Will politician bloggers and groups sorting through heaps of posts on local issues open up the social and political awareness space? FENG ZENG KUN looks at the changes

The local blogosphere has evolved in the past year - not just growing in numbers but also in opening up public discussion spaces.

A survey released in March by Singapore's Infocomm Development Authority estimated 862,000 bloggers and 958,000 blog readers currently in Singapore. The same survey last year tabulated the blogging population at 502,000.

The new converts include at least 21 politicians, compared to four blogging politicians before last June. (See '24-hour Hotline To Ministers')

The move from personal blogs to more public and social ones also involves more blog aggregators and group blogs, like Ping.sg, Intelligent Singaporean and Singapore Angle.

Aggregators collect posts on personal blogs onto a single site, while group blogs are authored by teams of writers.

The power of the masses provides more breadth and depth of online conversation, according to those sites' editors.

For this work, Ping.sg averages about 100,000 page views monthly and Intelligent Singaporean, 45,000. Singapore Angle gets about 50,000 monthly hits. In comparison, popular blogger mr brown gets 150,000 monthly page views, as does veteran aggregating site Tomorrow.sg.

Associate professor Ang Peng Hwa, chair of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, does not think this expansion is surprising.

Dr Ang, 50, said: 'With bloggers like mr brown and Xiaxue going mainstream by appearing in widely-read newspapers, there was more curiosity about blogs.'

Mr Benjamin Koe, 27, a new media specialist at public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, also noted that the changes here reflect the patterns abroad.

He cited the recent embracing of new media like blogs and YouTube, a video aggregator, by United States presidential candidates like Democrats Hillary Clinton and Chris Dodd, and corporations like General Motors and Marriott International.

Mr Koe said: 'When more people inhabit the blogosphere it becomes more important to do so.'

What difference it makes

Like many, however, he was less concerned with the causes of the local changes than with their effects and potential.

Dr Bernard Leong, 32, editor of group blog Singapore Angle, thinks that a larger blogosphere makes for better social debate. And that, he said, is where aggregators and group blogs have a role to fill.

Dr Leong cited the recent controversy over local playwright Alfian Bin Sa'at. When Mr Alfian was dismissed as a relief teacher for undisclosed reasons in May, hot heads led conspiracy charges against the Ministry of Education on their personal blogs, before cooler ones pointed out the lack of proof and information.

The aggregation of these posts on Tomorrow.sg and elsewhere put forward a more balanced picture, and prevented the blogosphere from degenerating into a link-to-link echo of conspiracy.

Mr Andrew Loh, editor of group blog The Online Citizen, also said that these more public sites provide an equally loud voice to all Singaporeans.

He pointed to the Derek Wee incident last year as one such instance.

Last October, Mr Wee, 36, blogged about his economic insecurities of growing old in Singapore. These were dismissed as laziness on the part of the insecure, by teenage blogger Wee Shu Min on her blog, which in turn, brought both views to national attention.

Mr Chua U-Zyn, 24, founder of aggregator Ping.sg, added that multi-author sites have a wider catchment than personal blogs.

Mr Chua cited the breadth of discussion on his site, which ranges from the local blind-dating scene to issues of meritocracy.

For all these reasons, Mrs Kerlyn Yang is glad for these sites. An avid reader of Tomorrow.sg and Intelligent Singaporean, the 28-year old banker said: 'They show important alternative views of Singapore.'

Others, however, still rely mainly on newspapers for their information. Like 42-year old taxi driver Bala Jaganathan.

He said: 'These sites are good, but they lack resources newspapers have, like access to information and full-time writers.

'So, right now, I think they're playing catch up with the mainstream media, although they might be better at exploring less well-known topics.'