It was a good meet and much was done. In what seemed like a week of meetups (first with the Malaysian bloggers and now this), a bunch of us Singapore bloggers (or as Miyagi put it, the Singapore Blog Mafia) gathered to discuss the upcoming blogger conference and the launch of tomorrow.sg.
One of the perks of meeting up like this, besides the great company, is that we get to take really great photos of the event. Like Xiaxue and Adri, the First Ladies of Singapore blogging, gamely posing with the First Ah Peks of Singapore blogging, brown and Miyagi.
Present at the meeting were Calm One, La Idler (pictured here with the "Shy" One), Daryl (pictured here with Calm One), James, Xiaxue, Adri (Ayi-dree, not Ah-dree, ok?), Miyagi and me. Preetam came later after work.
Secret Agent Man, Cowboy Caleb chickened out was absent with apologies, because revealing himself would jeopardise world peace. So he will remain an Undercover Editor.
In order to protect Calm One and Idler, who were also on the Witness Protection Program, my photos of them have been marked private.
James started the ball rolling by sharing his toys, like that little PDA of his that runs Linux and shows 天龙八步 天龙八部 videos. Then he whipped out his 12-incher and placed it on the table (ok, that sounded wrong), and soon, the rest of them had to take out their Apple laptops too, like Calm One and his white 14-incher, and Adri with her 12-inch Powerbook.
Miyagi took out his notebook too, the advanced-no-need-battery model with LINES. Yes, paper one.
iPods, mobile phones and PDAs were soon whipped out by the Jedi Council, and shown around. It was like a technology face-off.
In order not to lose out, I took out my iPod with iTalk and lapel mic attached, in the hope of getting some nice material for my podcasts.
It was a little too noisy in NYDC, Holland Vilage (The Manufactured "Bohemia" of Singapore) because of the crowd and the music blaring from the sound system, but I did get some nuggets of choice conversation. We got the staff to turn down the volume of the music twice, because of the loudness, and also because the koo-koo CD player occasionally went too fast, and turned the CD into the Chipmunks Greatest Hits.
Miyagi came from work, which meant that he was in his sweaty PE attire, and he rushed to change his tee when he arrived. That was okay, except that he attempted to smell nice too, by spraying a lethal amount of cologne. We also died from the fumes and the restuarant almost called HAZMAT.
And as a demonstration of how small Singapore is, Miyagi met Finicky Feline outside the restaurant when he was, er, getting some fresh air (must not encourage the kiddies to engage in activities bad for the lungs).
We worked out the details of the upcoming conference, and then moved on to talk about tomorrow.sg. Yes, ladies and gents, there is now a place online for you to read about Singapore-related stuff, be it blog posts, Singapore news, or foreign sites talking about Singapore.
How is that possible? Well, simple. YOU are going to provide the links to that content. You see, tomorrow.sg allows anyone to suggest a site or link. Your submissions will be fed into a queue and the editors of the site will approve the submissions based on strict editorial guidelines (like, we think the link is cool).
We realised early on that one person cannot do it all, and having all of you readers and bloggers involved in suggesting content to one site would be more powerful than just one of us bloggers going it alone. All we needed was a good infrastructure to build it upon (James provided this with Drupal, bless his high-tech soul), and some volunteers to be editors to select and publish the content.
Think of this as a Boing Boing for Singapore, but (hopefully) bigger and better.
Now it ain't very pretty yet, and kinks will be worked out as we go along, but I think the site is pretty cool as it stands. So go forth and suggest away.
Of course, no blogger meeting is complete without some silliness. And Miyagi and I provided some. Like trying to be Mediacorpse star, Tay Ping Hui, he with the Creased Forehead of Angst.
I think my attempt was the best, and if they ever need any stunt double for his shows, they can look me up. As long as it doesn't involve me showing my abs (last seen wondering near Nee Soon camp, in 1988).
