Global Voices Online

After blogging for close to three years, I thought I should start to give blogs and bloggers a fresh context in Malaysia.

Last month, with the help of US-based friends who run the Malaysian Forum, I had a roundtable with a group of dynamic knowledge workers in Palo Alto, California to share my thoughts about blogging within the Malaysian context. It was an honour and a great experience engaging in frank conversations with my fellow countrymen and women who are scholars from Stanford and San Francisco universities, and those who had graduated and established their professional practice in the Bay Area.

Today, back home, I will give an evening talk to the Malaysian Chapter of the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), themed: Blogging: Freedom of Speech vs Social Accountability. Perhaps I'll to touch on the issue of the Personal Data Protection Bill which remains stranded three years after its second reading in the Parliament.

September 8, I will have another evening talk with a group of young PR consultants as a part of the Public Relations Consultants Association of Malaysia’s (PRCAM) SpeakEasy programme. The theme: Blogging, Beyond the Politics.

Mr Tang Hangwu, who is now in Cambridge University in UK, has also planned for me to hold a joint faculty seminar at the Law Faculty, National University of Singapore (NUS), themed: Blogging and freedom of expression sometime in September.

Tang presented a paper, Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom: A Malaysian Case Study on Blogging Towards a Democratic Culture, at BILETA (British & Irish Law, Education and Technology Association) early this year,

Perhaps, bloggers should outreach to the communities of practice to give blogs a relevant context in a knowledge-based economy. There are critical thinkers who should be networked together to influence change in society and national economy.