describe a group of members.
Then, there is the original ideal of ping.sg - to be a platform for everybody, regardless of your popularity or how "in" you are.
It just appears that some members feel that the original ideal should be upheld - one platform for all, and not to segregate members into various groups. Personally, I think this ideal should be upheld too. Equality for all!
However, the recent debate about the use of the label "in-group" got way out of hand too quickly. I personally have made many friends when I joined ping.sg. For want of better words, I belong to the "lim jiu" group of pingsters (*grin*). Although I seldom join them for their outings and activities, that by no means imply I elevate myself above them or I am an "elite" (or otherwise). I just do not forsee the said activity to be interesting to me, or I could be otherwise engaged during the timing of the said activity. Usually I appear for activities that involve liquor (*grin again*), and one should not be surprised that the same people will turn up for such an activity - not everybody drinks, just as not everybody likes the colour purple.
The sudden ban of dk from ping.sg really will adversely affect the image of ping.sg. To any outsider, a ban of a long-time member of ping.sg without some sort of formal announcements as to the reason why, shakes the confidence of the masses. Right now speculations are rife that the ban was due to the disagreement of ping.sg and dk's opinions. Without some sort of formal clarifications, such rumours and speculations will take on a life of its own, and will, very likely, be counter-productive to ping.sg. As we all know, word-of-mouth rumours spread like wildfire and soemtimes, have a greater impact than any official "advertising" or PR campaign.
For all we know, dk could have been banned for a totally different, and possibly unrelated, reasons. For now, we don't know. From the way it looks now, he got banned for caring. Then in this case, should I start to be more aloof? Should I start not to care, because if I care too much, the same might happen to me.
I love ping.sg. I love the virbancy of the whole thing, the people, the good times (and the bad). I identify with the ideal too - to be a platform for everyone. I really hope to see some form of clarifications, because I truly want to know where I (and everyone else) stand.
Labels: blog, internet, ping.sg
13:32 by FoxTwo
The Big Hoo-Haa In Ping.sg Recently
I read through some posts, notably Endoh's and Krisandro's (and Krisandro's again). It's sad to see things like this actually happening. However, one must bear in mind, it's human nature to have differing opinions. Otherwise there'd be no wars on the planet, and everybody will be living in utopia (or like the Borg in Star Trek, one collective hive mind). Who the protagonists or antagonists are, is actually kind of irrelevant. You don't need to know who they are to resolve the issue at hand, if any.
Personally I have no problems with "shallow" or "deep" posts. I read both types at my whim. If I don't feel like exercising my brains on that particular day, I'd probably read those light-hearted, shallow posts. If I want something deep and meaningful to chew on, I'll read some really though-provoking posts. The only trouble is, thought-provoking posts are hard to come by. Even harder are thought-provoking ones not lashing out at the government or presenting some form of government conspiracy theories. Yeah I'm politically agnostic.
What does that say? To me it means Singaporeans are more concerned with mundane stuff than what makes the universe tick. Besides, some of these bloggers might be doing just the right thing - write shallow stuff to cater to the majority of the audience. It's every blogger's aim to get more readers, is it not? It's kinda like Hollywood, which kept producing those "doomsday movies" at one time back before 2000. Armageddon was a hit, and soon other movies followed in similar vein because audiences at the time were perceived to be hooked on doomsday movies (Day After Tomorrow, The Core etc).
So when a blog post about a topic suddenly gets a lot of hits, other bloggers will jump on the bandwagon to try to get hits too, it's only natural. Just look at the Mas Selamat escape, it's a very good example. Blog after blog kept writing about it so much so that it seemed like the whole Singapore blogosphere was clogged up with just Mas Selamat and his escape. I was sick of seeing "yet another Mas Selamat post" at the time, and didn't bother to read anymore. After all, everyone was just be regurgitating what was given in the official statements. Hardly anyone offered their own opinions.
I was originally going to write about the Phoenix Mars Lander mission in this post, but I guess that's too "deep" for most Singaporeans. After all, Mars is so far away. Success or failure of the mission has no bearing on their cost of living, their salary, their bills and so on. They are detached. If the Pheonix doesn't tell them where to get the next meal, they're not interested. Such is the Singapore mentality. Exploring another planet doesn't excite them. We are now ON ANOTHER PLANET, you see? We're not on Earth anymore. Do Singaporeans care? Hardly. Did life exist on Mars at one time? Singaporeans don't care.
All I can say is - don't dwell on this. Life goes on. The people who do not like shallow posts won't read them. People will not write "deep" stuff if there isn't an audience (or perceived to be no audience) for them. It's just the law of economics at work here.
If I ever get disillusioned like some people already have, I'll leave on my own, and I doubt anyone will miss me and my little blog here. For now though, I'm staying.
13:08 by FoxTwo
I Went To The Ping.sg Lim Jiu @ Brewerks...
Yeah I popped by the place about 8pm or so. I thought they'd all be done with dinner by then, but nooooo... they've just started to order their dinner! Geez. I was on my way to a friend's birthday bash, which was near the place they were having the ping.sg gathering thingy, so I just swung by for a bit.
Yeah you'd be surprised at how many turned up. Even 3 or 4 tables joined together into a traditional longhouse table was not enough! Anyway, soon enough, food came for the pingsters.
Now, that was Uzyn's burger thingy which he ordered. It was huge. And I mean huge. Well not as huge as Botak Jones burgers but still, pretty dang huge!
Yeah that's Uzyn's hand trying to grab the burger.
Well anyway, I didn't stay too long as it was time for me to go meet my buddies at a nearby pub for a birthday bash.
So I took a slow walk to the place, which was really really near. Seriously. Soon enough, the party got into full swing and all the whiskeys and sakes started to come out. Yeah that's kinda like the amount of booze we had. It was a nice bash, but nothing unusual.
Yup, we didn't get laid. We did get plastered though. For one thing, I don't even remember what time I reached home. I only knew when I looked at my SMSes and extrapolated the time I should have arrived home from the last-sent SMSes.
Labels: drinking, ping.sg, pubbing
21:30 by FoxTwo
What Made Me Get Into Blogging?
It's a question you should ask yourself too, once in a while anyway. This question was asked of me a couple of times by people in ping.sg though.
How did YOU get started in blogging?
For some people, they're just "jumping on the bandwagon", because they hear that you can make oodles of money from blogging.
For other people, it's a way to vent their frustrations, be it against the world, the govt, or even their own husbands/wives.
So how did I get started? What made me do it?
Well, for the answer, we must now visit the pages of ancient history (ancient history in computer terms means more than 10 yrs ago). I belong to the age of dinosaurs. Pre-1990's we were connected via modems at slow-poke speeds of 300bps, 1200bps, 2400bps etc. We chatted via Bulletin Boards, which many people in Singapore run, out of the goodness of their hearts. Nothing was commercialised. No money was involved. Files uploaded and downloaded via BBSes were all compressed with .ARC at first, then later on a better one called .LZH appeared. Soon after, the author of .ARC made a new compression algorithm, and called it .ZIP (recognise it now?) and it became wildly popular, in part due to the reputation of his original work on .ARC.
When Internet started to become prevalent, the gahmen decided that BBSes were a threat to Singnet, and started to require all BBS operators to "register" with them to get a "license". Notice how suddenly this only became a requirement when Singnet started? Naturally, almost every single BBS in Singapore closed almost overnight.
It was back around 1994 or so, that I first got "connected" to the Internet via Singnet's Kermit technology. Yeah back then I was on a text-based interface connection to the Internet. So were many people. Netscape (affectionately known as "Mozilla") was king, IE was an unknown browser that Microsoft was trying to promote, and people who wanted to know if their friends were online FINGERed them.
So, being an ex-owner of a BBS, I needed my own "space" on the Internet. Hence, I did my first webpage and uploaded it to my free space that Singnet offered... an incredible 1MB of space! The webpage was simple, no graphics, just text.
Soon I found many of my old BBS friends had their own homepages too. But, there was something missing. We needed to write stuff, to vent. Back on our old BBS systems we could always write "articles" and post them up on the BBS, and people who logged in can read them. So, I created a "soapbox" area on my homepage. A place to read my hand-crafted HTML page about stuff I wanted to write about. Yeah, "blogs" used to be known as "soapboxes" back then. Why a "soapbox"? Because in western countries, if you had a problem with something, you took a soapbox (ie a small crate) out to a street corner, stand on it, and start speaking. People will stop walking and listen to you.
As the years rolled on, I jumped from Singnet to Pacific Internet (and now currently on Starhub). As I jumped, my "free web space" address changed too, and lost readers. Registering our own domain was unthinkable - it was US$50.00 (damn I wish I had registered google.com back then!). Eventually I found a FREE webhost that is independent of my ISP and I had a whopping 10MB of space! Beat that, Singnet/Pacnet! However my joy was short-lived. The free homepage provider closed down and I had to move my pages AGAIN.
By now, a new phenomenon had started to sweep the Internet world. There was this new thing called a "web log", or a "blog". People could actually write stuff and have it put up onto the Internet, without knowing a lick of HTML. I wanted one of those!
I didn't find one till about 2003 or 2004, called Blogger.com. Even after locating it, and thinking it was a perfect way to continually update my site without me hand-crafting HTML pages, I still didn't really use it much. Notice that Blogger had been around a couple of years prior to me discovering it - I just didn't really look for one till it found me one day :)
So, slowly I started to backdate all my old soapbox entries onto the blogger platform till about 2001 (I gave up on those before 2001). As you can see from my Blogger profile, I joined Blogger in 2004, but I have entries starting at 2001 and very sparse entries between 2001 and 2004. Reason being, it was hard work hand-crafting HTML pages just to post my thoughts, so I didn't do it regularly. In fact if I remember right, I didn't post anything at all in 2002.
So, fast forward a few years. In 2006 I slowly started to pick up on my "blogging", but I have left my homepage alone too long. It looked dated, using HTML technologies from pre-2000. Traffic to my "blog" or even my "homepage" was practically nil. Usually all I see are just Google and Yahoo search hits. I needed a revamp, but never found the energy to do it.
By this time I was slowly but surely starting to read blogs, and discovering RSS. Making money from my blog was the furthest thing from my mind (I still don't depend on my blog to make money now). What I needed were readers. I started to hang out in forums, giving links to my homepage and blog. I started to write comments in other people's blogs. That only helped my traffic situation a little. From under 10 hits a day, it increased to just under 20. Almost 100% increase, not bad huh?
Then in 2007, on one of the more obscure blogs I happen to stumble into, featured a prominent ping.sg button. Clicking on it, I registered.
And the rest, as they say, is history :)
14:20 by FoxTwo Thanks to Uzyn's superhuman efforts, the NEW Ping.Sg is finally live about 2pm today!
Here's a screenshot:
Notice the top 10?
Yes, nice and clean now. The most often asked feature - the ability to flag posts as inappropriate by the community, has been implemented! We have ping.sg back and not pr0n.sg anymore! Yay!
There are other neat features like "un-ponging" and "poofing", but I'll let the ping.sg blog explain it to you (when Uzyn gets around to blogging about it, that is).
Oh yes, now we can see who ponged which post ok? So now we know who are all you humsup lou's! *big grin*
17:35 by FoxTwo Ok so I'm a lazy guy, I admit it. But hey, I'm ON VACATION! I'm allowed to be lazy!
Anyway, Daphne was bugging me to go open my letterbox and see if I got the T-shirt, and I kept putting it off till today when I finally decided, what the heck, may as well clear the letterbox. Lo and Behold! Yes the T-shirt was indeed in there!
So, here are the pics of it.
Good thing I chose size M instead of L. Fitted just nice, but if I ever grew FAT (hey I'm already fat), it'll become a tiny bit too "snug" :)
Thanks Daphne!
18:40 by FoxTwo
Ping.sg Shoutbox In A FireFox Sidebar
When Uzyn (head honcho of ping.sg) made the standalone shoutbox some time back this month (or was it last month?), many people loved it.
Then I got to thinking, couldn't I have the standalone shoutbox in the FireFox sidebar? Then it'll be permanently there, and I save one taskbar entry on the desktop. And, if in the office, the panicky clicks you issue when the boss comes around has one less "wrong button" for you to click to hide all your browser and chat and other windows :)
So, I did some experimentation, and here it is!
First, you need to open your browser to this URL -> http://ping.sg/shouts and save it as a bookmark.
Then, you go to your bookmarks, and edit the properties of this bookmark you've just created. Make sure the "Load This Bookmark in Sidebar" option is ticked, as shown below in the picture.
Viola! The next time you click on this bookmark in Firefox, it'll open itself in the sidebar.
Sorry users of Opera and other browsers.... I have no experience with them, so I don't know if it's possible to do the same thing with those browsers. Firefox works extremely well though.
Addendum :- Thanks to Xizor, please be reminded to login to ping.sg before you attempt to shout. ping.sg uses cookies, so if you set cookies to non-expiry (like me on my home browser), you'll remain permanently logged in on your browser, and you don't need to login everytime you want to load the shoutbox in the sidebar and shout.
Labels: FireFox, ping.sg, shoutbox
