Singapore Writer's Fest: Creating Online Communities Through Blogging

This talk, held on the final day of the SWF, was really fun. Not only did I get Cory Doctorow to sign a copy of his new novel, Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town (which I bought from Borders an hour before the talk!), the talk itself was very entertaining and quite informative! It was a 4-way talk with Cory Doctorow and Singaporean bloggers mrbrown, Mr Miyagi and the (in)famous XiaXue. Mr Brown was the unofficial "head" of the talk but everyone had something interesting to say. The talk was in the form of a question and answer question so there was plenty of audience interaction.

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Highlights:
mrbrown introduced the Singapore blogging community that they started- Tomorrow.sg, a link blog which he said was modelled after the blog that Cory writes for, BoingBoing.net. Not a bad model since BoingBoing's the most popular blog on the Net! He spoke of a controversy they had recently where they posted a link to a single unwed mother's blog (it's this post here) and she got loads of unwanted publicity as a result and her boyfriend was slammed left and right for being a jerk. There was a big uproar with people saying that Tomorrow.sg shouldn't just link to blogs anyhow without permission. Cory chipped in that the Net was "made for linking without permission" and people shouldn't post information on a public medium, which a blog is, if they intend it to be private. Besides, Livejournal lets you publish private, password-protected blogs- so if you want to publish a private diary online, use one of those to make sure nobody else reads it!

Tomorrow.sg's policy now is that if a blog has a notice saying permission is required to link, then they'll ask for permisson (amusingly, Cory chipped in that he'd link without asking for permission anyway!). If not, they'll take it for granted that it's OK to link to the blog. Sounds fair enough. Here's their linking policy in full. Still on the topic of privacy on the Net, Cory recommended this insightful piece by blogger Danny O'Brien. The piece is basically about the kinds of conversations people have on the web (particularly on blogs) and the differences between public register- what you say for public consumption- and private register- like conversation between friends.

Later, someone asked a question about government intervention in the blogosphere here. So far, the speakers said, the government hasn't done anything drastic with regards to blogs, even those with political content- they're content to take a wait and see approach. mrbrown did relate a funny anecdote about a photo of 2 policemen asleep in their car that he put up on his blog- apparently the Chief of that police division came to his house and politely asked him to take down the photo as it negatively affected morale in his division. Apparently this is the only time mrbrown was ever approached by a public official with regard to content in his blog. He did stress that they didn't force him to take down the photo, merely requested it while explaining to him the reasons why they didn't want the photo up.

Another interesting topic of conversation was how bloggers respond to criticism. Xiaxue mentioned that some bloggers get quite upset- and even in her case there's often quite a lot of negative comments on her posts (a lot of people hate on her cos her blog is so popular. It's not really my thing but I don't see why the hating) but she also has quite a lot of supporters who defend her.

Oh yeah! Mr Miyagi's put up a few clips from the talk up on his blog! Specifically, the clips on this post and this post. The first is a hilarious clip of this Mystical Indian Dude (as me and my sister dubbed him cos of his propensity to speak in flowery, deep-sounding language) talking about how opinions are ants. And blogs are honey. Yes, really. He's actually got an interesting point hidden in his multiple metaphors. The reactions from the panel were something to see whenever he spoke. Everyone just did a double-take, a kind of "did he really say that?" moment. He also chipped in with the last comment of the day. Can't remember the details, but he was talking about how blogging is a kind of stress-reliever and somehow ended up talking about Laughing Clubs, the ones they have in India where lots of middle-aged men gather in parks and laugh their worries away as a group. The second clip is of Cory talking about how you can choose to focus on new content for your blog or focus on interacting with your readers.

And that's it for this year's Singapore Writer's Fest! The talks I attended were all quite excellent so I'm really looking forward to next years one. The organisers did a really good job, well, organising the whole affair so kudos to them, too!