You heard the man.

And if you haven’t, here’s the skinny:

This July 26th, the Malaysian scene will EXPLODE into a orgy of mass-sharing and learning with the arrival of BarCampMalaysia.

If you’re into early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, open data formats, and connecting with like-minds, BarCampMalaysia will stroke you the right way.

Wanna feel the heat?

“Attendees must  give a demo, a session, or help with one. This is called sharing and we like it.”

Damn right.

You can start by copying and pasting anything from what you’re reading, or from the wiki, onto your own blog.

Go forth and multiply!

What is BarCamp Malaysia?

BarCampMalaysia is an ad-hoc gathering packed with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. It’s inspired by BarCamps all over the world, born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.

The focus is on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. But of course, you can only imagine what other random surprises are in store.

When and where is BarCamp Malaysia happening?

When
July 26-27, 2008
Saturday 10:00 AM-6:00PM (official section)
Hangout time 6pm to Sunday morning
Sunday 10:00 AM-2:00PM

Where
xTrain Sdn Bhd
Unit E-7-1, Block E
Megan Avenue 1
189 Jalan Tun Razak
50400 Kuala Lumpur
Google map - View

Wow this is mind-blowing! I want to know more!

Go to the wiki, read up, and add your name as a participant.

You can also

• Join the Facebook Group
• Get on the mailing list in the Google Groups
• See Schedule & proposed session ideas
• Help us out! Sponsorship Info
• Keep track of the Volunteer Meetup Notes
• Follow @barcampmalaysia on Twitter for latest updates
• Spread the word! BarCampMalaysiaPromotion

And remember to blog about this!

See you there!

What makes you think the really good programmers want to work with you in the first place? Your 1970’s inspired employment arrangement?

From Jim Ware

The future of work is about a whole lot more than cost cutting. The real, and long-lasting, benefits of embracing new work patterns, adopting alternative workplace strategies, and leveraging new workforce values and expectations have a lot more to do with attracting, retaining, and leveraging creative talent.

I will be blogging more about what works (overseas) and what sort of “new work patterns” and “alternative workplace strategies” I’m employing to get the most competent people to collaborate on a project. Stay tuned.

WebWatch Malaysia is back ;)

Humility. It doesn’t matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don’t know what you’re doing. The good news is that nobody else does either, though some are foolish enough to think that they do (and that’s why you can beat them).

What is the humble approach to product design? Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren’t. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. Watch for the signals. Lose your technical and design snobbery. Whatever works, works.

Here are some notes if you’re interested in building a web application better and faster.

Agile software development in summary

• You build to user “scenarios”, “stories”, or “storyboards”, hopefully based on a real user, rather than abstract requirements.
• You release frequently to users, using “milestones”, “sprints”, or “iterations”.
• You fix the release date, not the features. You cut features so that you can release on the expected date (or time, if you are really moving quickly).

The only 3 Milestones you will ever need

• The release we are working on
• The next release
• Product backlog

The key to building high performance teams

All of the team members share a single goal. It helps if the goal is concrete, and clear to people inside and outside the team - for example, a product release. Team members don’t even need to know each other, if each of them are motivated by the goal.

Team members should be allowed to lead.  If you structure a team so that there is a strong project manager, and enforce centralized task assignments, your team will only be as good as the project manager.

All of the team members should actively be working on the same thing. Think: daily commits and daily builds

With the right tools and processes, a manager can bring together more people to work together.

I’m currently testing out assembla in some of my projects. You should too, and tell me what you think.

People change habits when the pain of their current situation exceeds their perceived pain of adopting a possible solution. I call that the “change function.” It may seem simplistic. It’s supposed to be.

Change = f (level of current crisis, perceived pain of adoption)

Does your new internet business require users to learn new ways of behaving? Take note.

I won’t brag about it here, but if you’re curious…

• The Kuala Lumpur version is http://kl.bunchout.com
• A Malay blog review is on Info Malaya
• Hear my personal pitch
• The story behind the scenes is on this blog

Imagine… you have a great idea for a website/ web app/ internet business… what do you do next? I get this question too often, so I wrote a quick guide highlighting 3 things you can do to move your idea forward quickly.

• Has custom info on the profile
• Profile pic
• All comments the user has posted
• All blog posts the user wrote, if any
• And members can vote on each other’s comments, and there’s a quality score for each member

I haven’t found a Wordpress solution yet. But Movable Type just went ahead and did it. If anyone wants to code a Wordpress version please get in touch with me.

I’ll be webwatching again real soon. Meantime, this is all I have for ya.

The last I heard

• Tumpang (I covered them here and here) is launched internationally.
• Malaysia-based blog advertising network NuffNang was bashed on TechCrunch

But that’s like, really old news. Just thought I’d whack that up anyway.

Since I’m on the topic of old news…

Huzit.com is a Malaysia based wiki with sharper marketing and front end. Not winning any design awards of course but it’s sold to the user in an interesting way. Check out a Huzit page of local popstar Saerze.

Drop me an email if you come across anything I should blog about.

In a nutshell, you

1. Identify your business outcomes
2. Drill down into the feature set that will achieve those outcomes.
3. Each feature is then captured as a specific “story”.

This article will tell you how to define and identify what stories to tell, and how. Whether you are a coder or not, already familiar with writing “use cases” or not, if you’re developing a web application, read it and tell me if you find it useful!

I see a blog aggregator as a site which shows the latest posts from a given sample of selected blogs. Bloggers like adding themselves to aggregators for some added traffic and exposure, as well as a sense of belonging.

I’m assuming the key benefit of a blog aggregator is for you to be able to DISCOVER brand spankin’ new content related to your interests.

But in this day and age, do we really rely on them to get our daily shot of interesting content?

For starters, remember Project Petaling Street?

What would the Malaysian blogosphere be without its roots, in the good ol’ PPS?

Anyone can sort of be part of it, and you PING it to let it know you’ve got new content.

I know TheCicak.com still gets some traffic from PPS, an indicator enough people do go there, or at least subscribe to its feed.

Then there’s Planet Malaysia.

Smart in its simplicity… it chooses a couple of famous Malaysian blogs, and displays their posts based on the members agreed and RSS feed setup control by members (full text or summary).

Usually showing the full post resembles blog scraping, but Planet Malaysia has permission :)

Looks like the founder duplicated the format across other communities, pumping in the AdSense. Kudos on the entrepreneurial thinking.

Next, we look at a different kind of aggregator… one which used some human help.

Like Rice Bowl Journals Malaysia

Appears to have some human help in choosing who gets featured. Has an extensive Asian network, and affiliation with Global Voices Online.

I reckon things can get a lil interesting. But are human editors the best way to to tell you what’s hot? This site took the idea a step further…

Blogs Malaysia (looks like now defunct)

Human editors to make recommendations, later approved by its editors. I liked this back then compared to the all-inclusive aggregators usually included a lot of junk.

However they have been criticized for discrimination / elitism. Also, they relied on human horse power… which seemed like it ran out of juice.

I kinda liked the design, though… by (in my books) one of Malaysia’s top web designers, Ivan, which MindValley *almost* hired.

But Blogs Malaysia isn’t all dead… it took a twist, into a more sustainable auto-ping thing a la PPS.

Enter Ping.BlogsMalaysia.com

A clean, well calculated design, as expected.

Popular? I don’t have data. Useful? Not to me. Functional, differentiating factors? Soon, perhaps. But it seems to have been an “experiment” since forever. I guess I’ll just have to WebWatch it…

Meantime, Who’s SARA?

A south-east Asian blog aggregator. This picture describes how it (and most straightforward blog aggregators) work…

I’ve nothing more to add.

By now you might’ve suspected I’m not a big fan of Blog aggregators. Which is why when Blogtitude came on the scene, I wondered… what’s new?

Blogtitude

They are flashing the BETA badge. I’ve been guilty of that before… So I will wait patiently…

The team they have look very promising! I’m actually very excited to see what they will come up with.

So what’s the verdict on blog aggregators? Do they really help you find new, interesting stuff? I reckon out of sheer luck and randomness you do get some cool stuff. It’s like underground treasure hunting, and that’s fun.

If you get carried away, and get even more old-school with BolehBlogs… a WEBRING! There. I said it. Web. Ring. It’s like this huge list of links of Malaysian blogs. Rummaging through them can be fun… but if I’m lazy, it doesn’t really help me find interesting new Malaysian blogs / posts… Like most aggregators, it’s a haystack, where I’m struggling to find the needle.

So what’s next? Dailyvoices Malaysia?

Full Disclosure… I helped develop it with MindValley. We’re using our new crazy algorithm SocialRank to power it.

It’s more of a blog filter than an aggregator… where it looks at all the Malaysian blogs, but only features the 15 blog posts which have increased the most in popularity… so it finds the needles in the haystack, if you will.

The SocialRank algorithm looks at multiple factors to determine if any one Malaysian blog post is gaining popularity. You can’t vote. You can only participate in blogs normally like you do, and let the algorithm be the judge of what’s hot.

Does it make it easier for you to find today’s most talked about, interesting blog posts?

I sure hope so. I’ll let you be the judge. We’re tweaking the algorithm as we speak. In the meantime, check it out, and tell me if you like it!

Malaysians love social networking and love SMSing. It’s about time someone cashed in on this!

Thanks Tim for alerting me of this note-worthy Malaysian web app.

The way they’ve branded themself, and deliver the service is very smart innovation, and will definitely appeal to Malaysians.

I will write a more critical review, or maybe interview the founder later, but in the meantime, have you guys tried it? What do you think?

See Pacmee.com

Update: This post now with links, thanks Prashant ;P

Was at 2 different parties last week, one organized by Multimedia Development Corporation and another by Flickr…

Did I find others who are as involved with “the internet” as I am? Full story and pictures here on the MindValley blog.

• FlexiOffice
• Receptionist.com.my

Or, if you’re an internet marketer who needs ClickBank and Paypal (both services don’t like Malaysians very much) you can consider a Clickbank and Paypal ready virtual office in Singapore.

But what aroused my curiosity was Incubator.com.my, an MSC status incubator.

Apart from the business address, they provide advisory services, strategy reviews, brand advisory, IP advisory, and “investment sourcing services”. Full details here

Has anyone tried this? Are they any good?

Current incubatees include a promising mobile content developer, a political community, and extremely lame million-dollar homepage wannabe.

UPDATE: This ugly website has good info on setting up Malaysian companies, including shelf companies etc.. Though it would be useful. Enjoy.

Skali, has been appointed to upgrade 450 websites belonging to the Federal Government and its agencies.

From The Star

Congratulations on your big fat contract, Skali. Please ensure the websites

• Can be found through the right keywords in search engines
• The information is useful and the site is useable
• Don’t use Flash or 1990s graphics
• Have actual human beging maintaining the information on the website, answering emails etc..

Anymore tips for Skali & the government websites?