Thoughts on Project Petaling Street.

Looks like spam in PPS is making an appearance, and people are noticing.

I've got a few things to say, and not all of them are nice.

The Vikings are already inside the café.

If that particular ping is spam, it's spam, and it'd be best if we assume that the horse has been let out of the stable. It might not have happened already, but let's assume it has, and thus act proactively to stop it.

No, I don't mean lynching the buggers who are responsible for this. Wouldn't that be nice? Gruesome, but nice.

No, don't panic either. It's not the end of Petaling Street. Geez, get a grip, people.

Rethinking Petaling Street.

Aizuddin Danian is a great many things to a lot of people. I don't exactly like or hate him; I've never met him, though Hani has, and hasn't got a bad thing to say about him. I've heard people slagging him off, but who hasn't? Femes blogger syndrome, what did you expect?

Petaling Street, for lack of a better term, is the centre of the huge, messy megacollaborative gestalt that is Malaysian blogging (I think I just out poyo-ed ‘blogosphere’… quick, someone get the Poseur Police!). It wouldn't have been so coherent, so focused for so long without PPS. Face facts, ladies and gentlemen. PPS is our NEP.

It's Here and You Use It.

No, no, don't laugh. Seriously. Without it Malaysian bloggers would've been forced to assimilate themselves into the global blogging community. Instead of one megacommunity we'd have dozens of small communities interacting with Everyone Else and getting blown around by External Forces, oblivious to our fellow countrymen.

We're still dozens of small communities, but at least we're talking with one another on a regular basis.

And frankly I like it. Kinda. I can leech off the careers of bloggers who have made it good and use it to enchance my readership (hey, I just admitted to being a faker last post). And others can do so as well. Most of the time we know when a Malaysian blogger posts something — they usually post, and then ping.

And that may be threatened, not by the forces of globalization, but by spam.

Wait, that is a force of globalization. Nevermind then.

The Future of PPS

But the issue is that PPS is kinda sorta under attack. Well, not yet. Probably. Let's not just over-focus on trying to warn people not to give up their ping addresses. Like I said, too late. Let's start looking at ways in which we can solve this issue — not reactively, but proactively. Perhaps a way to get community members to determine which post is spam and which post isn't? Or something simple (theoretically; I understand that it's pretty damn difficult to implement) as a Bayesian filter?

Then there's the issue of who owns Petaling Street. Aiz does, there's no question. Is that a good thing? I mean, not to diss you or anything, Aiz, but what if you got run over by a bus? PPS dying with you… would really suck.

It's not at all related to spam in PPS, but it's worth thinking about.