Ping.sg was started as a bedroom project by myself. I was the sole designer, coder, and investor. [More on the history of Ping.sg]
It has been 2 years since the project has started and the Singapore blogger community has seen a very steady and promising growth over the years. Membership and readership counts have increased steadily over time.
I created Ping.sg to be a platform that helps to connect local bloggers and blog readers. So far I believe it has been pretty successful at doing that. Occasionally, we do see some commercial sites or adult sites trying to abuse the site to gain traffic for their commercial benefits. Thanks to the reports from the community, we have been able to cope with such abuse by banning such sites from Ping.sg, thus retaining the relevance of the community - aggregating latest and interesting blog posts for bloggers and blog readers.
Over the years since Ping.sg was launched, we have seen a lot of good posts by bloggers and the growth, not just in size but in significance, of the Singapore blogosphere. We have also seen a fair share of ‘blog wars’ among the bloggers, attacking each other.
Personally, I am deeply saddened by such acts, but so far I have refrained myself from making any comments on such issues. I consider such issues as micro-level issues and I as the founder and sole developer of Ping.sg should not make any comments on the internal fights among the members. My focus is always on the macro-level of things, ie. to further improve Ping.sg and to enhance Ping.sg to be a better platform for bloggers to follow and connect with each other.
As the 2nd Anniversary Party Organizing Committee of which I am also part of, along with Daphne, is busy trying to organize the celebration party, I have already started engaging a designer to further improve the layout and usability of Ping.sg and I have also started working on several features which I hope would help the bloggers connect to each other and make possible to follow the now-pretty-rapid postings of new blogs. I hope to unveil these features, packaged with Ping.sg 2.0 at the upcoming event.
So far, Ping.sg is in the red, financially. Yes, there are advertisements on Ping.sg, but they are barely enough to cover the expenses of Ping.sg, don’t even mention my salary. If you have known me personally, you would know that I am involved in a lot of projects and my girlfriend, Sek Ling would know how busy I am everyday of the week. I am working more than 8 hours a day trying to meet the deadlines of my clients’ projects, my other startup - Widgeous, and yet I’m still trying my best to squeeze out some time to do some development and maintenance work for Ping.sg simply because I love the community, and I enjoy reading blogs and seeing it grow. I sincerely would also like to thank Daphne for volunteering to be a community manager as I find less and less time for myself to provide for the social-side of the community. She is currently holding a day job herself, a very stressful one, and yet still trying her very best to interact with the community and provide for the community. She’s doing all of these without getting paid a single cent. Everytime I reminded her of how grateful I am towards what she has done and hoping that I could compensate her enough for her work, she would push me aside claiming she enjoys doing what she’s doing and that she loves the community. If you know Daphne personally, you would know how much Ping.sg means to her. Her life now almost fully revolves around the people of Ping.sg.
Of course, being an active community, the members, core or not, have played very significant roles in it. Countless, or I would say almost all, of meetups and activities are organized by members themselves. Being in quite a few of the meetups, of course missing quite a few as well, I have always enjoyed interacting with the bloggers and I am proud to say that I have made so many blogger friends throughout the course of running Ping.sg. I would also like to thank the community for being so supportive of this project and keep blogging. I procrastinate a lot during my work and you know what I do when I procrastinate - read your blogs!
Of the misunderstandings that have been happening in Ping.sg recently, a few users have accused Daphne and I for not taking any actions against the bloggers for their “mis-blogs”. On top of my stance of being indifferent on the internal micro-level “fights”, it has also never be the intention of Ping.sg to start controlling what the bloggers say. Even if we want, we are absolutely powerless to do that, unless of course we start screening each and every blog posts before being published. Ping.sg is a platform to share, and never to control the blogosphere. It is merely a tool for the bloggers.
I will stay focused in my work to improve Ping.sg for the bloggers in the region. My rewards for running the site is seeing the blossom of the blogosphere and seeing how much bloggers are making friends from the platform and do a lot of interesting collaboration projects and all.
I love Ping.sg and I will not hesitate to take any actions to stop any unappreciative users from trying to break the site and the community.
July 5th, 2008
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