Partisan politics pushes social media forum off track

by Aidila Razak
Sourced from http://malaysiakini.com/news/167178
Jun 17, 11 | 8:47am
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A panel discussion on political campaigning through social media lost its plot as Malaysian partisan politics raised temperatures at the World Bloggers and Social Media Summit yesterday.

Despite the presence of international panelists from the UK and the Philippines, the focus kept returning to Malaysian politics as some members of the audience trained their guns on moderator and Malaysiakini CEO Premesh Chandran.

Opening the floodgates was blogger Zainol Abideen, who blogs as Mahaguru58 and used his first opportunity to ask a question to complain about being removed from Malaysiakini’s Top Blogs section. He claimed that he was removed after he “started to become critical of Pakatan Rakyat”.

Cheered on by the audience, he also expressed unhappiness over Malaysiakini’s policy to allow “anonymous commentators who do not have the (guts) to show their names” to post comments considered “sensitive to people’s religions”.

The blogger, who claimed to represent the Muslim Bloggers Alliance, was also critical of Malaysiakini’s editorial stance which it said highlighted too much of negativity in Malaysia, thus scaring away investors.

Backlash on Twitter

While Zainol’s comments received cheers of support among the audience, the live tweet stream from the summit, which was projected onto the wide screen beside the stage, saw several members accusing the blogger of bigotry himself.

Some put the spotlight on a video posted on the Internet featuring the blogger saying that “Christians in Malaysia are starting to get out of hand” and suggesting that non-Muslims be tattooed on the chest or forehead to avoid body-snatching cases.

In a blog posting, Zainol later claimed that he was only joking about the tattooing of non-Muslims.

Chandran responded by explaining Malaysiakini’s editorial policy to speak for the underdogs and their concerns, including wastage in government expenditure, and that the portal bans users who continually post racist and bigoted comments after three warnings.

He also pointed out that Malaysiakini features blogs from the likes of former New Straits Times editor A Kadir Jasin and ex-premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who cannot be said to be pro-Pakatan.

While the portal takes no responsibility over the content of the blogs it features, it does remove blogs when it receives complaints that the sites are defamatory and inflammatory in nature.

Good parents don’t grant total freedom

Malaysiakini was also put on the spot when asked if it will continue to be as critical of the government if Pakatan Rakyat takes over Putrajaya.

“You can ask our journalists who know that they get it from both sides, and we have been sued by Pakatan and BN politicians and we deal with both accordingly, and will continue to do so if Pakatan comes into power,” Chandran said.

While several other questions beyond partisan politics were raised, they were not about the original panel discussion of using social media for political campaigning, but focusing instead on the topic of the previous session on social media ethics.

In her comment, one blogger placed the granting of freedom of expression as a fundamental right in the context of “good parenting”.

“You will never give your child absolute freedom for his or her own good,” she said.

This was, however, refuted by Filipino panelist Tonyo Cruz, who said that there is no reason to question the belief that humans have the right to free expression.

“Don’t deny it to yourself and your children. If you take it away from yourself, you become less human,” said the member of Blogwatch, which is widely acclaimed to have significantly influenced the results of the presidential elections in the Philippines.

Mahaguru58 during the QnA with Malaysiakini CEO, in the background.

JAMESJG.COM said only the last session of the World Blogger and Social Media Summit chaired by Malaysiakini CEO, Premesh Chandran went a little off track yesterday. A few other bloggers who have negative comments against Malaysiakini couldn’t made it to the mic for the Q&A session. Not so free to expression eh MyEvents?

Overall the bloggers’ summit was a success with top world bloggers (minus owners of WordPress, blogspot, Peter Cashmore of Mashable) sharing their experience with the audience.

Sessions with AirAsia X CEO Azran Osman and Tune Talk’s Jason Lo in the panelist, were lively and great.

Nevertheless the summit was an eye opener to social media newbies. Politicians should block their diary for the coming social media summit this November.

YB Muhyiddin Yassin leading the march to the nomination centre.

The Sibu by-election is a testing ground for many politician on the effectiveness of the Internet in getting their message across to the voters. The Sibu parliamentary by-election also see the launching of the BN candidate’s personal website.

I believe the website main target group is the young, IT-savvy and first-timer Chinese voters. Most of the content are in Chinese, hence it will not serve the non-Chinese (for the time being).

The website will serve as an example to other politicians who wants to publish their activities and most importantly the messages and issues right from their own notebook. That’ll fill up the editing done by the mainstream media.

I want one too

So, Yang Berhormat sekalian.. what do you need to get a personal website up?

1. A person who can write about your activities, knows how to operate the video camera (and edit it), knows how to operate the digital camera (and knows the good angle to shoot)
2. A webmaster – no need to get those with master degree to do this. Anyone who knows how to manage cPanel (the most common application), a WordPress blog and get it all networked with other social network sites.
3. Don’t pay them too little. You pay peanuts, you’ll get monkeys hahahaaa..
4. And, please do not expect all the content to be there. You need time to gather all the documents, photos to make an informative site. So, it means, do not launch your website when the election is being announce. Do it NOW!

Snippets

PAS is sending a large team to Sibu for the by-election obviously to help their fellow opposition candidate to win this by-election. Their target area are the Malay/Melanau majority. PAS is a believer of Islamic law in Malaysia and they are pursuing it. On the other hand, the DAP has always maintain their stand that Islamic law should not be use in Malaysia. Confusing isn’t it? You need a dancing to balance it, kan? Vote for Barisan Nasional!

I assume you have already managed to install WordPress using your Fantastico De Luxe feature that comes with your cPanelX. It’s really easy and shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes.

Downloading the theme

Perform a search on Google using the keyword “free WordPress themes” or similar phrases and look for a template that will fit your needs. Once you find a WP template that you like, preview it (check its live demo) to see if all is OK. Imagine how it shall look like on your website (blog). Then click the download button or link and you should be downloading a .zip file.

Extract the file

Extract the .zip file on your PC and read the ReadMe document that is included within the template’s files (if any) for your reference and to know the license.

Uploading to your web server

Upload the complete folder of your template to your WordPress installation – into the following folder: yourwebsite.com/wp-content/themes/

The best way to do this is to upload the files via FTP using an FTP client. Uploading files via the file manager from your cPanelX would take too long time and would be quite difficult as you would have to upload the files file by file. So if your web hosting provider supports FTP, it’s worth using it.

Activate the theme

Now that the files are uploaded, you just need to activate the template. To activate it simply login to your WP installation on yourwebsite.com/wp-login.php and go to Appearance > Themes and just select the new theme. Click “Activate”. Now when you refresh your website, it should load with the new WordPress theme.

So that’s it, you are done!

Once a blogger will be a blogger! I have closed my first blog at uchukeling.com earlier today and decided to be more personalised in my approach to blogging. Hence, I decided to register my newest domain – www.jamesjg.com – the short tag for James Joshua Guang.

Today also marked my migration to WordPress 2.8 which shall see the merging of WordPress and WordPress MU at a later date.

Plugins

To my fellow blogger friends, here are the list of plugins that I am using for this blog. And, I will create a special tutorial category for new blogger who would like to have a blog powered by WordPress. The tutorial will be based on the various questions emailed to me. If you have any thing to ask, please send your email to blog[at]jamesjg.com and I will try my best to assist you.

• Comment License shows a license with terms of your choosing in your comments form. You can edit the terms of your license in the options page.
• Most Popular Posts is a basic widget for your sidebar that creates a list of links to the top posts on your blog according to the number of comments on the post. You can customize the widget title, number of links to show and whether or not you want to display the comment count.
• No Duplicate Comments check comments for duplicate content using Google AJAX Search API as they are published. This helps to avoid having duplicate content in your posts. It only checks approved comments that have over 50 words. The plugin searches two random strings, both 8 words length. If one of them finds an exact match, it emails you letting you know so you can check it yourself and decide if you want to delete it.
• Smart Youtube is a plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos/playlists in your post, comments and in RSS feed. The main purpose of the plugin is to correctly embed youtube videos into your blog post. The video will be shown in full in your RSS feed as well.
• WordPress Mobile Edition is a plugin that shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device. Mobile browsers are automatically detected, the list of mobile browsers can be customized on the settings page.

Bookmark

To my gentle readers, I will be grateful if you care to amend your bookmark and add this latest blog. To avoid missing any of my post, you can click here for the RSS feed.

Theme

This is the hardest process of owning a personal blog – choosing the right theme to reflect our personality. No doubt there are hundreds of free themes available on the Net, but what we want may comes in bits and pieces, and in the end we may have to choose the one nearest to what we wanted.

Quick loading and readability is definitely the top priority for my blog. That comes in the form of visual-friendly fonts in term of its size and colour. To those of you who are new to blogging and WordPress, the theme can be change via the Appearance (yourdomain.com/wp-admin/themes.php) feature at your administrative settings.

How do I get the theme to appear in the list?

You need to upload the theme to your web server. For me, I am using Core FTP Lite for my FTP. Make sure you upload it to the correct folder, which is usually found at yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/

Interested to have a domain of your own?

What could be the best thing to have on the Internet if not your own personalised domain name. A personal domain is like having your own home address on the Net. Its like the address of your house where people can send mail, gifts, visit you (of course) and what’s better than to print your own t-shirt with the dotCom on it.

Drop me an email if you are interest to get one just like mine – jamesjg.com!

Lightbox – Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

Featured Content Gallery – I use this plugin to create a featured content gallery anywhere within my wordpress theme. Authored by Jason Schuller, the plugin uses SmoothGallery, a script developed by JonDesign’s. The plugin requires at least WordPress 2.3.

WordPress PDA & iPhone – This plugin will enable users of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and iPhone to view my blog from their phones browser.

Akismet – This plugin comes with your WordPress installation. It checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need to register with WordPress to get your Akismet API key.

Smart YouTube – Insert YouTube videos in posts, comments and RSS feeds with ease and full customization. By Vladimir Prelovac.

Getting Socially networked
Most of us would (by now) is a member of one social network like Facebook. And, I am a member of the following network.

Facebook – you could get addicted to this network. I found a lot of my long lost schoolmates here.
Flickr – where I store my photos.
Twitter – the micro blogging application that I use every now and then.

List of Application

• Adobe Photoshop CS (for my image editing and web interface).
• Xampp – Offline webserver for me to test phpBB and WordPress before it goes online.
• CoreFTP – to upload files to my web servers.
• Microsoft 2007 – to do work, of course.
• Firefox
• Adobe Reader
• Video Lan – for me to watch movies (less worries on codec)
• Winamp – to push MiriFM live on the Internet (soon) + Shoutcast
• SPB mobile applications – to get it connected to my mobile devices
• ROXIO applications – to download my photos from digital camera
• Games? – hmm undecided yet but always hope that Super Mario is available on PC (updated one larr)

All that on 01 January 2009 .. a day to relax after the New Year celebration (this year we’ll be celebrating at Indin Resort.. all night of beach BBQing, beer, wine and poco poco).

Till then.. have an explosive New Year Eve everyone!

Cheers from UchuKeling.com!! God bless.