600+/5,000 bloggers in this small town? (in a Million Bloggers Nation?)

Think Balik Pulau is small?

After all, there are not even a single local TV/radio station, a local newspaper, a major mass publication (that reaches 10,000 or more readers, besides the national or sub-national ones) and not even taxis in Balik Pulau - the only public transportation modes in Balik Pulau are the new government-owned Rapid Penang and the slowly dying private Yellow Bus busses.

Still, the small district-town of around 30,000 (based on the eligible voters number at ~23,000 for the state legislative areas for Pulau Betong and Teluk Bahang in the Balik Pulau parliamentary area, NOT including the one other slighly larger state legislative area of Bayan Lepas) residing in mostly village houses (as there are currently zero hi-rises in this area, to-date) boasts well over 600 profiles in the blogging platform (Google) Blogger.com alone. - A search on "Bayan Lepas" alone would return a result of ~4,000 profiles.

i.e. What connects this remote Balik Pulau directly, and fast, to the larger world 24/7, instead of planes or express buses/trains are the Mobile and DSL broadbands, and Internet dialups connectivity enabling its residents to mass-reach the entire world via self-publishing, in the convenient forms of blogs, microblogs and plethora other social media sites.

That's at least 600 online publications by residents of Balik Pulau (as each blogger maintains at least one blog site), or as many as 5,000 online publications in total, if to include the Bayan Lepas state legislative area (NOT the larger metro-like Bayan Lepas town/city area which would otherwise include most of Bayan Baru, Bukit Gedong, Pantai Jerejak, Batu Uban and Bukit Jambul too).

At this count, 1 in about 50 BP-ites blog, or as high as 1-in-10 in the Bayan Lepas area.

By the way, this ratio does not take into account, bloggers who publish on other platforms such as Wordpress.com, Friendster.com, LiveJournal, Blog.com, Blogstarz etc. or at self-hosted domains using independent Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Wordpress, TypePad, Movable Type, Joomla etc.

The Blogging Nation

However, these numbers are considerably lower than at other more developed and dense areas in Penang, such as George Town alone that boasts nearly 30,000 Blogger profiles alone out of about 50,000 in the state of Pulau Pinang, and Kuala Lumpur with well over 200,000 profiles, of which there could be as many as ONE MILLION BLOGGERS in Malaysia - As many as 1 in every 30 Malaysians blog!

The graph and ranking list below from Google Insight based on web searches for the term "blog" since 2004, shows a steady increase, and currently place Malaysia at #3 in the world, just behind Viet Nam and France, ahead of her closest neighboring countries, Singapore and Indonesia at #4 and #9 respectively:

The larger 1,000,000 number also coincides with total Malaysia-based profiles on the fast-growing Facebook social media/networking platform as of today (1,054,260 as of March 2, 2009). However, a search on Facebook pulls only about 30 profiles with "Balik Pulau" as user's hometown, although the maximum result of 500 was resulted due to a high number of Facebook users having studied in Balik Pulau-based educational institutions -- Perhaps, most Facebookers a.k.a. the elite Malaysian Internet users prefers to put their workplace city as their hometown in their online social profile. A search on the fast-growing microblogging or microsharing platform, Twitter pulls even much smaller result.

Now imagine the 4-million or so Friendster users (who are mostly teenagers and pre-graduation higher education students) finally starting to migrate by the masses to Facebook (which is currently being participated by less than 8% under-18 years olds) and adopt the microblogging culture (which is fast-growingly popular in the United States, Japan and Europe), Malaysians will be having as many as four million blogs and microblogs in perhaps, a four-year time, i.e. by the next political General Election in Malaysia (by or before 2013)!

Will we be ready by then?

Will our next Prime Minister have at least 100,000 supporters on his/her Facebook Fan page, or at least 100,000 followers to his/her Twitter account?

How about our local (Balik Pulau/Penang - is there any? at all??) brands, heck even Malaysia brands such as Air Asia, Malaysia Airlines, Proton, Petronas, Berjaya, Genting, 1901, Jobstreet etc.?

Consider that Mr. Barack Obama, the newly elected President of the United States has more than five-million supporters (psst. ahead of the Coca-Cola and Nutella brands at near 3-million each, or celebrities like Cristiano Ronaldo, Rihana and Michael Phelps at over 2-million each) on his Facebook Fan page, and 340,278 followers on his Twitter account as of March 1, 2009. Meanwhile, our Prime-Minister-in-Waiting YAB Dato' Seri Najib bin Razak only has 113 Twitter followers and 703 Facebook supporters as of today while the political Opposition Leader, YB Dato' Seri Anwar bin Ibrahim isn't too far ahead at just 187 Twitter followers and 17,500 Facebook fans. (The most popular Malaysian on Facebook today is the very vocal former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tun Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, who also maintains the most popular individual blog in Malaysia at chedet.com - established since May 2008, with well over 60,000 supporters on Facebook)

Will say 200,000+ bloggers and microbloggers in Penang, including at least 10,000 in Balik Pulau alone, by 2013, enable creations and elevations of our first of local (Penang-originated) brands?

Glocal Media/Brand

And why not start with the Media itself! (for the local brand, I meant). Who's out there to take on this challenge, and initiatives? Who will work on our first, truly local daily/weekly newspaper for Penang, even in an online form if the printed form seems to be enormously impossible? Who will start our own truly local radio and TV stations, in competition to the federal-government owned RTM's Mutiara.fm?

Are the few journalists for Sinar Harian covering the five regions of Penang, putting the entire Balik Pulau and Southwest District of Penang Island into "Tanjung 2" enough for us? Is The Star's "North" Metro edition covering the northern region of Peninsula Malaysia all the way down south to Ipoh, Perak (some 100+ kilometres away!) good enough for us?

Our universities - is Apex-elevated USM with about half-a billion Ringgit in additional funding for the next few years, up to the challenge? How about UiTM, WOU or other major Penang-based higher learning institutions? Perhaps the Tourism University that's supposed to open in Balik Pulau within the next few years?

Who will start producing podcasts, and live streaming of media coverage in Balik Pulau? Heck, the entire Penang? Will the public state/island-wide Wi-Fi project that is to be rolled out by the Penang State government this year enable these local media initiatives?

(For certain, the present 3GB & 5GB hi-speed download cap for Maxis & Celcom 3G broadband services that throttles "Unlimited Data Plan" customers' speed to under well under 100Kbps CANNOT accomodate these high bandwidth media distribution!)

Yesterday, a major conference on branding called "Branding Malaysia" was held in Kuala Lumpur.Was it just another self-congratulatory celebration for the 1% large companies - Celcom, Media Prima etc., which are mostly government-linked, and the few SMEs out of the 19% businesses in Malaysia being cared the most by the government's MIDF, SMIDEC, MATRADE and many other acronyms you've heard so far, while average Malaysians can't even get RM10,000 loans to start or improve micro businesses (being rejected by the banks by the 100,000s!)?

Wake up Malaysia! Wake up Penangites! Wake up BP-ites!

Let us be the media producing nation, not just a behemoth media consuming one.

(Malaysia for instance is ranked among the largest web traffic contributor to US-based Friendster at over 10% and to several entertainment/sociopolitical blogs, and all ten most visited websites for Malaysians are foreign-based).

Think Local Brand... Think Micro! I like the tagline by Pistachio Consulting, whose Laura Fitton is completing a Twitter for Dummies book for August 2009 publication: "Micro Sharing. Macro Results".

Perhaps only then, our most popular social media entities that we can be proud of would be of local entertainers, brands, products, athletes, companies etc. instead of just politicians from the two ugly sides.

Power of the (Mass, Social) Media in the hands of the People....


The amateur writer, @WoNoJo has constantly been one of the first few thousand Malaysian Internet/email marketer, webmasters, bloggers, micro bloggers, group moderators etc. and has been writing casually on the new media since 1992. ie. an early new media adopter, but continuously struggles as a self-financed entrepreneur for many years due to his hesitance to emigrate off his birthplace island that is over 300 km away from the nation's capital city. He likes Numbers but has been horrible at Finance. He is campaigning for and working on several micro initiatives to promote and establish local media to empower the people (who are mostly being disregarded from the four decades of over-federalization in Malaysia), with microworking capabilities and economic freedom. He 'hentam keromo' blogs and tweets at http://wonojo.com (since mid 2007). He has over 666 followers (and counting fast) in his 'cult' (sorry, not applicable for registration with the Registrar of Societies or the Ministry of Information) as of 3/3/09.