TODAY: Vigilante justice, blogger-style

Have com­puter will con­demn – poor car park­ers be warned

YOU’RE look­ing for a park­ing space at Sun­tec City and there it is — a red Sub­aru parked across two lots.

Makes your blood boil, doesn’t it?

Now, you can take a pic­ture of the offend­ing car and send it to Park­ing Idiots in Sin­ga­pore (parkingidiots.blogspot.com), a blog inspired by the Amer­i­can web­site, Park­ing Idiots (www.parkingidiots.com), where the tagline reads: “Your park­ing is our amusement.”

Not merely for amuse­ment, the Sin­ga­pore edi­tion of Park­ing Idiots con­tains pho­tographs of cars parked ille­gally or just with­out con­sid­er­a­tion for other car park users.

Read more at TODAY­on­line: [pdf][text]

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And there is appar­ently no short­age of idiot dri­vers — at last count, there were 33 pho­tographs posted on the site, and more than 5,000 vis­i­tors since the blog was cre­ated at the start of the month.

The blog’s author claims that var­i­ous requests have been made to up the ante on “park­ing idiots”, and one sug­ges­tion has been to cre­ate a “park­ing idiot” label that one can slap on badly parked cars.

“Park­ing Idiot — if you can’t park, don’t drive! You have been caught on cam­era. Check parkingidiots.blogspot.com to see your photo on the Inter­net,” reads one of the sug­gested labels.

Be afraid! Even mar­gin­ally bad park­ing is not let off the hook. Next to one photo of an idi­ot­i­cally (albeit legally) parked car is the com­ment: “This kind of idiot dri­ver we nor­mally for­give, because he is still within his lot — but just squeez­ing the next lot enough to make the next dri­ver squirm.”

Until recently, the cars in the pho­tographs on the blog had their reg­is­tra­tion plates blurred out, but appar­ently, after get­ting legal advice, the blog’s author intends to accede to read­ers’ requests that num­ber plates be shown.

“I am step­ping up the blogsite a notch by hence­forth NOT mask­ing the plate num­bers of the cars, unless specif­i­cally requested by the con­trib­u­tor of the photo,” the author declares.

If you still won­der whether the com­mu­nity at large has any use for blogs, take a look at blog­gers like these who you could say posi­tion them­selves as “com­mu­nity watchdogs”.

There’s a dirty, clogged drain on Anson Road in front of Tan­jong Pagar Plaza. Do you call the National Envi­ron­ment Agency (NEA) to com­plain or write a let­ter to the press? Nei­ther — you take a pho­to­graph, start a blog and write an entry about it.

There’s a blog called “Sin­ga­pore Town Coun­cils” (towncouncils.blogspot.com), which pitches itself as a “com­mu­nity ser­vice for all res­i­dents of Singapore’s Town Councils”.

Cre­ated on March 9, it invites read­ers to con­tribute com­ments or pho­tos, “if you see any inci­dent that you feel needs high­light­ing (whether a short­com­ing of your Town Coun­cil or a commendation)”.

The four entries so far detail places under Town Coun­cil juris­dic­tion which, the blog claims, are not being main­tained prop­erly by the local Town Coun­cils and the NEA. Blog­ger Jeff also tracks let­ters of com­plaints to the press on san­i­ta­tion issues, includ­ing responses, if any, from the rel­e­vant Gov­ern­ment agencies.

Jeff — 51-year-old father Jef­frey Ho Loon Poh — has also cre­ated Sin­ga­pore Alert (singaporealert.blogspot.com), where Sin­ga­pore­ans can raise issues or give sug­ges­tions on “issues that may threaten the con­tin­u­ing exis­tence of Sin­ga­pore”, such as bird flu, ter­ror­ism or the country’s water supply.

Then there’s his Dengue Alert blog (denguealert.blogspot.com), which at the height of the dengue out­break last year kept track of poten­tial mos­quito breed­ing areas — with the help of the pub­lic — and alerted the authorities.

Jeff’s blogs may just become use­ful repos­i­to­ries for com­plaints made by the com­mu­nity to Gov­ern­ment agencies.

Of course, there are blog­gers who write about com­mu­nity issues, but don’t ded­i­cate an entire blog to a par­tic­u­lar cause. You do not have to do that to be heard; there are things called blog aggre­ga­tors, which put sim­i­lar threads from other blogs into one place.

A good place to start look­ing at Sin­ga­pore­ans writ­ing about com­mu­nity issues is the frequently-updated Sin­ga­pore Data­base (www.singaporedatabase.com/community_currentissues_others.htm).

Mr Miyagi has been enter­tain­ing read­ers at miyagi.sg for over a year, and believes that Joo Chiat might have been saved sooner if those cam­paign­ing for the sleaze to be cleaned up had had a blog.