Happy 2nd. birthday, Open Malaysia blog!

May 17, 2008 is Open Malaysia blog's 2nd. birthday!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

The first post 2 years ago declared, "This is a blog
about openness, saying that the changing times call for innovation through open collaboration." Open innovation, ODF, open standards and open source were what we championed then and what we still champion today.

Malaysia had voted Approval of ODF as an ISO standard just before this blog started 2 years ago. OOXML came into the picture since then, but in the last one year, Malaysia cannot be considered to have officially accepted OOXML -- the Malaysian National Body committees  (TC4, then ISC G) voted Disapproval of OOXML, and the Malaysia final vote of Abstention decided by the Minister is at best non-committal to OOXML.

On the blog's 1st. birthday on May 17, 2007, there were 194 posts and 163 comments. In the one year after that, we added 111 posts but the number of comments tripled to 512 comments within the same one year! The worldwide dialog created by this blog was awesome.

In the 1st. year, we had 32,000 visits (by Sitemeter). In the 2nd. year, the month of March 2008 alone had 32,000 visits, with a total of 100,000 visits in the whole of this 2nd. year. The most popular post was definitely The Last Lap on the OOXML results which attracted thousands of visits every day.

Yes, the times they are a-changing. I leave it to you to recount the changes you have seen in "openness" in Malaysia and elsewhere over the last year -- do write your comments below.

Comments

[yoonkit]

Contributing to OpenMalaysiaBlog is certainly fun, rewarding and challenging but also saps alot of my personal time. Its quite amazing what we have achieved so far, considering that we are just volunteers, making Malaysia more open bit by bit.

We managed to see the past 2 years the repulsion of certain vendors and their tactics, and how they have alienated themselves from government agencies, customers and associations.

Its quite sad to see how people justify certain decision not based on its merits but by its affiliations with vendors.

The past 2 years have been eventful and I look forward to more exciting posts from sunny Malaysia.

yk

[orlando]

happy birthday !

Greetings from Argentina

Go [truly] open standards!

:-)))))))

orlando ( ombzzz )

[gml]

(cue music) Haaaaaappy Biiiirthdaaay to ya! \o/

Thanks for all the insightful/lighthearted/outrageous posts I had the pleasure to read :)

Greetings from de_DE

[nazrul nifkuzyaire]

Happy belated besday...