Parannoyed Delusions

Web 2.0: Some people say it's just hype, others say its the new internet gold rush, whatever it is, it's arguably virtually non-existent in Malaysia. With most Malaysian websites still adopting that old, so-last-millenium, "web portal" look and concept (and not to mention those ugly government websites), I wonder when will we ever move on to the next generation of the web.

Here, I list down some ideas and guidelines that I feel every Malaysian web startup should adopt in order to stay relevant and ahead in the web.

First, some general qualities I wish all new Malaysian web startup should have (based on ideas from: TechCrunch: Top Ten Things You Can Do To Get Blogged). I have not yet seen a single Malaysian web company embracing any of these ideas. I'm not saying that companies without these qualities automatically suck, but it's a brand new world wide web out there, and there ought to be somebody smart enough to do this.

1. Leverage the blogosphere.
   • Start a company blog: If possible have your CEO/president/whoever's in charge write. Already seeing this done by the likes of 8TV's Ahmad Izham (couldn't find the link, I think it's down?)
   • Be friends with PPS: Send out regular press releases, free demos, beta testing invites to Malaysian bloggers. Let them be your first product reviewers.
2. Be as open as possible.
   • Provide RSS feeds: If your web company provides an information-centric service, don't force people to visit only your website to get info, leverage XML technology and provide RSS/whatever syndications.
   • Provide open APIs: Let users build applications on top of your service. This gives your service automatic, free value-added features.
   • Don't hide information: From the TechCrunch article: "Put your location, contact information, team bios, faqs, blog and other important information up on the site in an easy to find location. Don't make bloggers look up whois information or read your terms of service (for legal jurisdiction) just to guess your location."
3. Hire a good writer.
   • Tell a story: Don't do a business presentation.
   • Be different: Be creative, and if possible, funny. Don't take I.T. too seriously.

And here are some ideas of what kind of new web 2.0 service an upcoming Malaysian startup can build. As much as I want to be the first to do any of these, I believe in being open and my wanting to see something new and cool coming out of Malaysia far outweighs my 'competitive' urges (though I am already working on some of these...).

Most of these ideas are based on another TechCrunch article: Companies I'd like to Profile (but don't exist).

1. Facebook for Malaysian students
   Facebook is a social networking site for college and high school students in the US. Most Malaysians probably don't know it, but we love social networking, just see how many Malaysian profiles are there in Friendster and MySpace. And I'd say most of these people are probably secondary schoolers and college students.
2. Open source Yellow Pages
   One-stop catch-all listing of local businesses. Anybody can add their business free of charge. Syndicate the listing via RSS and mobile phone SMS. Use user tagging to enable quick search and categorization. Make money via localized banner ads and premium listings.
3. Open source something
   Jobstreet.com, but with RSS and web APIs. Lelong.com.my but more like eBay (e.g. again, RSS, API, but with an open reputation feedback system)
4. The Free Music Label via Podcasts
   Why buy an RM5 pirated CD when you can download it for free? Artist/bands release singles/albums for free as MP3 via podcasting. Make money through exclusive artist merchandise (t-shirts, mouse pads, underwear, pencils, whatever), music video/concert DVD/VCD, banner ads on artist website, ads inserted directly into the podcast via Fruitcast.
5. Independent Film Distribution via Videocasts and Streaming Videos
   For the Malaysian indie film scene, this would be a great way to get exposure. Give priority first to short films as bandwidth considerations are a concern. Make it easy for anybody to post their own productions. If bandwidth and disk space are still big concerns, just use ourmedia.org and aggregate/manage Malaysian content.
6. "Take advantage of the booming Malaysian blogosphere"
   Sites like PPS and the relatively new BlogsMalaysia make the Malaysian blogosphere a more fun place to be. Make more sites like these, but add more web 2.0 twists. Mash it up: Blog aggregation(PPS) + [social bookmarking + tagging (Del.icio.us)] + user review(BlogsMalaysia) + user voting(Digg.com). And remember, make it all available through RSS an web APIs!

Please comment if you have any further suggestions, ideas, quarrels, etc. Also, email me if you want collaboration in making any of these ideas happen :)

So finally Ramadhan 2005 AD / 1426 AH is here. I would like to take this opportunity to say have a nice Ramadhan to all muslims in the whole world, hope you'll have a happy and blessed fasting month. To celebrate this month, I am going to release a few special Ramadhan web projects.

The first is solat.xml. A simple web service API and an XML-based language used to represent and syndicate solat / prayer times. Use this to get prayer times in nice, web 2.0 style, XML document, for any kind of usage. Currently only prayer times for locations in Malaysia are available, thanks to a nice cgi tool from Al-Lazim.com. It's currently alpha, so do try it out and look for bugs and issues, if you find some, e-mail them to: abuzaim+solatxml@gmail.com.

You can try it out right now by clicking here: http://zaim.abrahman.com/labs/solat.xml/?method=get&location=Kuala+Lumpur (you should get an XML document)

Via Global Voices → Rantings of a Sandmonkey, a weblogger from Eygpt who claims to be extremely cynical, snarky, pro-US, secular, libertarian, [and] disgruntled. Not sure whether he's being sarcastic or what.

PC games with Islamic themes. Some of it, to be honest are quite ridiculous in a funny sort of way. For example, Ummah Defense I, a 2D scrolling space-shooter:

It's the year 2114 and the Earth is finally united under the Banner of Islam. As a member of the Intergalactic Muslim Council (IGMC), your job is to help coordinate Dawa efforts on other planets. You couldn't be happier with your work, until the Flying Evil Robot Armada (FERM) attacks your home planet of Earth. It seems there was one disbeliever, known as Abu Lahab XVIII, left on Earth, and in his desperate attempt to deny the truth of Islam, he has constructed a whole army of robots to destroy the Earth and all of its Muslims. (He needs to use robots because all the humans had embraced Islam).

And, a Zelda-like RPG, Maze of Destiny:

Armed only with your wits, and your faith in Allah, you must dare the depths of Darlak's dungeon. Can you recover the missing letters of Surah Fatiha, rescue the teachers of the Quran, and re-establish the true worship of Allah on Earth?

Then, there's the anti-Isreali, Intifadah Counter Strike clones: Undersiege, Under Siege. They look quite cool actually.

Thought of sharing another round of my recently added bookmarks in del.icio.us. Today I found: How to learn a language for free online, typography ideas for blog headlines, more UMNO/NEP ruckus, when to buy an iPod, and "the end of Microsoft" AJAX overview.

1. Free Online Language Courses: A huge list of links to sites providing free online language courses, from Abenaki to Latin to Urdu to Welsh. I've been thinking of taking up Chinese and/or Tamil. (filed in: world languages via: digg)
2. Typography for Headlines: A collection blog post headlines' design and typography. (filed in: webdesign blog css via digg)
3. Straits Times Interactive Review: Reviving NEP, Umno's race card, again?: An article on the recent spate of NEP revival rhetoric from UMNO in Singapore's The Straits Times. Never been a "real" follower of Malaysian Malay politics, but my interest in it do sometimes "peak". (filed in: malaysia malay nep umno politics via Screenshots)
4. Mac Buyer's Guide: Know When to Buy Your Mac: A summary of Apple products, with recommendations on when exactly is the right time to buy one, since Apple regularly release updates to their hardware. Been thinking of getting an iPod, but someone recently remarked that I don't go out at all so why would I need a portable player? Very true. By the way, iPod's buying recommendation is: "Buy - Product recently updated" (filed in: hardware mac shopping via digg)
5. Wired News: You Say You Want a Web Revolution: An intersting article with an overview of the relatively recent rise of AJAX and how it could spell the end of Microsoft's desktop dominance/relevance.(filed in: javascript programming web software ajax via /.)

Thanks for reading. Drop a comment if you have anything to say about the topics above.

I was going through my usual daily visit to CSS Beauty, a webdesign/css gallery showcasing CSS-based websites. And what do you know, two (or at least one) Malaysian-based site is on it's list. One is the web-hosting company Exabytes, which is quite good (sometimes) I might say, I had an account there once. The other is Idaman Suri, not sure if this really is a Malaysian, it could be Indonesian. Very nice, clean design, both sites, which makes me wonder if they were designed by the same people.

Interesting site I found via digg:

"We once had a link behind the image, to download Firefox. But they sold their soul, and we no longer recommend them." - Scroogle.org

I hate to read really well-written and truthful-looking things that shake any part a long-held belief of mine. Before this it was Michael Crichton's State of Fear which changed my view on global warming, but then I reverted back once I read sites like RealClimate and WorldChanging (more on this in a later post perhaps).

This time it's my belief in a good piece of open source software called Firefox. Or more accurately, on Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind Firefox. Let me just do a copy-and-paste quote:

In June 2005, we read that a Silicon Valley blogger with alleged insider information was reporting that the Mozilla Foundation was raking in $30 million annually from their Google connection.

To which I asked, what Google connection? Well, this (from the same site):

Apparently the bulk of the money from Google is due to Mozilla's agreement to make Google the default engine in the Firefox search box. When a Firefox user clicks on an ad from a Google-box search, Mozilla gets a cut of Google's profit.

That's not all:

If you enter search terms in the location bar instead of a web URL address, Firefox goes to Google and picks off the top link, and takes you directly to that site. [...] If you try the same thing in Explorer, you get a search preview from MSN, but you aren't sent directly to the top site. Microsoft's behavior is less intrusive because it gives the user more options.

A non-profit, open source project being more intrusive than Microsoft? Well, the news about Mozilla spinning off into a for-profit corporation seems to fuel some sort of confirmation on this, I would say.

The site I'm quoting, Scroogle.org is actually a site advocating the scraping of Google and Yahoo! search results, effectively stripping off all those ads:

These engines crawl the public web without asking permission, and cache and reproduce the content without asking permission, and then use this information as a carrier for ads that generate private profit.

They give good, solid arguments, too:

The larger issue here is that the commercialization of the web became possible only because tens of thousands of noncommercial sites made the web interesting in the first place. All search engines should make a stable, bare-bones, ad-free, easy-to-scrape version of their results available for those who want to set up nonprofit repeaters. Even if it cuts into their ad profits slightly, there's no easier way to give back some of what they stole from us.

Well, this would probably irk some of those weblogs existing and pinging PPS "solely" for Google Adsense, I'd say.

So, does this mean I'm going to stop using Firefox? Well, no for now I guess. Because like I said, Firefox is a good piece of software. But I'm definately going to start avoiding direct Google searches though...

Update: While typing a reply to a comment here, I thought it would be more appropriate if I added it in the post itself. Is what Google doing really wrong? I thought it was, because I believe blatant commercialism without a shred of community responsibility or a "give back to community" ideal IS wrong. But then again, Google has in fact given back to the community, with projects like Summer of Code, it's pages like Google Labs, and also the availability of it's API. I don't know, I'm beginning to get mixed feelings about this.

Well, what do you know, this weblog has been in existence for more than a year now, although my actual 'blogging time' is probably only 9 months out of the 12. Therefore, I decided to give my weblog a little revamp and a bit of a re-introduction...

So I spent the whole of last night updating my weblog's template. I'm beginning to appreciate the subtleties of Blogger's template system, it's quite flexible really. Besides the obvious changes, I added some Javascript-ing here and there. If you reload the page, you can probably see the photo at the header, and the greeting at the bar on the right change. Clicking on the photo or greeting will also change it. You can also hide/show posts, leaving only their titles and links. And lastly, you can now change the font sizes of blog posts.

Once done with the template, I started the daunting process of re-touching each of my posts. I added Del.icio.us and Technorati tags or easier categorization, although this process is not yet 100% finished at this time. I also fixed some HTML to make it XHMTL 1.0 compatible.

As for the "re-introduction" part — Hello! My name is Abu Zaim and I'm a multimedia designer from KL, Malaysia. This is where I post my personal opinions, thoughts and my deepest-darkests-secrets for the whole world to see and read. If you like what you see, stick around, browse my archives and read my previous posts. Leave a comment or two. Maybe you can even bookmark or add my feed to your RSS feed reader. Or if that's moving in too fast, perhaps you could just look out for my pings at Petaling Street. Anyway, whatever you decide to do, thanks a lot for dropping by.

Well, I'm glad that's all done. With a much cleaner looking weblog with a brand new re-introduction, I can now write in peace...