What’s your real name and why jibone?
My real name is J. Shamsul Bahri. That is how it is on my I.C. and birth certificate. Just ‘J.’ Which was partly why the nickname ‘Jibone’ was given to me by friends during my school days. That name have become my IRC nick and almost everything I register online.
What do you do professionally?
My ‘day job’ name card says that I am a R&D Engineer for System Consultancy Services. A system integrator type of company. I do some software and web programming. This job pays the bill.
Other stuff I do is I write and maintained several webzine/webblog. Jiboneus.com starts out as a personal blog now it’s a Webzine about arts, music, films and technology. Another recently launched website is WirawanWeb.com, it’s a webzine about all things web, from silly memes to serious stuff like online privacy and Internet censorship.
I am adopting the term Webzine because well, the term ‘blog’ these days refers to politics and personal stuff. Beside I am inspired by the whole ‘fanzine’ subculture, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
On my free time I like to play with web APIs. I call it my ‘web experiments’, Jejak Kicau is one of it.
What inspired you to create Jejak Kicau?
You remember the movie X-Men (not the latest one), where Professor X goes into the room Cerebro and he could ‘listen’ to the thoughts of others all over the globe?
Well, either we realize it or not, we are all putting our thoughts on the Internet – Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, photos and videos. Imagine if we could take a look at what’s on the minds of most Malaysian.
For the Bersih event, we could see half of it wants a fair and clean election while the other half are complaining about the traffic jams.
What inspired you to create Jejak Kicau?
I’m not sure about the goal, this is just a pet project playing with web APIs. I do have plans to include Facebook status updates via their public Graph API and other stuff from other social networks if there is a way to access it.
It could be a useful socia analytic tool tracking trends across different types of social network, or just a toy for tracking hashtags.
Share 1 thing you liked / learned from this project?
1 thing I learn from this project.. today, almost everybody have a handphone with a camera with Internet access. News no longer comes in a pre-package format. Tools like this brings the news straight to you as it happens. I’ll let you decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
What was your goal for this project?
Editor: It’s been so experimental that Shamsul told me there wasn’t really a goal to this as of now. ;)
Lastly, what now?
There are a few enhancements I want to do.
- Shorter URLs resolving to the long format, maybe with a title in it.
- Include Facebook updates in the mix.
- Twitter streaming API for better updates.
- Smooth some of the rough edges.
I plan to put this up on a public github or something, once I clean up some of my embarrassing codes that is.
So I guess that’s all about me and Jejak Kicau.
Editor’s Note
I’ve always wanted to feature Malaysian heroes of our Internet for their driven ideas derived from inspirations or aspirations. This is one of them. Please contact me if you’ve a pet project you’d like to share and I hope you like this enough to make it permanent. ;)