Guidelines for the Blogging community
By SIM KWANG YANG
First, there is the 3-in-1 Minister in charge of blogging matters talking about bloggers, including his complaint that Raja Petra Kamarudin (RPK) never gives credit to the government.
This elicited a long and elaborate but gentlemanly reply from RPK himself in his latest entry entitled Open Letter to the Minister of Information, Communication, and Culture Rais Yatim in Malaysia Today.
Then, the third annual Bloggers’ Event of the Year – also known as BUM2009 – is being held today at the Lake View Club in Subang Jaya in Kuala Lumpur. Dr Mahathir Mohamad will be the key speaker.
Trawling through Google, I came across this April 3 report on the Star:
“MALAYSIA has about 500,000 active bloggers, ranking the country among the highest in the world after Indonesia and the European Union, Utusan Malaysia reported.
“According to Universiti Malaya media department lecturer Dr Abu Hassan Hasbullah, this showed the power of blogs in influencing the thinking of the people, especially about politics.
“He said blogs currently had a wide reach considering how many Internet users visited these sites everyday.
“Our research shows that 70% of the election results were influenced by information in the blogs,” he said.”
Microsoft has these interesting stats on Malaysian blogging in its survey, ‘Youth and Self-Expression Drive the Art of Blogging in Malaysia’. Its key findings are:
* 74% of bloggers are 25 years old or younger
* 64% of bloggers are women
* 81% are most interested in blogs by friends or family
* 48% of bloggers like to write their thoughts or comment on the world around them
* 34% of bloggers like to have their own personal corner of cyberspace
* 50% said boring blogs are biggest turn-off
