Cambodian Blogger on Blogging · Global Voices
Tharum Bun

Borin Ly is an Information Technology specialist. Just like some other university students who are computer and the Internet enthusiasts, Borin also has a weblog. Borin grew up in Sihanoukville, a well known beach town in Cambodia. The 26-year-old computer geek is currently doing his master degree in Business Administration at Economics and Finance Institute, a program of Charles Sturt University.
Borin Ly – Cambodian blogger. Borin blogs at www.borin.ws
Borin uses his Internet-capable mobile phone with his laptop to get online. Borin joins hundreds of Cambodian bloggers on the Web to have his say and to discusses a range of issues – poverty, poor education, corporate social responsibility, food safety and the hight cost of telecoms.
Q: Why do you have a blog?
Borin: At first, my blog is not about Cambodia, it was about web hosting, design, and website promotion. The motivation is revenues from Google Adsense, of course. But after some failures, I shift my blog focus to talk about Cambodia. The motivations are to share knowledge, to express myself, and to exercise my freedom of expression.
Q: What do you write about?
Borin: Most of my blog posts are inspired by everyday experiences. For example, I write my recent post on food safety, because having breakfast with my mother, I started to look at the food and thought “Is it healthy?”  then the problem of food safety came in to my mind. I’ve heard many complains from friends about chemical that are not suppose to be in food. Seeing my family, and friends consume those food everyday makes me sad, I have to say some things about it, my blog is a tool to say it out loud and clear. The second type of my post is, sharing knowledge, for example “how to download YouTube video”. Some of the posts are in my field of study: business and economics. Some of my post are responses to blog posts by others in Cambodian Blogosphere.
Q: Which blog software do you use? Why?
Borin: I use WordPress. The reason is availability of professional designed themes. I can download one of them, customize it for my own blog. Another reason is my current hosting account has a Fantastico feature that allow me to install & update WordPress easily. To make things easy, I also publish my posts using Microsoft Word 2007, which has a feature to publish a blog post directly from the program.
Q: How many hour online do you spend a day?
Borin: Well, I spend the average of 5 to 6 hours a day. To make it easy I use internet with 3G mobile phone. For blogging, spending time online is not as important as spending time writing contents.
Q: How do you find new blogs?
Borin: I find them by blogrolls in those blogs I’ve already known. Some of them are found by blog search engine such as Technorati, Google, and of course Global Voices Online, using keywords such as Cambodia, Phnom Penh…
Q: What is your advice for new Cambodian bloggers?
Borin: Here are my advices:
1) Write whenever you want. Do not care much about your English, as long as reader can understand that’s ok. Blog doesn’t have to be perfect. But also edit your writing before hit the publishing button.
2) Write even if there’s no reader. It takes time before reader come to your blog regularly.
3) Viewing writing is a kind of entertainment, not work. Enjoy it, writing will improve after a period of time.
4) Most new bloggers tend to focus more on website design, but the true success of blog comes from content. So spend more time on writing rather than designing.