anthroblogia

For the previous related posts please look here (Part I) and here (Part II).

This third and final section will look at the blog 'alliances' in Malaysia, and go back to the initial question of whether All-Blogs is unique in any way.

In the English-speaking Malaysian blogosphere there are the following blogger groups:

Muslim Bloggers Alliance: clearly a religiously oriented group, it was initiated by Mahaguru58 in July 2007 and is an online extension of offline interests. It's difficult to know much about its intentions or goals, as the discussion group is closed to non-members and there is no centralised blog/homepage, but it does seem to be somewhat exclusive: although the Pro-tem Secretary, Menj, states that it is open "all Muslims who are bloggers", he also goes on to specify: "Liberal Islam heretics are not welcomed." No doubt, though, by visiting member blogs one can see where their interests lie.

It seems to have a formalised structure, given that 'Pro-tem' officers are named, but the actual aims and objectives are not immediately available, given that the discussion groups that the url leads to is closed...

In terms of the categories discussed in the previous posts, I would describe it as religious, with an offline focus (this is debateable), founded by a group and restricted to a geo-political base (Malaysia).


PABS: there is no 'home link' as such for this grouping, but it was announced on 24th July 2007 by SoPo blogger Ktmoc here, and by other noted SoPo blogger Susan Loone here. As noted by Mamak, it seemed to be formed in reaction to the perceived politicisation of All-Blogs.

The meaning of the acronym is not clear: shar101 says it is 'People's All-Blogs Society', whereas SK says it means 'People's Alliance of Blogs'. I can't find a reference on the two founding members' blogs.

It is apparently still active, as an August 4th post by Ktemoc entitled " PABS calls on Government to embrace bloggers" implies. In this post we also see a statement that gives us insight into the reasons for its formation as an alternative to All-Blogs:

"As for the Allblogs*, apart from their high profile visit to the de facto leader of an opposition party, its protem chairperson alluding to support for the PPPA and some of its protem committeee members' preference for registration of only identity-revealed bloggers as members of its association, I wonder what else can it do to protect bloggers and promote blogging, as its committee had envisioned."

Continue reading "Bloggers allied - Part III"

The 25th August was a very significant date for the Malaysian blogosphere: the National Alliance of Bloggers (All-Blogs) was launched, complete with its own bricks-and-mortar locale in Bukit Damansara.



Despite not having registered, the organisers were kind enough to let me in after I dropped Cheryl's name (thanks Cheryl!) Once I was in I spotted a few familiar faces, such as Wattahack?, muststopthis, Howsy, Jun x 2 and desiderata; and also met some new people, such as the prolific graphic artist mob1900.

After a while Rocky opened the proceedings by leading a rendition of the Negaraku, and giving a brief history of All-Blogs, then Haris Ibrahim expounded a bit on the theme of Bangsa Malaysia which had been the subject of the forum in the afternoon.

I won't go over the evening in detail, as others have given various accounts of it (I parked the urls in a previous post), but I thought I'd go further into something I said while there. At one point bloggers were asked to introduce themselves, and I was 'volunteered': I said a few words, then proceeded to say that the event there - the forming of a blogger alliance and Blog House, was possibly unique in the world. Afterwards, I wondered how accurate was that - so here is a little research into the issue...

'Blogmeets', bloggers meeting offline, have been happening for a while (I don't have any accurate information there, but I do remember Reed mentioning them happening in UK, at some point between 2001 and 2005), and in my opinion usually mark a certain 'maturity', or stage of development, of a blog 'community'. In terms of the virtual/real discourse, it marks a confluence of the 'virtual' and 'real' worlds: though I prefer to use the terms online and offline, as it's all 'real' to me. Blogmeets were usually somewhat informal events, social gatherings with no particular objective in mind apart from getting to know other bloggers better. So bloggers meeting offline isn't new, but the Blog House inauguration was specifically about inaugurating a place to house a formal organisation designed to represent the interests of bloggers - All-Blogs. This is unusual I think. It was also the venue for the launching of PELITAR, a movement to promote the concept of Bangsa Malaysia - but I'll not go into that in any depth as it doesn't relate specifically to blogs.

To find out more about alliances, I googled the following terms: 'blogger alliance', 'blog alliance', 'blogger union', 'blog union'. I also searched in Technorati, but surprisingly hardly any of the blogs I got through Google turned up in Technorati. This is what I got, grouped into rough categories. Continue reading "Bloggers allied"