Hari Minggu

Hari minggu just means Sunday in the Indonesian language and that's what it is here as I write this latest entry. The Government's Communications and Information Minister announced that yesterday was National Bloggers Day (I don't know what happened to the apostrophe) and so it seemed appropriate to acknowledge the fact with a fresh post. While there are of course many bloggers in Indonesia, the percentage of the population who maintain a blog would be quite tiny due to the lack of penetration of the Internet. SMSing is pervasive, even among the poor, but use of the Internet is not.

I'm rather cynical about the practice of declaring special days for anything, whether they be National Blogging Days or Save the Forest Days or whatever. "Blogging party gets official stamp of approval" is the title of the article that appeared on the front page of The Jakarta Post today. The minister gets some publicity but he's actually not doing anything except to say that blogging is good. The Government might do better by reducing its spending on multimillion dollar military equipment and channeling some of it into improving the telecommunications infrastructure so more people could actually blog if they wanted to.

Blogging could certainly help promote the Indonesian language. Another article in yesterday's paper is titled "Foreigners show 'less interest' in Bahasa Indonesia" and goes on to quote a linguistic expert on the Indonesian language who is from the United States but is currently working here in Jakarta. Uri Tadmor says "during the last few years, the number of students who want to learn Bahasa Indonesia in North America and Australia has declined rapidly". Learning Mandarin, Vietnamese and Thai has become far more popular, he said. Predictably, the Indonesian Education Ministry response to the news was that to simply deny it and instead confidently announce that "foreigners are showing more interest in learning Indonesian".

Don't get me started on the Ministry of MisEducation or I may get frogmarched to the airport. I need to move on. There's a very interesting analysis of the blogging phenomenon to be found here and some very funny comments to be read, one of which I'll quote here:

Several studies indicate that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month, depending on whose figures you choose to believe) and that few are regularly updated.

The 'average blog' thus has the lifespan of a fruitfly. One cruel reader of this page commented that the average blog also has the intelligence of a fly.

The Perseus report noted above indicates that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, "representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned".

Blogs can be useful however, as I was reminded last night when I checked the latest post from a PCTips blog that I subscribe to. I'd recently lamented the fact that in Vista's Business Edition, there are no games. My wife, Desy, likes playing solitaire on my laptop when I'm not using it but she wasn't able to after I updated from XP Professional. This blogger had experienced the same disappointment and frustration. Microsoft must have figured that being the business edition and likely to mainly used in business circles, this version of Vista should be free of games. It turns out that the games are actually on the computer's hard drive but they need to be activated. The post described how to do that.