TODAY: Just a boring bloggers’ night out?

Bel­ly­dancers swayed, SPG par­tied, tips changed hands. So who yawned?

IT was a big week for the blog­ging com­mu­nity in Sin­ga­pore.
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First, we blogged about the National Kid­ney Foun­da­tion saga to death, then we attended the first-ever Sin­ga­pore Blog­gers’ Con­fer­ence, Bloggers.SG.
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In what The Sun­day Times called “a big yawn”, blog­gers from around the island attended a two-segment con­fer­ence on Sat­ur­day that started in the morn­ing at the Wood­lands Regional Library and stretched the after­noon and night at DXO (the new NTUC nightspot) at the Esplanade.
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There was even a queue out­side the after­noon venue, despite National Day Parade rehearsal-induced mul­ti­ple road clo­sures.

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Break­out ses­sions included tech­ni­cal tips on blog­ging, by “mas­ter blog­gers”, such as mr brown (www.mrbrown.com), Pree­tam Rai and Xiaxue (www.xiaxue.blogspot.com), and a seg­ment on the legal ram­i­fi­ca­tions of blog­ging.
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It was such “a yawn”, this whole thing, and the sit-down bits of the con­fer­ence was wrapped up with a belly-dancing per­for­mance by a group (www.bellydance. com.sg) which vol­un­teered for the occa­sion.
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(As blog­ger Trompe L’oeil recaps: “The metal rail­ings creaked under strain as the men leaned for­ward to get a bet­ter view of the sul­try sec­ond dancer … I could swear the air in the dark­ened enclo­sure was hang­ing thick with the heady scent of lust.”).
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Speak­ing of vol­un­teers, it has to be said that the only peo­ple who were paid to be at the con­fer­ence were the DXO staff (and even then, DXO sup­plied them to the con­fer­ence free-of-charge) and the news reporters.
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Every other per­son, from the stage crew, panel speak­ers, ush­ers and pho­tog­ra­phers came, attended and sup­plied their own ser­vices on their own time.
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We learnt use­ful blog­ging tips too. Blog­ger Tym (www.toomanythoughts.org/blog) went home and played with her new-found tech­ni­cal skills to track online con­ver­sa­tions about her at the con­fer­ence.
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And, oh, to meet blog­gers we’d never got to see before in the flesh, now that was a treat.
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Blog­ger Sarong Party Girl (www.sarongpartygirl.blogspot.com) turned up after The Sun­day Times reporters left, which is a pity. Because, if they had stayed on, they might have had the chance to wit­ness that the Sarong Party Girl with­out her sarong is still pretty much a Party Girl.
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Maybe the “main­stream media” (blog­gers’ def­i­n­i­tion of any­thing in print or broad­cast con­tent) just didn’t pay enough atten­tion, and expected every­thing to hap­pen as things nor­mally would in the real world. Blog­ger Tym observed of sev­eral reporters:
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“I over­heard a press pho­tog­ra­pher remark­ing queru­lously to his reporter col­league, “No ban­ner out­side, nobody at the door — all so secre­tive”.
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“I saw another reporter repeat­edly approach dif­fer­ent con­fer­ence organ­is­ers, entreat­ing their assis­tance in unmask­ing a hith­erto unidentified-in-real-life blog­ger, because she’d decided that was the angle for her story …
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“How could they be expected to make sense of a non-profit event that doesn’t need a ban­ner because its main tar­get audi­ence gets the infor­ma­tion directly from the organ­is­ers via the Web, not the main­stream media or a ban­ner hang­ing out­side a com­mu­nity cen­tre?
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“How could they expect to inter­view, let alone unmask, a pop­u­lar blog­ger, when the local blo­gos­phere thrives on good­will and (largely) mutual tol­er­ance and respect — not just for the views expressed in each other’s blogs but also for per­sonal deci­sions to reveal/conceal per­sonal infor­ma­tion, includ­ing one’s iden­tity?“
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By all other blog­gers’ accounts, the con­fer­ence went very well. Even if the legal panel mod­er­a­tor, Daryl Sng (www.dsng.net), had to leave because he was acti­vated by his army unit’s mobil­i­sa­tion exer­cise, the seg­ment still went on as smoothly as the back-channel would allow.
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The “back-channel” is an online cha­t­room that allowed con­fer­ence audi­ences (on loca­tion and off) to make com­ments about the panel in real-time, with the “live” tran­script screened behind the panel speak­ers.
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Every now and then, the audi­ence would burst out laugh­ing at the com­ments, while the panel was dis­cussing some issue seri­ously.
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If any­thing, this con­stant stream of inter­rup­tion, bor­der­ing on the chaotic, encap­su­lates what the online com­mu­nity is about: Ran­dom bits of infor­ma­tion, hurtling from every direc­tion, car­ry­ing dif­fer­ent opin­ions and voices, mask­ing dif­fer­ent faces and per­son­al­i­ties – but com­ing together to make a fluid, organic and community-based entity whose sig­nif­i­cance is greater than the sum of its parts.
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Mr Miyagi a.k.a. Ben­jamin Lee, has been enter­tain­ing blog read­ers for a year, and is very sorry for not hav­ing enough time to talk to Sun­day Times reporters. (His blog can be found at http://myveryownglob.blogspot.com)