Malaysia has been busy with it’s politicians since the recent elections. Murder trials, sexual harassment, misconduct in law enforcement and the list goes on.
Ridicules if you ask me. Why do “upper class”, “educated”, “leaders” perform such “low class” acts? Are they no more then upper class beggars and prostitutes?
Well anyway, back to my post. My dad spends most of his day surfing the net for inside on the local political scene. His constant thirst for knowledge drives my mom insane, especially when he skips his meals. 64 years old but the mind of a 20 year old.
Today I found Negaraku, a Malaysian news aggregator. Put together by noktahhitam and laman7 the aggregator polls feeds from local newspapers, general blogs and political blogs. The interface is clean and easy to navigate but the site is slightly sluggish which will improve in time I hope. My dad’s going to love this, all his info in none place.
Check it out: Negaraku! - The Malaysia News Aggregator
Information Minister Datuk Seri Zainuddin Maidin aka Zam seems to think otherwise. According to him the Malaysian citizens only believe in the mainstream media, our one-sided news shows and newspapers and alternative media like the internet, blogs, mobile phones and other new age communication media had nothing to do with the shocking outcome witnesed during our recent election.
What do you think, did the Internet & Blogs Influence The Election Results? Vote here.
Watch his idiotic video.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jSamj4dyKM[/youtube]
Malaysiakini is extending it’s free service till this Friday 14th March. However after that it will be switching back to it’s subscribers-only model. Malaykini.tv their video site will also be transitioning to a subscriber-only model due to the high cost of bandwidth. Lower resolution videos will however still be uploaded into YouTube as they have always been.
Much needed upgrades are also being put in place. Malaysiakini will be seeing 3 new high-end servers and have it’s bandwidth upgraded to 150mbps. Users will surely realize an improvement in performance moving forward.
Malaysiakini and many other local news sites experienced a tremendous spike in users/subscribers this past week thanks to the Malaysia 12th general elections. I myself experienced 12k page views within a few hours.
This just comes to show the awareness levels of Malaysians, almost everyone I know is internet savvy now, even my dad 63 years old now spends 6 hours a day on the net researching. Many politicians (Non net savvy I guess) consider the Net (alternative media) a bad thing and claim that almost everything if not all is not true. But one must ask, why aren’t they coming out with their own sites/blogs to counter the negative media. An open debate I would call it(the democratic way). Watch a video.
I still buy newspapers today but since I feel that the local papers and news channels are generally pro government, I need to hear both sides of a story. Where do I go? The online world/community is the answer to satisfy my “need to know” hunger. However one must not easily believe everything one reads online or from the papers. Always cross reference before coming to a conclusion. Find the truth and not blindly follow.
Malaysians are smart people, don’t keep challenging them. serve the people and your country not just your party.
Source: Malaysiakini
