redemption in a blog

Singaporeans found blogging

May 7, 2004

Pardon the newsy (and awkward) title for this entry - it’s hard trying to think up creative titles when that juice dries up. Anyway, this is more of a gratuitous, promotional linking entry than a real blog entry (although some of you will not be unaccustomed to blogs that are full-on linkblogs - and I’m not talking about side link-blogs).

So yeah, recently I’ve encountered a couple of local (Singaporean) webloggers whom I’ve had to pleasure of speaking to. They are one Alex Choo and one Jaime Wong, both very different people and rather unrelated in fact, so I should speak of each in turn.

Well, Alex is someone I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with at length (via IM) and will be someone I’ll be working with on a clandestine project that will save the world from the Antediluvians when Gehenna comes… yes, something like that. Alex is also the owner of Google Apps, a collection of tools that use the Google API. This includes “Adsense serves…“, which tells you which ads a particular webpage would serve, and also Glocal News. Glocal News lets you search for news on Google News related to a particular country:

Glocal News does not just check for country names, it also checks for commonly used terms associated with that country.

You may ask: “why don’t I just go to Google News and key in ‘USA’ to find USA-related news?” The difference lies in there being other keywords related to each country, and these are entered in the search for you invisibly. That gives you a rather good set of results, if you do try it out. The bad thing, however, is there’s no way you can add more keywords and the application depends on the author appending more keywords as they become relevant.

Now, Jaime Wong is a freelance web designer who wrote me simply because you don’t see many Singaporeans who know what Web Standards mean - we need to stick together, all 4 of us. We did talk a bit about starting a local interest group, but as of this time there’re so very few of us. Probably needs to gather more momentum and weight first before a thrust of any sort is to do any good. If you’re Singaporean and are interested in a local interest group dealing with Web Standards, do write me or Jaime, just for a chat or anything at all.

By the way, Jaime’s weblog is absolutely stunning. You have to check it out. It was even listed on CSS Vault.

Hmm… Well, this didn’t turn out to be a linkblog-like entry after all.

Posted by Chu Yeow at May 7, 2004 SGT | Permalink | | Category: Blogging