ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

JUST WHAT DID I SAY at Nexus 2007, the special Web 2.0 event last Saturday? A quick look at the writeups of several bloggers suggests that different people heard and saw different things.

First, Benjamin Koe, in Almost social media (Nexus 2007), had been most flattering:

“Although the speaker line up included Nathan Torkington (O’Reilly) and Cory Ondrejka (Linden Labs), I learned the most from a fellow Singaporean: the blogger known as ClappingTrees…

“This happened in a panel discussion hosted by Kevin which included Kathy Teo (CNET Asia), Jennifer Lewis (STOMP), James Seng (Tomorrow.SG). As the discussions went on about crowdsourcing the media, I began to wonder why the distributed nature of free content creation was embraced, but gatekeeping was left to a bunch of editors… Then came ClappingTrees to the mic and spoke the words that were on my mind.

“The question (paraphrased) was basically: In a world of social gatekeeping (think digg), why do the above crowdsourcing media qualify as gatekeepers of content that’s not even theirs?“

NEXT, THREE BLOGGERS who mentioned me (that I know of) had been quite factual in their reporting. For example,

Vanessa wrote:

“Question time. Josephine reminds us of Sim Wong Hoo’s old article on Singapore’s no U-turn policy, while in the US everyone can do a U-turn unless they’re told otherwise (it’s an allusion to our over-reliance on rules to limit what people can do). James responds that attempts in Singapore to form a Digg-like community has yet to really take off.

This is the point where Uzyn from Ping.sg shows himself and we give him a round of applause.”

DK wrote:

“Uzyn stole the stage for 5 minutes halfway thru the panel. It started with Clappingtree talking about tomorrow.sg’s way of selecting article and how difficult it was for bloggers to gain readership. She mentioned about ping.sg which suddenly drew lots of attention among the audience.”

Marina (a.k.a. Rinaz) wrote:

“In the middle of the session, a lady from the floor, Clappingtree, asked the panelists on why there should be a censorship. She reasonsed that everyone, as long as they are within social values, should have a voice and a chance to be heard. She mentioned that ping.sg, a blog aggregator was a site where every blog had an equal chance of being read.

“After the session, Uzyn, creator of ping.sg got hounded by fans.”

Then surprise of surprises… reading the writeup of Kevin Lim (the moderator of the session) gave me a shock and an aftershock. Initially, he wrote (the same thing) in three separate blogs on his site:

“James took the opportunity to explain how news gets published on Tomorrow.sg. He considers Tomorrow.sg as a form of human news filter, where they depend on a diverse set of editors to create balanced gatekeeping. From geeks to celebrities, conservatives to liberals, tomorrow.sg has them all. Still, this has never been enough for some bloggers (JK> Here is a link to my blog. And wow! I’ve become “some bloggers”), and tomorrow.sg has constantly come under fire for being biased given their set of editors. This issue has been beaten to death years ago, and there are always ways to get around this.”

Later, he revised this writeup in one of the blogs as follows:

“James took the opportunity to explain how news gets published on Tomorrow.sg. He considers Tomorrow.sg as a form of human news filter, where they depend on a diverse set of editors to create balanced gatekeeping. From geeks to celebrities, conservatives to liberals, tomorrow.sg has them all. Still, this has never been enough for some bloggers. Some time ago, I witnessed that the power law was developing in the Singapore blogosphere, and it was Clappingtrees (aka JK) who revitalized this idea at the panel’s Q&A, by *arguing* that popular blog aggregators such as Tomorrow.sg had *biased editors*. I do feel that this issue has been beaten to death years ago and that the more productive route would be to try new ways of getting around this.” (Note: Asterisks added by me.)

Come, come, all of you who were there and listening to me. Tell me what did I say?

Afternote 30-03-2007: Just found CoolInsights’ comments on what I said.