Top 100 Indonesian blogs
Indonesian blogosphere buzzing yesterday when Priyadi release his list of top 100 Indonesian blogs. [1] Sorted by how many blogs/pages links to your blog, Priyadi showed 100 most popular Indonesian blogs from 460 blogs that he compiled.
The list is not perfect but it's a start. He estimated there are 10,000 Indonesian blogs on Internet and planning to make a more comprehensive list based on larger Indonesian blogs database
Other Indonesian bloggers followed with [2] their version [3] of the list shortly, sorted by other methods.
Increase the number of Indonesian taxpayer
Love letters from Indonesian Directorate General of Taxation [4] are hot. Many Indonesian, somewhat rather confused, received this “love letters” [5], a notification of Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), or NPWP in Bahasa Indonesia, while have no idea what to do about it due to the lack of information on this matter.
Apparently this is a part of effort to reach a target to increase the number of Indonesian taxpayer from 2 million people to 10 million by 31st October [6].
Yes, with 240 millions population [7], it is rather surprising only less than 1% of us are paying tax. Therefore, the government has every rights to try to increase tax paying citizens, and many Indonesian are more than willing to pay if only that the staff of Directorate General of Taxation was not notoriously known to often pocketed the tax money themselves.
Hopefully, this effort to increase tax paying citizens has a positive consequences where more Indonesian will pay more intention and demand more government accountability.
Cabinet reshuffling, acquisitions and Google Inc.
Yosef Ardi at Indonesia Today [8] has a round up (in English) of situation confronted by Indonesian political parties [9] regarding cabinet reshuffling, demand voiced by many public element due to disappointment of economic ministries under President SBY administration.
He also named 2005 as the Malaysia's year of acquisitions [10] with so many Malaysian companies acquired Indonesian companies, just like 2004 and 2003 was for Singapore albeit with totally different reaction and sentiment from Indonesian.
And as noted by Jalan Sutera [11], a columnist over at Bloomberg posed an interesting question, “Would You Rather Own Google or Indonesia?” [12] citing the fact that in April, Google Inc. [13] surpassed Indonesia’s entire stock market in value.
As I said, interesting hypothetical question, but in the real world the first thing that come to mind is the phrase dotcom bubble [14]. The savvy long term investor will choose Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, an archipelago of some 18,000 islands with rich natural resources –including oil — (even tough currently kind of mismanaged) that make the world’s powerful nations salivate over the 7 years old Internet search engine.
And yes, the article suggested the same thing in the end.