Bloggers wanted to visit Selangor, Malaysia for all-expenses paid trip!

My Selangor Story is a contest spearheaded by Tourism Selangor to promote Selangor’s cultural diversity and rich tourism resource to travellers around the world and Ping.sg is proud to be named the official online community for the campaign.

They are giving away very interesting prizes which includes all expenses paid trip to Selangor for shortlisted bloggers, cash rewards (up to MYR 2500 for first prize winner) and hotel stays at Malaysia’s top resorts.

All you’ve got to do is do what you do best — submit your best blog entry on “My Selangor Story” on your blog and on the official site. You may well be on your way to winning the wonderful prizes.

Closing date: 10 September 2010

Visit http://www.myselangorstory.com for more details.

Four great years of Ping.sg

It’s been 4 great years of Ping.sg!

Growth

We have been growing steadily since our launch back in 4 July 2006.

Over the last 2 years, we have had steady >100% growth of number of registered users every year.

There has been more blogs added to Ping.sg in the 4th year alone compared to the number of blogs added for the last 3 years combined.

Needless to say, the number of blog posts we syndicate each day have been increased very significantly over the years. We now have >5000 new blog entries every single day! The numbers completely dwarfed what we were syndicating per day for the first 3 years.

Coping with growth

Obviously with such a high increase of activity and traffic on Ping.sg, our old dedicated server was not able to support it well.

Over the course of last year, we have done tremendous work in optimizing our code (for the technically-inclined, this means lots of indexing and lots of caching with both memcached and file-cache). We have also moved our whole infrastructure from a dedicated server in a data center in Singapore to be fully cloud-based, to enjoy the benefit of easy parallel and vertical expansion of our hosting infrastructure.

Since the start of 2010, we are fully hosted on Amazon Web Services‘ cloud computing platform. Though at that time, our main compute server was located at eastern USA, we made sure our system exploit the content distribution network (CDN) to make sure that the majority of our users, who are based in Singapore, are still able to enjoy the speed of Ping.sg. In April 2010 when Amazon launches the availability of Singapore cloud infrastructures, we immediately switch ours from USA to Singapore.

Moving ahead

Despite the changes on our software and hardware infrastructures, we admit that there has not been much feature updates for the last 1 year. While it has been our intention to extend the services of Ping.sg further, due to the limited resources that we have, we have had to deal with the pressing matters at hand – coping with the growth, and optimizing and cleaning our codebase.

With the current position that we are in now, we now have an inflow of a large amount of blog-related data, including and not limited to blog posts, categories, content, and user activities. With such vast amount of data, the current presentation is quickly becoming obsolete. It’s becoming almost impossible to pick out the good articles from the sea of information. We are currently experimenting with new presentation on our site. Moving ahead, we aim to showcase and heuristically determine interesting/noteworthy blog posts based on visitor’s interests.

Ping.sg is still a blogger community and we aim to continue to improve to not just bring more traffic to bloggers, but to also aid in connecting bloggers in the region and making blogging more fun and rewarding.

Thank you!

All of these are only happening thanks for the continual support of the bloggers and blog readers. Thanks for giving us a healthy growth for the last 4 years!

Many thanks to our sponsors as well for believing in us all these years. We couldn’t have grown without any of your support!

Stay tuned for more updates soon. If you have any feedbacks for us, feel free to email us at we@ping.sg. You may also consider joining our beta program for helping us to test our new features.

Singapore’s online reality TV – Nokia The Rookie

Nokia Singapore has recently organized and produced a Singapore-based reality TV to promote its newest handset, Nokia E72.

The show is organized similar to the format of The Apprentice where contestants are required to perform certain business-related tasks. Losers will be eliminated with each episodes. The unique and nicest thing about this series is the fact that the whole process of this show, from searching of the contestants, to the actual airing of the episodes are done online on the internet.

5 episodes have been aired thus far. Each episodes showcase how the contestants utilizes various functions of E72 to aid in the given challenges in the quest to be crowned the rookie.

Catch the the new and past episodes online at the official site. There are even behind-the-scene episodes available after airing of the actual ones.

The finale has also just been posted, and I’m going to check it out now!

Ping.sg is looking for beta testers

Ping.sg has certainly come a long way. We began from a small community 3 years ago, aggregating less than 10 blog posts a day, to what it is today, aggregating over 1000 blog posts a day.

What started as a blog aggregator, with a simple and quick system, which determines most popular posts of the day by most reads, that was working rather well when we first started, is almost irrelevant today. It’s time for a change.

We are currently working on a new beta site that we hope to open to selected interested beta testers at the start as our beta updates are still very experimental. We should be rolling out an initial beta features some time next week.

Please sign up using the form at http://ping.sg/beta-tester-program

Social Media Sharing Session at Singapore Polytechnic

Earlier today I gave a short presentation at Singapore Polytechnic for the students of the first batch of a social media module that they will be conducting.

I probably went overboard with the technological terms that I used in my slides for being overly excited about the future Ping.sg plans that I almost forgot that my audience consists of students in social media studies, and nothing related to technology/engineering.

My apologies for that. But if you’re into some technology, a little on history of Ping.sg, and how Ping.sg will be evolving to be more useful and open, enjoy the slides.