Archive for November, 2009

The other evening, my co-author Silvia Cambie and I, along with corporate communicator Marc Wright, gave a talk at the Asia Pacific Technology Network (APTN) on Asia and the Interactive Web, at the invitation of Louis Turner, APTN’s chief executive. (Thanks, Louis, for inviting us!) APTN is a group for people interested in Asian technology and the evening’s guest included technology and patent lawyers, telecommunications entreprenuers and Asian affairs specialists.

Silvia spoke on the shift of economic power from the West to Asia and presented some case studies on use of social media in China by companies such as Toyota. I discussed the use of social media by the Asian diaspora and how the internet is helping an emerging class of affluent, influential and articulate Asians network around the globe. In counterpoint to the two of us, Marc gave the view from the West, highlighting that businesses no longer controlled their messages and the importance of engaging in social media with an authentic voice.

One of the things I enjoy about blogging and social media is how it has enabled me to connect with a range of talented and creative people whom I would never have met otherwise. As I went through my slides, I was struck that two of the three case studies I presented were due to Malaysians I had met via blogging:

• Photographer Steven Lee first approached me via my blog to ask if he could photograph me for his book on prominent Malaysians (as it turned out, I couldn’t participate in the end because, technically, I’m now British, but we’ve remained friends and hook on on Facebook, via our blogs and also in the real world). He was my first case study that evening - an example of how an Asian living in London networks globally through social media to raise the profile of his photography business.

• I learnt about Rantauan.com, the Malay social network, through journalist Zaharah Othman, aka blogger Kak Teh. I left a comment on her blog once and she then came along to read my blog. We corresponded via our respective comments pages and then by email and then finally met up in London for coffee. I’ve since interviewed her about political blogging in Malaysia for my book and she’s written a number of articles about my books for papers in Malaysia.

To top it all, I was really pleased to finally meet in person Chinese-English translator Nicky Harman who has written for this blog. She contacted me a few years ago out of the blue asking if I knew how she might find a publisher for her translation of Striking Root. Directly as a result of her blog post about the translation, a publisher got in touch and was interested to publish the book. As it turned out, Nicky went with another publisher in the end but there’s the power of blogging for you. Anyway, unknown to me, Nicky is a member of APTN and so the other evening, we were able to meet for the first time in real life!

Here are some pics of the evening, including one of me with Nicky:

I usually focus on blogging for business so it’s nice to be reminded that most of the 170 million blogs out there are by ordinary people writing about their daily lives and personal feelings. It was the We Feel Fine project that was the big reminder - it’s a project led by computer scientist, Jonathan Harris, that explores “human emotion on a global scale” by harvesting emotions expressed on blogs whenever the words “I feel…” are found.

The emotions are gathered and sorted in different ways and shown in six “movements” - madness, murmurs, montage, mobs, metrics and mounds - which are essentially different visualisations of the data. You can see good feelings and bad feelings as well as the geographic location, age and gender of the person expressing those feelings. The project’s website suggests that this living artwork can offer specific answers to questions like: “Do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest?”

You need to launch an applet - which can take up to 20 seconds to load - in order to experience this amazing artwork. Click on the image below and it should take you to the We Feel Fine page: to launch the applet from there, click on the last sentence of the first paragraph (”We Feel Fine is divided into six discrete movements, each illuminating a different aspect of the chosen population. These movements are represented in the We Feel Fine applet.”)

I love the way the bubble of feelings cluster round the mouse cursor when you click on the screen in Madness - if you hover it over one of the bubbles, it will show you the location of the feeling and a brief idea of what the feeling is.

Then in Murmurs, you can see each latest feeling expressed somewhere out there in the world appear on the screen and if you click on the phrase, you’ll be taken to the blog. So “i feel so detached from everything i used to stand for” takes me to a blog post You Are My Brand Of Heroin - tonight is the night to let it go by xshadowsoflovex.

So how does this artwork make me feel? I feel more connected with the millions of people out there in the world.