April 28, 2003
Amazon and Blog?
Google already bought Blogger. What sort of idea would be out with Amazon and MovableType? - Six Apart met with Jeff Bezos. This is for good, in my opinion.
Can't access to DiveIntoMark
Is Mark's blog went down in the past 12-14 hours? I was not able to access it. It might be some routing problem of my Internet access.
However, just checked, it's there. Glad to see it back online.
SARS Blog
Apparently there is much better coverage and brilliant blog about SARS in Malaysia. Screenshots, a blog of columnist Jeff Ooi (who is also the founder of USJ.com.my). He blogged a lot about War on Iraq and SARS, which also made his blog being popular. How ignorant am I not noticing his excellent blog? :) With his blog as a starting point, to Malaysiakini columnist Oon Yeoh's blog, and towards many other Malaysians' weblogs. Wow...it's really something new to me. I didn't really know there are so many of M'sian blogs out there. It's great. Blogosphere is great but we sometimes do need to get around neighbourhoods to have a feel of home.
The other blog, Wangjianshuo's blog, covers what happening in Shanghai, China. I am sure that are lots of blogs about SARS in Shanghai, mostly in Mandarin. Wang Jian Shuo's blog shows you how a day like in Shanghai while it's under the threat of SARS.
SARS "Index" Update
From Malaysia local paper:
Reported deaths, by country and worldwide:Reported cases of probable infections, by countries with highest numbers and worldwide:
- China (mainland): 131
- Hong Kong: 133
- Singapore: 22
- Canada: 21
- Vietnam: 5
- Thailand: 2
- Malaysia: 2
- Philippines: 2
- Taiwan: 1
- [Worldwide: 319]
- China (mainland): 2,914
- Hong Kong: 1,543
- Singapore: 199
- Canada: 142
- [Worldwide: More than 4,800]
There are new probable cases found almost everyday. Sarawak (Malaysia) has new cases these few days. SARS cases found and probably spread in a hospital in Taiwan... Though WHO's latest outbreak report shows situation in Vietnam stay stabled, no underreporting of SARS cases in Shanghai, it's still no good in Shanghai and Hong Kong SARS progress. People still suffer the fear and try to move away from affected cities (Shanghai, Beijing). Malaysia is better in term of number of cases. However, the fingerpointing between Health Ministry and media revealed that people didn't really trust the ability on risk management of government. We keep hearing rumour and find people don't really trust the news announced by our government. Is it normal because of the critical outbreak, so people tend to guessing and spreading rumour? Or mainly it's just we lost the confidence on how our government handle the previous outbreak of Dengue and Nipah disease? Building trust is important, how you stand up and taking critial action ASAP, it'd calm people down and reduce the damage to the least.
Time reports on financial effect of SARS:
The financial toll, meanwhile, is already catastrophic. Economists predict that China and South Korea could each suffer some $2 billion in SARS-related losses in tourism, retail sales and productivity. Japan and Hong Kong stand to lose more than $1 billion apiece, and Taiwan and Singapore could lose nearly that much. In Canada, meanwhile, J.P. Morgan Securities Canada estimates that Toronto is losing $30 million a day. All told, says WHO, the global cost of SARS is approaching $30 billion.
More:
TopicExchange
The Internet Topic Exchange, an implementation of Ridiculously Easy Group Forming concept, powered by Trackback, providing a centralized tracking of discussed topics/subjects/ideas. The idea is like: you post in your blogging tool, attach it to a topic/subject, public it somewhere, and ping the centralized place (e.g. TopicExchange), then users could have a list of discussed posts in their view. Better yet, linking this to blogging tool, blogger read the list of posts on certain subjects while blogging (via XMLRPC, SOAP).
It's still stage of experiments. You get new things everyday in Blog. Cool.