the death of PPS?

PPS, or Project Petaling Street was the first blogtal (blog portal, where members can post/ping their lastest posting) for Malaysians and by Malaysians. Appeared roughly at the same time as Technorati, the world biggest blogtal , PPS is certainly one of the cornerstone in Malaysia cyber history. Well, history aside, more recently, I observed some sad and gradual developments of PPS.

Firstly, due to its non-profit nature, all its administrators are rather busy with their own private life and career. Unlike Technorati where its founders are paid in millions, the founders of PPS (a bunch of them) are not paid by anyone. In fact, few years back, when PPS requires a new server, donations have to be called in. Unsurprisingly, the Malaysian government never chips in when it should. Hence, PPS has not been developed or monitored well in recent months. Random spamming and commercial advertising pings are not removed. THe recent layout change was rejected (due to poor design etc).

Secondly, as mentioned before, is the prevalence of commercial postings by various "professional bloggers". As more and more Malaysians join the bandwagon of posting for a living (few hours work a day and money coming in streams...siapa tak nak!), learning from the successful trials by various established bloggers, most of them would fully utilize the availablity of free advertising on PPS. who wouldn't?

Consequently, more established bloggers are slowly disassociating themselves from PPS. Bloggers such as Jeff Ooi, Kenny Sia, and even xiaxue, started off by pinging PPS. Jeff used to have a special link bar on the side. Well, those were the days. With gradual decline of useful content pinging, and the decline of growth of bloggers, PPS will only see its way out to obscurity. Unfortunate end-of-shelf life for such a great idea.