Blogging Comes to Singapore

It was clear to me early in my visit that Singapore knew and cared little about blogging. During a tour of the Jurong Regional Library, I met Ivan Chew, a National Library Board member and manager of Bukit Merah, one of the island’s many community libraries. I immediately liked Ivan. He sees libraries as a redistribution systems for ideas both good and bad. He's passionate about ideas. We chatted about Michelangelo and Leonardo as our press tour shuffled through the library various floors and features. A friendship started and we began email chatting even before I left the island.

But when he referred in his email to blogging as “verbal diarrhea,” I took issue with him. He then found his way onto my blog and from there, found Chris Shipley and David Weinberger , two wise choices, when one is searching for quality or so it seems to me.

Just a few days later, Ivan has started his own blog and I’m sure it’s one of Singapore’s first. I like his clean, breezy way of expressing himself. He seasons his prose with doses of self-effacing humor and charm. He says its about being a librarian but it seems to me that its really about ideas.

Welcome Ivan. Welcome to the Blogosophere, Singapore. Bloggers also call it “the cosmos,” a borderless place where ideas, information, insights and occasional lunacy is shared between peers and without centralized restrictions. Hopefully, the cosmos will cultivate Singapore’s seeds of innovation, which are just now being planted. Blogging is a new communications channel more interactive than CNN, less-controlled than your newspaper. It is a cheap and easy way for everyone to publish their and be heard.

Ivan, may your blog become fruitful and multiply.

Comments

[Ernie]

Site wasn't available at the link you specified; could be an outage at Blogger.

[Ivan]

I think it's bec. of an extra quotation mark at the end of the HREF code. Shel also reorganised the post, i.e. renamed the permalink. I had to fix the broken link on my other post. One of those things we have to live with.

[Stephanie]

It seems to you that Singaporeans know little about blogging because you're runnning around talking to a LIBRARIAN?!? It's the kids you have to be talking to, people still in school. I'm 22 now and I created my first website (a free geocities account) when I was 13. Between the ages of 16-18 I posted regular diary entries, doing my own html because during that time services like blogspot and livejournal didn't exist or were new (and besides, "what idiot doesn't know how to use html"?)

I don't have an online journal now, but many friends and acquaintances still do. Some blogs are pretty mundane accounts of daily life, of course, but others contain philosophical musings and, yes, political commentary. It's nice that Ivan has discovered the world of blogging, but I assure you, he is far from being the first.

[shel israel]

Stefanie,

Please don't knock the Librarian. I think very highly of him. I based the viewpoint on blogging on conversations with people I met who were mostly connected with technology. They were not kids. I also went looking on Technorati and PubSub which had just started, and found very few bloggers in Singapore. Even in your comments, I'm a little confused because you are discussing HTML and not RSS. I was talking blogging not websites.

[kookabaru]

Hi Shel, Stephanie is right in saying that the Singaporean blogosphere is very active. I'm also 22 and I started my first blog with diaryland 5 years ago. At those times, blogger didn't offer customization options hence I chose diaryland.
Of course, you're talking about things like wordpress, MT, Nucleus etc. I was late in adopting those, using Nucleus CMS right now. But by then most of my friends were already on Xanga, Blogspot and Livejournal.