Being my usual self on a cold windy night, I decided to do something that fits my inquisitive nature perfectly. Connective blog hopping. The kind where you pick a blog with links and see where it goes from there. It just so happens that I dug up on a very old skeleton in the closest.

His name goes by Tim Yang.

To those of you who already know, there is no point in explaining it any further. To those of you who don't know, I'll keep the story short because some skeletons are not really meant to be displayed out there. As far as I know, Tim Yang claims to be one of the longest Malaysian bloggers around (since 1996) and that the very idea behind Project Petaling Street was his idea which was snatched away by Aizuddin Danian. That and something between all Malaysians are tech illiterate cheapskates and elitist ideals (added on note: Plus banning all Malaysian IP addresses from his site)…well…you can understand why this ugly mess should be moved along and kept out of sight.

To me that all doesn't matter.

Because ancient history aside, it comes up to one question that I have seen been tossed back and forth in that very tiresome argument.

Who does Project Petaling Street belong to?

I believe I can answer that question.

It belongs to every blogger who uses it.

I am a blogger and I am lucky to use something like Project Petaling Street. It gets my blog out there if not to the world then to a bunch of people I would like to call my community. Isn't that good enough? It doesn't matter who came up with the idea. As long as the idea came up in the first place. It doesn't matter who took the idea.

It matters that they used it for something that benefits people.

Yes. Proprietary rights still apply in the world. It applies only if you plan to make money out of it but in the end, a system built on selectivity rather than diversity would only corrode into stagnation. This is a world built on the diversity and flow of ideas. It doesn't matter if you came up with an idea first, because with 6 billion people on the planet…someone probably has a better idea than you. It matters that you make it, change it, you evolve it into something better than what you previously thought off.

That's what PPS has become.

An idea made into reality. Built up. Refined and evolving with the help of many ideas as times go along. It made a community.

And the community makes it up.

So yeah, I believe that we own PPS. PPS belongs to everyone who uses it to ping their blogs. It belongs to everyone who uses it to read other people's blogs. Just as when an artists creates something, whatever the artist creates belongs to society. PPS was created with the society in mind for the society to use and with that, it belongs to the society it was created for.

Not Tim Yang. Not Aizuddin Danian.

Not the Beta Testers who helped fine tune the system.

But every one of us who pings PPS.

Every one of us who reads PPS.

Every one of us who are PPS.