Indonesia: Blog aggregators, President’s new site and Prophet Muhammad Cartoon · Global Voices
Enda Nasution

With the growing numbers of blogs it becomes more difficult to find, read and follow and what each other is posting in their blogs. One can simply solve the problem of reading and following blog posting by subscribing to their feeds and read the posts trough RSS clients or readers, but finding a good blogs for reading to begin with is different matter altogether.
For this we usually depends on a blogger authority figure to point out a blog that worth reading.
For others who would want to find new interesting blogs by themselves they now can resort to blog aggregators.
Currently the Indonesian blogosphere has given birth to several blog aggregators. While several of them are sprung from a blog community, there are others that are a fruit of resourceful individual blogger.
Here are the Indonesian blog aggregators and short description about them:
Planet Terasi
Owned and maintained by Ronny Haryanto, a postgraduate student in Sydney, Australia, Planet Terasi (terasi = dried shrimp paste) is the first and oldest Indonesian Blog Aggregator with a preference for original Indonesian related content with pinch technological/geek taste. It currently aggregates about 60 blogs and updated every hour.
Merdeka.or.id
Lead by Andry S Huzain a programmer who lives in Surabaya, Merdeka.or.id (Merdeka = Freedom) strive not only to make it easier for people to find good blogs but also to motivate the bloggers to provides useful informative posts. Not all blog submission will be aggregate; there is a review and voting process that will decide the fate of a blog. Will my blog make the cut? Yes, if as they described, your blog has kick ass and consistent post.
Komunitas Blogger Muslim
In the most populous Muslim country you will expect there will be Indonesian Muslim Blogger community, and you are right. This blog aggregator, aggregate blogs that is a member of Indonesian Muslim Blogger who lives, not only in Indonesia but all over the world, from Qatar to Denmark, from Bosnia to Pakistan. With slogan “For victorious Islam in Cyber World“, the community has more than 400 active members.
ID-Gmail.info
Sprang from Indonesian Gmail mailing list this blog aggregator, aggregates ID-Gmail member's blogs. This highly active (for some people extremely might be more suitable) relatively new avant garde community has now become a base for anything new and advances in regards to Internet, media and social-cultural trends in Indonesia. With 500 members, one of the milestones of the group is when the exchanges reached to a monumental 30,000 email messages in one month (November 2005).
In the future, hopefully there will be more blog aggregators with special niche/by topic that will surface. Where the added value of a “Blog Aggregate Editor” will enhance the signal vs. noise ratio in the blogosphere.
President SBY's new site
Indonesian president, Dr. H. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (or SBY as he familiarly refers to) has a new, quite “innovative” website.
The website, complete with RSS and Podcast feeds, that reporting day to day President's activities has an English section and a special section for the Indonesian First Lady (in Indonesian)
This well designed and maintained website create blogger reaction (and public as well) when it launched and revealed its monthly operational budget of some Rp 42 million (US$ 4,500 per month).
Where the amount seems high in a country with GDP per capita $3,700 (2005), Priyadi argued that that budget is relatively modest (in Indonesian)  for a head of a country website, that has to consider bandwidth usage, hired staff and security and maintenance system.
The other reaction is regarding the domain name chosen: presidensby.info. Why the president site does not use the official Indonesian government domain go.id as what the vice president do.
The decision to select .info domain and putting “sby” on the address raised a question that the site was developed for more a personal SBY's website and less for a head of the country official website.
This conclusion lead to a call by Windede on his post, that President SBY's might as well give blogging a try.
Prophet Muhammad Cartoon
There are many (too many) words have been poured about this one. People killed, embassies burned. In my opinion, what the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, done was analogous with what in Internet known as flamebait. And foolishly the other side takes the bait and feed the troll. And now there's a flamewar going on.
On her blog A pilgrim for life, Eva Muchtar, a PR Professional who took sabbatical leave from her work to study Spanish Language in Sevilla, Andalucia, post about “The cartoons of Muhammad“, she wrote:
People can express whatever they want to express. Shall we express it even at the expense of other people’s privacy and beliefs? … There is also a question of how the Moslem should respond to it. Are they over-reacting? … But if we respond, how should we respond? And if we respond in the same manner as this initial cause of chain reaction, does it mean we are guilty of the same ‘mistake’?
Hopes for a peaceful and productive life, I think, is in order, as she continued:
When will this stop? Why should this unnecessary hatred start?
It is such a difficult subject to discuss. Had we known the answer, perhaps there will be peace on earth. But let us give it a shot anyway. Let us stop having pointless and never-ending cycle of arguments. Let us be more productive, helpful and loving to one another.