I wasn´t sure at all how to approach something as diverse and intangible as ‘the Indonesian blogosphere’. For sure, I first needed to find out what Indonesian blogs look like and how they work, and of course what bloggers write about!

My first step to approach the Indonesian blogosphere systematically was to conduct a content analysis. That is to say, I chose a handful of blogs, read through their posts and categorized their content. Since my background is in cultural studies, it made sense to especially look at how the individual posts deal with things as cultural background, religion, belonging to certain social groups etc.

Of course, some additional information was also of interest to me, such as the identity of the author, the frequency of posting and so forth.


Method

There are more than 400.000 Indonesian blogs, so there really are plenty to choose from. I decided to choose the list of blogs that was published on pestablogger.com as my sample. (Pesta Blogger 2007 was the first nation-wide bloggers’ festival in Jakarta, held in October 2007) My thinking is as follows: the bloggers who participated at Pesta Blogger are likely to be dedicated bloggers who are in it for more than just a day. They probably aim at keeping their blogs up to date and of interest to fellow bloggers and readers. I could assume that blogs on that list somewhat represent the range of ideas and approaches that are relevant in the Indonesian blogosphere.

About 300 bloggers participated at Pesta Blogger and my first high goal was to pick at least 10% for my content analysis. Of these 30 blogs I wanted to each read and analyze the first 10 posts. It soon became apparent that this would take way too long, so I cut down the number of blogs to 10. These 10 blogs I chose randomly from the list.

Appart from sorting the connten of the posts to my categories, I also took the following data for each blog:

The language, The use of multimedia, the number of comments to each entry, the date of the first and the tenth entry, sex and origin of the author (if available), the perspective of the blog (wheter it´s written in a personal way or neutral) and the kind (whether it´s open to all kinds of content or has a fixed concept).

The analysis was conducted between the 3rd and 20th of December.

The results will take a bit longer... but I´ll post them as soon as possible!

When I hear kambing I usually think of my favorite sate kambing grill on jl. karang tengah, or maybe I think of it´s relative, the sheep, which I secretly consider to be my totem animal.

But in this case, kambing (or goat) stands for a genius social initiative thought of and followd through by a group of Indonesian bloggers. This initiative, 'Bloggers for Bangsari' had bloggers collect money for a unique donation: from the collected money, goats where bought and sent to Bangsari, a small town in Java. There, they would be taken care of and bred by school children from poor families, the money arising from this helping to pay their tuition fees. All in all, 15 goats were sent to Bangsari!

Sadly, the blog about this initiative stops its entries with the arrival of the goats at their new home. I would really like to find out what has happened since then, and how the children are benefiting from this action. Are they now able to pay tuition fees and attend school, or are they too busy taking care of the goats?!

update:

The blog does go on reporting about what´s happening in Bangsari! Apparently, the number of goats increased to 43. The initiators of the program have recently visited each of the children taking care of some of the goats.

From Business Week, 2. July 2007:

A consortium of six companies (Telkom, Indosat, Excelcomindo, Bakrie Telecom, Infokom Elektrindo, Powertek Utama Internusa) are working together in the aim to build an optical fibre cable ring that is to connect 33 provinces and 440 urban centers all over Indonesia.

The ‚Cincin Pelapa’ or ‚Pelapa Ring’ Project consists of seven optical fibre networks within Sumatera, Jawa, Kalimantan, Nusa Tenggara, Sulawesi, Maluku and Papua, as well as one main line that connects the other networks. The length of the entire cable network will reach 33 000 km.

Constructions are scheduled to start in 2008, with first parts of the network ready to use in early 2009.


Sources:

• Tempointeraktif
• Kompas (print)
• Warnet2000

It was the Xmas time of year, which means I get to spend some time with my family in Lembang, or rather, close to Lembang in a mountainous resort with a spectacular view over Bandung (which is Indonesia´s second largest city).

I agree the view IS rather great, however, I soon started to miss the even broader view of the world the screen of my laptop (connected to the internet) has to offer.

I persuaded my mom to drive me 'down' to the more populated regions in search of a 'WI-FI' café (which are practically to be found on every corner in Jakarta). The search took me to a mall, curiously called 'The Paris of Java'. After asking around, I was exited to hear that there is free WI-FI access in the entire mall! However I was disappointed with a slow, unstable connection that made it more or less impossible to work.

After that, I asked around in several locations for a WI-FI café, with no success! Badung Bloggers, I know you are out there, but where do you blog? Any tips for WI-FI cafés in/around Sukajadi or Lembang area are helpful to me, because before you know, it will be that time of the year again...

Internet Usage seems not to be easy to determine. Statistics vary a lot, perhaps depending on how usage is defined and the data collected. Do you count only the number of subscriptions? How about all the people sharing internet accesss in an office or in a internet café?

For example, Internet World Stats claims there were

2,000,000 Internet Users in 2000 and
20,000,000 Internet Users in 2007

in Indonesia.

That makes for a 8.9 % penetration and a use growth of 900.0 % between 2000 and 2007.


PT Insan Komunikasi, on the other hand, comes up with only

393,670 Users in 2000
and 739,571 Users in 2003 (more recent data not available)

at a growth rate of 23%

Hmmm.... neither of the sites state in detail how the data is obtained. I wonder where I can get reallly reliable stats?

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?!