Hong Kong is the place for karaoke and shopping, but who woulda guessed mountain biking to be popular with HK youngsters?!A blade of grass is hard to come upon in this concrete jungle, let alone a forested mountain!
I came across a group of extreme bikers one night in the heart of Central, Hong Kong's finance and night-life centre, their bikes speeding noisily along the ground's uneven stones -- they were riding so fast down the sloped hill, I could hardly make out their fa...
If you live and work in Jakarta, there's no way you could be unacquainted with FREE! (Full REview on Entertainment) Magazine.
Jakarta’s equivalent of The Village Voice or Time Out,
this full-color biweekly stands out for its thickness (averaging 80
pages) and its readership of 20-to-40-year-old urban professionals
attracted to its coverage of lifestyle and entertainment related topics.
For its seven years in existence, FREE! has been most visible at public
spots like cafes, r...
Going to a concert or gig nowadays, you’d be forgiven for thinking that everybody in the audience is a documentarian.
"put your cameras up in the air, like ya just don't care!!!"
Hands held high no longer clap or hold lighters, they wave iPhones,
Flip Cams or [insert your preferred micro digital imaging device here].
But for every serious archivist who battles hangovers and peeved bosses
to upload and post their pictures as soon as they get to the office the
next morning, th...
How often have you been ‘invited’ to view uploaded pics on Facebook or
Flickr and, with one click, sent the said invite into your data
dustbin? Let’s face it, looking at pictures of someone else’s holiday
-- or party that you missed -- can be as exciting as that 1.30pm
PowerPoint presentation. That’s why the The Secret Agent's blog
caught my eye. Rather than the typical
‘here-we-are-with-you-know-who-at-such-and-such-place’ formula, these
images invite you to build off and use ...
It’s interesting to me that one of the media blurbs praising new social networking platform Koprol.com
reads: “Beat it, Facebook! Jakartans are about to get their own local
networking website...” Because the mobile-intensive, user-generated
site seems -- if anything -- to be providing a way for social media
brats to ensure their Facebook sites are up-to-the-minute and that
their friends know where they are at any given microsecond.
Two things struck me about this site. The first w...
Indonesia’s homegrown answer to youtube, layartancap.com is an interesting little site with heaps of potential. If only it had better content...
For starters, the ‘true streaming’ vids posted here take a fraction of
the time to load as youtube clips when using a typical (read: slow)
Indo internet connection. The site claims the faster speed is to do
with its location in IIX (Indonesia Internet eXchange). Not sure if this actually cuts down your internet bills, but they say it does...
Everyone knows that China is an extremely gastronomic-centric culture where much time and effort is put into finding the best restaurants. For foodies in China, many turn to Dianping.com, the largest user-generated restaurant review site in China, covering more than 500,000 restaurants in over 300 cities in China. More recently, Dianping has grown into a site where consumers can share their experiences on city life in general, including night clubs, shopping, beauty, hotels, marriage and mor...
Plurk is a social networking and microblogging site that
lets you share a timeline of events in your life through updates. Short
messages or updates are called “plurks”. A web function also integrates Plurk
into Facebook as status messages. Similar to Twitter, plurks are 140 text
characters in length. User may share images and videos with friends.
Users are encouraged to earn karma points by updating their
profiles, posting quality plurks everyday, and responding to other plurke...
In my previous post on Jakarta’s brewing post-rock cauldron [Melting Pot: Ghaust], I had anticipated the rise of a sub-culture that apparently had been lying dormant for the last few years, waiting its turn to evolve. The experimental indie/post rock community remains on the fringes, but it’s at least beginning a long, slow, silent march out of obscurity.
Since 2006 a group of musician posted a blog called Best Music You Never Know [postrockerz.blogspot.com], following a discussion of po...
For Jakarta film freaks, the living was hard a few years back. In order to see a cult, festival, or any other kind of 'non-commercial Hollywood' film, we had to order DVDs online, contact friends living abroad to send them, wait for one of the few annual film fests with an indie focus (like JiFFest) or search the back catalogues of Mangga Dua’s DVD stalls, only to come up with one or two titles we ‘kind of’ wanted to see.
Luckily, as the movie industry in Indonesia has grown more diver...
