I thought that the highlight of yesterday's "Crowdsourcing the Media" panel was really U-Zyn and his Ping.sg project. I'd like to help promote Ping.sg anyway I can and would like to round up support in doing it. Some ideas include:
1. Making "I heart Ping.sg" pin-up buttons (graphic designers?) 2. Ping.sg widgets for Apple Dashboard (I can do) and Yahoo! Widgets (don't know how) 3. Ping.sg Blog Widgets (seriously the best way to get out there) 4. Endorsements from popular bloggers? 5. A video tour of Ping.sg (U-Zyn, let's meetup to make this)
Kevin, have you checked out ping.sg/widgets ? There have been some widgets that I made during the Beta era months ago. Of course it's time for some improvements.
1. There are currently 4 buttons that I made when Ping.sg was still in its beta stage. It's time for some new designs. Any designers here?
2. Cool! [uzyn's to-do: get API up already!]
3. please check out ping.sg/widgets and we can still brainstorm from there. :)
4. Erm.. Personally I don't think this is necessary. With their endorsements, we could end up becoming too celebrity-centric. They can use ping.sg if they want to but I'm not planning to give them any special treatments. Not even myself.
Perhaps we could do a 2nd physical meetup. We could do a trial run of Pingnation (might want to rename to avoid infringement) using one of my video cameras and share more ideas. I've always wanted to visit Pitstop Cafe anyway. :)
Uzyn, I personally feel it depends on the type of vidcast we are looking at.
Diggnation is very technology oriented podcast. And thus, know a lot about technology and the hosts are geeks. They do really stupid geeky stuff, and that's their selling point.
Along the same lines, we can get hosts who are really interested in technology.
However, if we are doing something very specific to blogging, we might need to look at other types of hosts. People who are more bloggers than geeks.I feel that the "two guys sitting on a couch, drinking beer" model might not be popular with blogging community in general. Especially in Singapore.
I personally feel that Uzyn will be a good choice. Firstly, because of his knowledge of tech as well as blogging community. Also being the creator of ping.sg he's quite 'famous'. Atleast among the ping.sg readers.
I don't know Kevin personally, (I just read your blog.. You were feature in commandN!!!), but it seems you could be a great choice for a host.
I also feel that Diggnation might be a good idea to start with, but just as ping.sg is not digg.com, pingNation (or whatever), should be different from diggnation. Possibly something with more 'value'.
Ofcourse this is my personal opinion, and we can always experiment with various ideas.
Erm, I think I'm a little too quiet to be hosting a netcast/vidcast.
Speaking about tech and blog. Maybe we can have 2 segments as a start, which we could potentially split to 2 individual netcasts in the future. Singapore blogosphere and techonlogy, 2 segments. I don't think I'm good at talking about gossips among the blogosphere. But talking about tech I should be pretty ok though at some times when I'm lazy or too busy with work, I might not read any tech news for days.
:-) Chit-chatting is certainly not one of my strengths. No hosting for me.
Just a suggestion: Maybe PingNation could first give an intro and an overview amidst your jokes and gossip. Later maybe can interview two or three pingers in each episode.
A bold idea: How about doing a Chinswing-style podcast? Check out http://www.chinswing.com
One problem with current podcasts is: They are so one-way! If there's some way to do a mashup that enable two-way discussions between hosts, pingers and even listeners, we would have a winner!
clappingtree, check out Net@Nite podcast: http://www.twit.tv/ITN
They're doing live weekly podcasts with listeners. I think that's a good idea. We can have discussions and not putting too much stress to the hosts to come up with topics each week.
I like that idea!
BTW, we can use Pingnation as a codename for now but I am definitely not cool with using it as the final name.
btw, Uzyn, I think u shd be the main host. Can have one or more co-hosts, besides Kevin. Rinaz could come in sometimes. Now that she is featured in The Sunday Times, could be great to kick off with her and talk about Second Life, Ping.sg, she, you and the community.
Oh yes, thanks for the heads-up on TWiT's ITN. Great to know this. Looks like they could do this because of TalkShoe. Want to use that? Or do you have something up your sleeve?
Net@Nite is a great idea. But I don't agree that it will put less stress on the hosts. In such shows the hosts need to know about a lot of stuff, before they can answer/discuss. So actually the hosts need to keep-up with the latest news all the time..
TalkShoe seems like a good platform. They used that in the last TWiT. It was pretty good.
We can use a wiki or Google doc to brainstorm some ideas and questions first before each show. Oh yes, DK has a great sense of humor. He can really talk cock!
(Sorry, getting sleepy. Will catch up tomorrow. Goodnite.)
Over dinner, I was thinking along similar lines to what you guys have said... :)
I suggest that we have a regular anchor (host) and a new co-host every episode. This co-host would be regularly chosen from the blogosphere, so that we can give everyone an opportunity to appear on the show. As such, besides ping.sg, we get to learn about new bloggers every episode. We could do a mini-pong for a co-host as a way of voting who gets in (e.g. pick one from our five).
For the first episode, perhaps it makes sense to make it an "Introduction to Ping.sg" video tour. If no one minds, I could chat with U-Zyn about the project, and he could walk us through all the features of his aggregator. It'd be great for newbies and refreshing for the rest of us.
A few days before show production, we could announce the show's theme in this forum, and invite bloggers / viewers to post questions and suggestions which would then be mentioned by the host. Ze Frank did this extremely well, in which his viewers could steer which way he went, and help by contributing artwork and videos to appear on the show.
Personally, I've always wanted to produce a "Youtube Show" where I'd podcast the best of Youtube every week / month, so people can stay in tune with memes on the web right on their iPod (or what not). Perhaps this idea could be combined with what's going on here.
On frequency, I really don't think a weekly show makes sense... we might want to take it easy and do a monthly one, and make it good. There might not be enough blog content for a weekly show anyway.
BTW: Any fellow animators, videographers, sound engineers here? We'll probably need a volunteer crew much like how Command-N does it.
Yeap. We need to discuss and brainstorm your idea in details. Abit hard to actually discuss everything on the forum. Perhaps you can join us during the next gathering. :)
i believe someone must have already thought of this. i am wondering if ping.sg gets more popular, would that be any issue? The blog post so far are quite mild and to a certain extent can be quite techie at times. If more people start pinging their blog and you get to see more diversify content on religion, politics and sex. would that be any issue? Of course with more updates on the homepage, would information overload become an issue? Perhaps there would be categories, etc? No matter what, it will be an interesting...:)
why not call it PingIsland? pple will see the similarity but we wun run risk of copyright issues.
@dk99, i agree that the posts so far seem to be very niched and once the user base diversifies, we will have the porn, race, religion crowd coming in so its good to have filtering mechanism in place if uzyn dun have them yet..
@ kevin, i really like the idea of profiling different bloggers on the vlog (whateva name it eventually takes). gives pple an incentive to get on their own show.. in addition to establishing their visibility in this community..
@uzyn, i notice there ain;t too much comments yet after the pongs, but a lot of activity on the forums and shoutbox, hence no question of community participation. maybe you want to think about migrating some of that chatter to the ponged articles so all this conversation gets more content-specific? juz a suggestion by learning some of the better digg features..
@astro, @joy Let's not talk about censorship yet. To be a local site, we'll have to follow local laws. We'll see what needs to be done later on if you think the current side is not law-abiding enough.
Thanks for all the attention that Ping.sg is getting. That would bring Ping.sg a little "above the radar" (to quote jseng) and there would be more legality and censorship issues coming in. Generally as a sole founder and programmer for Ping.sg, I only wish to say that I created this site to create a blogger community. I have spent some time in banning some non-bloggers from exploiting the site in order to keep the blogger community as pleasant as possible. I don't wish to judge which opinion is right-wing or left-wing or right or wrong based on my own personal judgement or even judgemeny by a group of people, i'd like to keep this site as free as possible, but if someone requires me to tweak the policy a little to abide by the law (if the site hasn't been law-abiding enough), I would say I would do as much as I could to make it as legal and as possible and still keep its mission, that is to create a local blogger community, as true as possible.
Damn, personally I would really hate to tackle with all these issues. I'm a nerd and I love technology. I do this simply for my love of technology and also to create a more vibrant blogger community which would cater for all bloggers, regardless of his/her popularity. We'll see how it goes.
@ifadel Since you said it, let's meet up and discuss this thing! I'd love to see a netcast or vidcast going on local blogosphere and/or technology started!
@bjornlee on the comment on comments I may be removing the comments soon. When Ping.sg was started there was no comments feature, as I don't want bloggers to have to check both sites for comments on a single entry. I'd like to keep things simple. But in order to encourage discussions among Ping.sg users, I may be linking the comments to the forum so we can keep track of the comments easily. Ping.sg simply moves too fast, most entries don't stay on the front page for over 6 hours, and at the rate that we're growing, the speed is only accelerating.
@ uzyn, maybe steal that leaf from digg's and reddit's book? split the "browser" and the "explorer" groups onto two pages of "popular over 24 hours" and "fresh pings"? =)
Hmmm I'm not sure where I could come in. Maybe sound engineering, although strictly I'm still under training. I just feel like I want to be part of this.
I'd volunteer for host but I don't think I know enough of the scene here...
anyway think someone gotta ask...uzyn you've ever thought about getting sponsors/advertising partners, maybe for the videocast or what ever you call it? :P
yea, uzyn, let me know how i can help. i cant code, but i can help with some of that biz/ legal and sponsorship stuff can be coordinated.. i think u still hv my email from last time?
Good idea, DK. I second that. While I've proposed no control upfront, I do see the need to report any abuse -- inline with the "U-turn until someone says 'No'" principle.
I'll admit, apart from the fact that it's Singapore-centered I took to Ping because it's still rather small and... heh abit on the geeky side. I doubt the 'small' would remain for long, and 'geeky' will also inevitably fade as we get more people.
So yeah. My long-winded way of saying 'agree with dk99'.
I can offer 2 banner space at Wanttotrade.sg and Complains.sg (coming soon). Spoke to U-zyn earlier on these 2 sites .. maybe can explore?
Can also email blast out to my company's customers .. most of them gadgets users since they using our anti-theft software. About 90,000 of them local and overseas.
My wife can also do the same for her chainofbeads.com customers too. About 1000 of them local and overseas)
BTW, this is not an attempt to promote these sites hor. U-zyn knows about these sites, run by my wife, me, some ping.sg members that happen to be members in those sites too.
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