Tomorrow.sg
· #rants
So we have this Tomorrow.sg which seems like a meta-blog created with the intent of linking to interesting Singaporean stuff. Let us leave the question of what constitutes interesting Singaporean stuff aside for the moment and look at how content fills up the pages of Tomorrow.sg.
Folks submit interesting links and there are a bunch of Editors At Large who decide what goes up on the site. Pretty standard format - boingboing showed us the way onto human click-n-surf energy based collective data mining techniques.
Now a couple of days ago, Kevin wrote up something about Superblogs wherein he pointed out to a possible negative effect of popular super/meta-blogs: agenda setting through editorial gatekeeping.
Think about it. Boingboing is about as liberal as you can get. Is it a carefully thought out agenda? I doubt it. But the liberal attitude just seeps through and it surely is a reflection of the editors’ thinking, don’t you agree?
But Mr Brown disagrees that such an agenda leak can happen on Tomorrow.sg ‘cos, you see:
... the 11 [Tomorrow.sg] editors come from a very diverse range of backgrounds ... diverse enough to ensure that no one view dominates ... There is a certain check and balance built into the composition of the team.
The editorial team’s composition is AFAIK, accidentally diverse rather than by design and there are no stated ground rules for editors. So I am a bit skeptical about the ‘no one view dominates’ claim but I’ll not press this point since it’s hard to set an agenda based on infantile content. ;-)
The other point of concern that Kevin raised was the possible polarization of the blogosphere where the “popular get more popular, the lesser known get even lesser known.”
Again Mr Brown artfully denies this:
Tomorrow does not seek to turn the our VIBs into VIPs. On the contrary, one of the reasons it was set up was to turn LKBs (Less-known Blogs) into VIBs and VIPs. The editors on Tomorrow do not seek to promote themselves, but rather to promote as many blogs about Singapore as possible.
Which brings me to the whole fucking point of this post (you noticed this was filed under rants?) If the editors are not some super important people but just regular folks helping out with some link collection, then why the fuck do they have to keep editing the main posts on tomorrow.sg to add their comments? Why the hell can’t the editors use the comment section like the rest of us?
It’s because their stupid comments are more important than our stupid comments, that’s why.
And finally, compare and contrast: Tomorrow.sg vs Sepia Mutiny.