Blowin' In The Wind

The best of 2007

This has been the year of Google. It has had far more impact than the other internet giants even though Microsoft launched Windows Vista and is adding lots of bells and whistles to Windows Live. Yahoo seems to have lost its way. Sad, for I love My Yahoo, the pioneer news aggregator. Here are my personal favourites for the year.

Favourite online newspaper

The New York Times. I still try to check the Guardian almost every day. But the New York Times has much more content and is more balanced. The Guardian is innovative, but some of the articles in the Comment Is Free section seem to be written to provoke controversy.That's fine if the writer can deliver one-liners like Maureen Dowd or is funny and inventive like John O'Farrell or passionate like Robert Fisk. But O'Farrell is no longer a Guardian columnist and Dowd and Fisk write for other papers. There are Guardian columnists I like, but more about the Guardian some other time. Meanwhile...

Favourite newsreader/ news aggregator

Google Reader. So clunky when it was launched two years ago, it's now absolutely indispensable. No better way to keep track of the news and the blogs.

Favourite start page

My Yahoo! I am old-fashioned. Netvibes is innovative and I like the My Universe feature. And for blogging perhaps there can be no better start page than iGoogle. It can be customised to deliver all the information one needs to blog on any subject. But My Yahoo! is simple and can be personalised to carry all the news and blog feeds one wants. It's easy to use and extremely useful.

Favourite techie/bloggy blogs

Digital Inspiration, Lorelle on WordPress, ReadWriteWeb, Blog Herald and Lifehacker (in no particular order). Not that I need or understand every hack suggested by Digital Inspiration or Lifehacker, but I check them almost every day. Indian Amit Agarwal who created Digital Inspiration is a blogger one must read to keep up with the technology and learn new things about blogging and social media. He is highly informative, full of useful advice, writes simply and is very reader-friendly. Lorelle; VanFossen shares all those qualities; Lorelle on WordPress is a must-read. I also enjoy reading Richard MacManus and his ReadWriteWeb. He is really passionate about social media and Web 2.0. Blog Herald is good reading once again thanks to contributors like Lorelle VanFossen.

Finally...

A word of thanks to Time Goes By and The Blue Sloth. And how could I forget Mausi? I have had little time to blog or read blogs most of this year, but I remember their kind comments when I started. It's so nice when someone has a good word for you. I am sorry I have seldom responded to any comments recently. Even though I get them so rarely, I have been too busy or too lazy. Of course, I should respond to anyone who takes the trouble to read me and post a comment. Sorry. Thanks go out also to three bloggers in Singapore who posted encouraging comments when I started. They would know who they are. I have never met any of the people I am thanking. That's the funny thing about blogs or any kind of writing. You get to like strangers and think of them as friends.

WordPress, TypePad, Vox

Anyone using WordPress.com will know how easy it is to set up a WordPress blog. Could that be a reason for the spectacular growth of WordPress?

Say you are looking for a blog hosted on WordPress.com. You type in  the URL in your browser's address or location bar. But you are wrong, there is no website at that address. WordPress will then ask you if you want to create a blog using that  "blog domain" or internet address. You just have to click on a button for WordPress to set up the blog automatically.

WordPress.com also hosts blogs for free, like Blogger, and unlike TypePad or Movable Type. So it's no surprise WordPress has become the third most popular blogging platform, after Blogger and Windows Live Spaces, with more than 60 million unique users.Blogger has nearly 160 million and Windows Live Spaces almost 120 million. Six Apart ranks fourth with 40 million users. The figures appeared in the Guardian after Six Apart announced it was selling off LiveJournal three days ago.

Of course, plenty of bloggers pay to use WordPress on various web hosts as well to have more storage space, more choice and their own domain names. It's amazing how rapid has been its growth since it appeared in 2003 though it must have spread even more rapidly after WordPress.com appeared in 2005 and started hosting blogs for free. Another reason for its popularity must be the ease with which one can transfer a blog from Blogger, for example, to WordPress.com. But unlike Blogger, WordPress doesn't offer unlimited storage. So it must have other great features to have attracted plenty of serious bloggers.

TypePad is great too. What surprises me is so little is written about Vox, Six Apart's other blogging platform. Vox has beautiful templates, plenty of storage space, privacy controls and best of all it's free. Blogs can be moved from Blogger to Vox, too, though I am not sure if WordPress blogs can be transferred there as well. WordPress blogs can be moved to TypePad.

 

Try Vox

Wish to blog safely? Try Vox. It's free and you can keep it really private. Use its privacy settings to control who reads your blog. You can make sure it's read only by your family and friends, says the New Times York Times.

Yes, one can password-protect almost every other kind of blog, from Blogger to WordPress. But  Vox gives you even greater privacy. You can even decide who sees which item on your blog. Some may be only for your friends, others for your family. All you have to do? Just scroll down to the "viewable by" box below your post, and click on "anyone", "friends and family", "friends", "family" -- or, if you like, "nobody". The last option allows you to save your post as a draft -- viewable only by you.

Vox is really easy to use. So are Blogger, WordPress.com and, I guess, MySpaces. But Vox is better for packrats. You can organise your photos, videos and  audios here in neat collections which can be viewed separately from your blog entries. You can even store Amazon.com  links to the books you have been reading or want to buy.

Vox is a great choice for bloggers, as I mentioned in December. Even those using Blogger or WordPress could give it a try. You can import your existing blog into Vox with the click of a button. Why should you do so if you are using WordPress.com? You can store more photos here. As for Blogger, it's miles behind in innovation.

My only complaint? Vox doesn't come with a readymade searchbox like Blogger or WordPress. But it was launched only recently. And it's bound to get better. Anyone who wants a good-looking blog with beautiful templates, lovely typography and plenty of storage space should give it a try.

Give bloggers a break

It's time the Singapore government took blogs as seriously as the mainstream media, writes Andy Ho in the local paper, The Straits Times. Bloggers should be flattered and worried too.

As anyone who reads the local papers knows, they are good but rather like old boys from the same school. There are similarities. I am not saying they all speak with the same voice -- one may be more businesslike, the other more chatty -- but it's not like Britain, say, where conservatives can read the Telegraph and the liberals, the Guardian.

Singapore media are more alike each other maybe because it is such a small island, with just over four million people.

Blogs, on the other hand, give people space to write what they wish. It may be too personal, too quirky to be published in the mainstream media. Nor may the bloggers want to.

And being taken seriously means one must be on one's best behaviour. Who will then snigger or cry out loud: "The emperor has no clothes"?

I know there are moves abroad to make bloggers more responsible. Singapore has prosecuted bloggers for racism. That is okay.

But should blogs be taken as seriously as the mainstream media?

I guess Andy Ho's article in The Straits Times today was a follow-up to a recent controversy which I mentioned yesterday. I wrote: "The authorities weren't at all amused when a  popular local blogger known for his sense of humour wrote something cheeky in a freesheet recently. Such nonsense wasn't acceptable in a paper read by the general public, said the authorities, though it might be okay in a blog with a limited readership."

I think the authorities were right. Blogs should be taken a little more lightly than the mainstream media. With a few exceptions, they don't have the same traffic.

Andy Ho, by the way, made a sweeping generalisation when he said "the blogging world has no professional writers, no publishers". Think of Andrew Sullivan, Dan Gillmor, Peter Stothard, who is the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Dave Barry, Chris Anderson, there are any number of professional writers who blog. And the blogosphere has no professional publishers? What about Nick Denton? Really, a newspaper article should be better informed.

Iwant2bfamous.com, no, Me.com, yes

I was amused when the local paper two days ago published an article on blogging headlined "Iwant2bfamous.com". I want to be famous? Come on! The higher you go, the harder you fall. That certainly seems true in Singapore where the authorities weren't at all amused when a  popular local blogger known for his sense of humour wrote something cheeky in a freesheet recently. Such nonsense wasn't acceptable in a paper read by the general public, said the authorities, though it might be okay in a blog with a limited readership. But I don't want to find out whether that's true by writing anything remotely annoying in my blog. It's better still to be anonymous.

"Iwant2bfamous.com?" Not in Singapore. And I guess that applies to plenty of bloggers around the world who don't post under the real names for fear of their jobs, their bosses, their colleagues  and even their families. "No pictures," that's what my wife said when she couldn't stop me from blogging. No pictures of us must appear in the blog, she meant, and I guess she was right. Better safe than sorry.

Is it possible to famous and anonymous? "How can?" as some say in Singapore.

The Sunday Times ( that's the local paper) was right on something else. It called the blogosphere "me.com". Yes, it's me who is blogging. I blog about things that interest me like any other blogger.

But does that mean bloggers are a bunch of narcissists, as the article asked? I don't think so. Sure, I write about myself and things that interest me, but isn't that the only way to write? Unless one is a hack, of course, a pen for hire.

And we bloggers write in our spare time, for free. That's another thing that used to baffle journalists. How can anyone write for nothing? 

I said "used to baffle journalists" because they are finally coming to terms with blogs.

Blogs are changing the media. The Straits Times, The Sunday Times' sister newspaper, in Singapore now has an interactive portal where readers submit their own stories and photos. The change came much earlier in America and Britain. The online sites of England's quality papers now all have blogs. They realise it's the quickest, easiest way to interact with the readers. It's so much easier to post a comment on an online article than write a letter to the editor. And the comment is instantly published without editing, unlike letters to the editor.

The Internet has been a real boon. Can anyone find all the information he needs in the local newspaper, the local radio, the local TV and the local library? Now there's Google to help us. And it takes us to websites. Many of them are blogs.

One last word on the Sunday Times article: It mentioned several Singapore blogs I hadn't come across before. Yes, newspapers are still useful.