A couple of days ago I had the chance to meet up with Vera and Thamrin, both coordinators of the project 'blogging for democracy' as well as bloggers themselves.

They told me about the idea of their project (which is, in essence, to teach politicians and NGOs about blogging).

They said they were a bit disappointed only few of the politicians they had taught in seminars had actually become regular bloggers, but to me the fact that they participated in such seminars seems interesting enough!

We went on to chat about this and that. Some interesting issues came up that will need further investigation:

- Blogging and islam:Thamrin and Vera told me that the blogosphere has come to be a battleground for a growing islam issue. bloggers writing with more moderate views have received threats from fundamentalists groups an vice versa. The blog 'wadhel' (read 'what the hell') had been started in response the growing number of fundamentalists opinions but was closed down in May of this year.

- Blogging and women: Vera says, even though the distribution of men and women bloggers is about 50-50, the content of the blog is strongly dependant on the geneder of the author. Men tend to write about technology, politics and current issues, female authors tend to write about their families, cooking and their everyday life.

Nita has conducted a small survey within the Indonesian Blog Community.

Some of the interesting results include:

- 59 % of bloggers/readers get to know about new blogs through links on blogs they already know,

- 48% read between 5-10 Blogs regularly

- 17% of readers comment 'regularly' or 'always', and 53% comment sometimes!

Read the rest of the survey here:

http://nita.goblogmedia.com/HTML/risetblog.html

Yesterday I stopped by Edwin´s Gallery on Kemang Raya, a place that usually shows some interesting contemporary art from Indonesia and Asia.

This time, only one piece really caught my eye: A sculpture by Korean artist Yi Hwan-Kwon. It´s a painted fiberglass figure of a boy on a kickboard, but the entire figure is stretched and flattened in a way that really confuses your brain when looking at it.

I think because our brain is so used to process the sight of a human figure and expects it to have a certain proportion, the brain tries to compensate for the ‚missing dimensions’ of Kwonkwon´s figure, so it´s kind of like an optical illusion.

It´s a really fun piece of art, some cute details like the Fila-Socks the boy is wearing round it off. Unfortunately, it´s already sold… I wonder who´s the lucky owner?!