I know it's been a few days already and it sounds stupid to keep this up in the light of recent events, but I actually wrote this a few days before and was planning to post it up when I got back from my Sydney conference anyway. No sense wasting a saved post I guess.

So in reponse to Tim Yang's reply regarding my dugged up can of worms, here is the reply I originally wrote as a comment but then, having it being a little bit too long, I thought I'd turn it into a post and share it all of you because there are some things that all of you might want to hear.

Here goes.

Tim, I may be wrong about this but I think there is a vast difference between blogging philosophy here. You seem to speak of blogging as purely a center of information distribution. Hence you lack presentation on your site because it's simply not needed and instead focus on XML feeds as your means of distributing such information to the public.

I understand that.

But understand that blogging like all forms of ideas and information evolves to other faces as well. In my case or rather the majority of Malaysian blogs, it isn't about the distribution of information, but the freedom to express one's thoughts and emotions – the personal blog.

That itself has a different way and level of "survival" than what you understand and define. At the end of it all…for us at least, our philosophy is based on the will and need to keep expressing those thoughts whether or not there are readership involved. The niche would come naturally. You can't say for sure whether we will "die" out in the end because we lack the technological plugin to distribute our content via XML. Like how you omit presentation in your blog needfully. Many of us omit XML feeds needfully as well.

We find no strong need for it.

It doesn't mean we will fade out in the end.

As for the idea part. Ok so you said it was a bad idea. Then I really don't get what the whole hoohah is about. PPS is for everyone. It utilises Freedom 0. Sure…it isn't perfect, but everyone who is interested in joining the community can use it what its for. You want something that resembles PPS try Blogs of the Day. That is the closest site that can come to the PPS which applies globally. As always, nothing is perfect and it also has its own issues too. There is a vast amount of blogs out there and to have a centralised database for all of us would be almost impossible given our current situation.

I can't speak for all bloggers but I can say that at least for me again, the philosophy behind it is that blogs are a reflection of who we are. And as people behind the posts, we seek other people to connect to and share our lives with. PPS has done what was needed to be done in the first place.

Create a community of bloggers.

Live or die, that choice belongs to us.

You can't fault that for being a bad idea. You can't fault all of us because we changed the rules of blogging that doesn't suit your utopia of information distribution. Tim Yang. It's just that…PPS works. Maybe not to the world you envisioned it to be, but to the world we needed to create here in Malaysia…it works.

Don't you think it's time we all moved along from this? At least create something worthwhile again for the world to share if that is what you wish. At least pick up a responsibility to help educate what we don't know if that's the way you view us rather than condemning those of us who are left in the dark.

Let not brilliance be wasted on hatred.

Let not ignorance beget its own follies.