Edwin Lim, our country manager for Indonesia, hosted a very successful user conference in Jakarta. Prior to the conference, I was invited to participate on a panel with David Schmeichel of Brocade, and Harry Gumelar of the Tax Authority, who had installed a USP V for their new efiling application. The theme of the panel discussion was Compliance and Data Retention Strategies. The moderator for this panel was, a well know journalist and digital media guru, Deriz Syarief, from Bisnis Indonesia. When I was introduced to Deriz before the panel, he mentioned that he had read my blog during his preparation. Deriz did an excellent job keeping us on track and developing the contributions from each of the participants.

Later as I was catching up with my friend, Sulityawan from Indosat, Deriz joined us and I learned that both of them were bloggers. Sulityawan has his own personal blog which he does as a hobby. He blogs about best practices for storage. (This guy lives and breaths storage). While his blog is posted in Indonesian, I recognized references to the HDS AMS power down feature in his recent post on Green Storage. Deriz has his own blog as well as a corporate blog. He recently blogged about our announcement of the Simple Modular Storage announcement, which was in English. There is a very active blogging community in Indonesia, and many of them know each other through the blogs.

Later in the week I went to Kuala Lumpur, for a similar event which was run by Johnson Khoo, our country manager for Malaysia. This was an interesting time to visit Malaysia since they had just had a national election where the ruling part had lost its 2/3 majority. After the election results were in, their stock market declined by 10% and had to suspend trading for the day. In the midst of all this turmoil, I was not expecting a large turnout from our customers and press, but the opposite was true. Since I had the opportunity to talk to some of the people from the business press, I asked why the election results were so surprising, that the stock market should be so dramatically affected. Apparently, the minority party won through the use of the internet, which ran under the radar of the conventional media.

The Economist has a good write up of this on the internet. Malaysia has a high penetration of internet users, which some estimate at 5 million out of a population of 28 million. Bloggers like Tony Pua, and Jeffrey Ooi were instrumental in raising funding and awareness of the issues, taking their appeal directly to the public. The Economist also noted that there is a secondary internet effect where the content is further disseminated by word of mouth and SMS.

There is no doubt that blogging is a major force not only as a way to raise awareness around arcane technologies like storage, but also as a force to change geo, political, and economic directions. It is a force that must be reckoned with as the elections in Malaysia have demonstrated

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