Taking videos and uploading them to Youtube isn’t a big deal. Kids do it all the time. Nevertheless, let me share three Video on Net stories here.

First, what got me writing this: George Yeo, Minister for Foreign Affairs, put up his speech at the World Economic Forum onto Youtube last night.

This reminded me of the New Media @ Art House event: We put up Dr. Lee Boon Yang, Minister for Communication and the Arts, speech on New Media minutes after he finish delivering it.

Lastly, I didn’t know MyPaper, a bilingual newspaper, has a vodcast until they interviewed mrbrown and myself together with Run Tien from Zaobao. Sadly, they don’t use Youtube so it is a pain trying to embed the video clip here but you can watch it here: Segment 1, Segment 2 and Segment 3. Together with the vodcast, they also did an (front page) article on the same story: Can Netizen Talk Cock on the Net?

Incidentally, MyPaper website is pretty but it is a pain to navigate: Putting up their papers in PDF format that link to more PDFs which takes forever to load; Using their own media player thats is not embeddable, in today Youtube world is unacceptable; Worst of all, all sort of Javascript and thus making their papers unlinkable and thus un-Google-able, which makes it as good as does not exist since no one can find it.

On a unrelated note, I met Jennifer last week and told her of my disappointment on how ST handled Citizen Journalism story: ST has every right to advertise and promote STOMP. Slap your logo every page, do a frontpage story about your one year old party, but don’t encroach it as a story on Citizen Journalism, and worst, ignore everyone else. She understood and said she will feedback to the team. Yesterday, I got a request from ST from another reporter to do a story on Citizen Journalism again (this time in the form of Aggregators and Groupblog). And last night, Zaobao called and seem like they going to doing a story on Citizen Journalism too.

Nine months ago, I whined about how I was unable to get any wifi access in Funan, the IT hub in Singapore. With the launch of Wireless@SG in Dec last year, this is suppose to solve that problem.

Or is it more like this?

Thats what I got when I am back in the same place in Funan today. I spend 2 hours in the cafe in between my meetings and more than half of the time I am fighting to get connectivity. It is horrible and frustrating experience.

Now, you may say it is an one-off experience but actually it is pretty common.

I have seen being to places where it is suppose to have Wireless@SG coverage but no signal. I have gotten signal but the DHCP does not work. I have gotten both signal and IP address but no connectivity. I have gotten connectivity but DNS not functioning. I have gotten everything to work except it is extremely slow or with very high packet loses.

I like to hang out in Rochester Park lately and for the last 4 weeks, they have a non-functioning Wireless@SG signal there. It works for a couple of week before that. When it goes down, I thought the operator monitoring will pick up and get it fixed. 4 weeks now, I lost all hope they will ever get it fixed. I check with IDA website only to tell me to contact the operator. I email the operator and I get no response.

Finding a functioning Wireless@SG is as rare as striking lottery.

I cannot help but compare my experience in Kuala Lumpur. It is true that I get free wireless only at Starbuck (hence less coverage) but it works most of the time. A sharp contrast with a larger coverage Wireless@SG which DONT work most of the time. I rather take the former.

But heck, I shouldn’t complain right? It is “FREE” service.

No, sorry, it isnt free. It is paid for by IDA and some part of that money comes from the tax I pay. So long IDA pays for it, then make sure it actually works. This is not a community best-effort or FON network – it is a network paid for by tax-payer money.

ps: IDA already knew the problem, I am told. They had done their study on the quality of Wireless@SG. I am just ranting here because I am really frustrated at the 2 hours I wasted trying to get the Wireless@SG to work.

Bob Frankston saw my entry on Supernova and email me to ask if I have seen his latest blog entry. It was posted Dave Farber’s Interesting People list before so I have.

But I posted a longer rant to Bob that I would like to share here:

The core of the problem is the administration continues to believe in the myth of “universal service” and “minimal Quality of Service”, and thus lead to the only logical conclusion, an incumbent operator.

They have yet to accept the concept that a group of people to build their community network for their 100 homes, or a small operator servicing just this 1000 homes (and not interested anywhere else). And to do so means they must be willing to give right-of-way to lay infrastructure, be it fiber or wireless, to anyone big or small.

Until they do so, they will continue to believe in big and rich incumbent. To introduce “competition”, they issue a few more licenses to more big and rich incumbents and then to make them play nice with each another by regulating them. Its a never ending cycle.

At the same time, they would doing the opposite of what is needed to be done (de-regulations, opening up spectrum, giving right-of-ways). Sad but thats the reality today.

ps: Bob is the creator of the fame VisiCalc. We met several years ago at O’Reilly E-Tech.

Part of the fun of attending a tech conference is the backchannel.

[In references to the panel on The Social Web: Choices and Voices]

(1:38:51 AM) jseng: erm, i have no idea what they are talking on the panel matters
(1:39:20 AM) davidjoho: jseng, they are in the unique consumer personalization long tail bucket. Clear?
(1:39:56 AM) nicolelazzaro: I have no idea what they are paneling on the talk, jseng
(1:41:29 AM) jseng: joho, ya, they are doing innovative paradigm-shifting transparent process re-engineering long-tail customization for user centric application
(1:41:53 AM) davidjoho: ah, thank you, jseng. For a moment there I actyually thought I understand what they were talking about!

The last 36 hours was a crazy non-stop activities.

Started my day by going to the IX 2007. Met Jeremiah (finally!) although sadly we didnt get much chance to talk one-on-one. (He was blogging, chatting and preparing for his talk). The talks itself was a mixture of good and bad and so-so. Some are so outright offensive that Choon Keat decided to step out of the room totally than to listen to the corporate bullshit about security. Haha.

Left IX after Jeremiah’s talk and drive over to SPH. Did a vodcast for mypaper together with mrbrown. We took a while to discuss before we start because the topic was kind of vague. When we probe further, the producer said “No, really. We have no idea what we want.”. mrbrown later commented that thats a refreshing difference between Zaobao and Straits Times, as the former approaches things with an open mind while the latter often already have an angle to the story and just trying to squeeze quotes from you so they could tell their story. Okay, not always true but happened often enough.

Got a bit of quick bite and then over to meet Dr. Toh See Kiat and Dr. Ang Peng Wah (a very old friend and is also the Vice President of CASE, beside the Dean of NTU School of Information). We have something planned that I am very excited about. :-)

Then hop back to IX 2007 for a party with the digital movement folks. The party is small but it was a blast. Jeremiah already blogged about them and also gave many good advises (thanks!). There are no lacks of entrepreneurs and I spend a lot of time talking to many, some I knew and some new ones. One of the longest conversation I had is with one who tried to argue with me why he dont believe in X (altho he dont have much direct experience inX) in front of another well-known expert on X. I guess this is common problem when you believe too much what you read and listen too little to the people who actually knows the stuff.

ps: Apologies to Jeremiah over the confusion over his name on my part. I had this idea that his real name is Jeremy and Jeremiah is a nick. *doh*

Got home by midnight. Catch up with a bit of emails and then joined Supernova 2007 virtually, watching the Live Stream, keeping update via its blog (Suw was great!), the Jaiku backchannel and most fun on IRC. Suw, Joho, Doc Searl and the whole gang is on IRC. Gosh, my blood was boiling listening to John Kneuer on 700mhz auction. They spent years trying to crawl back 700mhz from incumbents only to auction it to another set of incumbents? Luckily, we have Joho, Doc and Isen tie-ing him apart while Kevin (pretend) to look chagrined.

Stayed until 6am, catch 2 hours of sleep and started a whole new day of meetings until now. Better get some sleep soon cos I want to join Supernova Day 2 tonight again. More fun tonight :-)

Incidentally, what kept me awake last night during the breaks for Supernova, is Paul Potts’ Con Te Partio and Nessa Dorma.

I hate to admit this but yes, I cried.

Pauls’ vibrato and control of his voice is nothing compared to Opera masters like Andrea Bocelli or Luciano Pavarotti. What he lacks in technical skill, Paul made up in his incredible emotion rendering that has that magical touch on the mass; the ability to lure people who never appreciate to Opera to stop and listen to him sing. In that regard, he is comparable if not exceed the masters.

Staying up at 3am watching supernova2007 live.

I spend the whole day at New Media @ Art House yesterday. Although the attendees are small (only ~100 people), they are definitely the mover and shaker of the media industry. More importantly, the discussion was a blast. There are too many things to summarize in one blog entry. But if you are keen, check out their blog covering the event. The bloggers has done a great job.

But I want to highlight Shekar Kapur said during the break out session: “to the online folks, copyright = right to copy”.

The executive from Sony jumped and start talking about the need to have stronger copyright for their 100M movie investment and an interesting debate started between them.

Between the two, I think Shekar got it right. That it is not about whether we should protect copyright or not, but rather the community values on copyright has changed. So instead of trying to fight the community and trend, perhaps it is time to find a new business model in a world assuming copyright does not exist (or at least unenforceable).

Some of the people I met today, not in any particular order:

– Douglas Merrill
– John Seely Brown
– Cory Ondrejka and Jean Miller (yes again :-)
– Paul Saffo
– Madanmohan Rao
– James Lim
– Jose L. Encarnacao

Its late and I need to go to bed so I can wake up early for tomorrow event. So no long stories about each one but heck, I have fun ;-)

This is going to be a busy week for tech geeks in Singapore. CommunicAsia and BroadcastAsia is happening this week. In conjunction of CommunicAsia and BroadcastAsia, IX 2007 also bought about a whole list of interesting speakers in town, like Cory Ondrejka and Jeremiah Owyang. Speaking of Jeremiah Owyang, we are going to have dinner on 21st June (Some of you might got my private email to ask you to reserve the date. This is why :-) On the same day with IX, MDA is also organizing a panel discussion on New Media @ Art House with the who’s who in the media industry. This is an invite-only event to discuss the future of new media and how business and society is going to be impact by those changes. And yes, there would be bloggers during this event who will keep us updated of the event on the New Media Blog. Check it out :-) Incidentally, every year on the same week, Supernova organized by Kevin Werbach is happening in San Francisco. I have attend it in 2005 and I always wanted to go back again. If you aren’t able to make it to Singapore, you should definitely try to attend Supernova. Sadly, this year I have to can the plan to be in Supernova again but as I was discussing with Kevin over email, we will try to do something together for 2008.

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