Chin Saik Yoon
Chief Editor

Content

The Asia-Pacific content sector is most vibrant in the non-English-speaking economies of the region. China, Indonesia, Japan and Korea all report of active and viable local content producers. Their “linguistic isolation” appears to have helped them nurture the strongest online publishers. The chapter on China reveals that more than 80 percent of its Internet users visit Chinese language websites (p. 74). It also reveals that more than 75 percent of China’s Internet users visit Chinese language news sites (p. 75).

Newspapers operate the most popular websites in the region, as in most of the other parts of the world. The popularity of news websites is not surprising given that newspapers are probably the only organisations online with the capacity to update content on a regular basis.

A common complaint across the region is of websites with static content. What is often found lacking consists not only of outdated content but also content generating little interest or providing limited utility. Many organisations, including government agencies, post online brochure-like information – scanty bits of information devoid of the breadth and depth which makes information useful to visitors. Associated with this complaint is the non-interactive nature of most websites. The complaint is heard the loudest of public sector websites since most users visiting government websites expect some form of virtual government service that helps them get around the often time-consuming bureaucracy of the real world.

This criticism can also be validly applied to the private sector. The popular news websites are largely online facsimiles of conventional newspapers and magazines or digitised versions of analogue editions repackaged for broadcast via the new ICTs. Really successful news websites tend to provide interactive features, such as online polls, searches of news archives, and links to related stories which provide a historical context and analysis to a particular news story.

A couple of interesting news websites which were born online, and continue to be published exclusively on the Web, are Detik.com http://www.detik.com (p. 98) and Malaysiakini.com http://www.malaysiakini.com (p. 190). Detik.com is the leading online news source in Indonesia. It garnered much of its reputation as being the most accurate breaking-news website during the 1998–99 student demonstrations. Malaysiakini.com built its reputation under somewhat different circumstances by providing alternative coverage of major national news events. It has now included a “blog”, or a weblog, in its daily editions. Blogs may be considered an original genre of the Web. It is a mix of a diary and a newspaper column, but offering links to an eclectic collection of related webpages about the topic being discussed and supplemented with comments from its readers.

Malaysiakini.com also exemplifies the challenges faced by dedicated online media. The news site is discovering that it is very difficult to generate paid subscriptions from its users to sustain its operations in the long run. Readers still expect to receive their online news free. The conventional news media have been able to sustain their online operations as they view them very much like online promotions, or cross-selling channels, for their print editions and the lucrative advertisements which they carry.

The popularity of online audio and video content is limited to Asian economies with established broadband access. Internet users in Korea (p. 142) and Japan (p. 123) not only stream audio and video but also use their broadband access to download music and play games. Apart from these exceptions, much of the content consumed in Asia Pacific is downloaded as text.

In some countries, even textual content poses a technical challenge. In Nepal (p. 197) and Cambodia (p. 133), for example, the lack of a standardised electronic font for the two national languages in these countries places content providers in a quandary as to which of the many available fonts they should use for their online textual content. There is no perfect solution when faced with such a quandary. The most practical strategy is to mount the content as large pieces of graphic images bearing text which does not require a font to access. However, this stopgap solution leads to other technical problems as large graphic images tend to take a much longer time to download and so they clog up the limited bandwidth available in most of the affected countries.

The challenge for the other Asia-Pacific countries, with a population fluent in English, is competing with foreign sources of content. North American and European news websites such as BBCi News, CNN.com and the New York Times on the Web are popular across the region. Their popularity has been a source of anxiety for many regulators, who worry that foreign media may sway public opinion at home, especially on crucial political and socioeconomic issues. Media critics, on the other hand, are concerned about the biased worldview shaped locally and globally by these influential media. The 2003 Iraq War has been cited as a prime example. One of the most critical assessments was delivered by Greg Dyke (2003), BBC’s director general (who paradoxically leads one of the dominant media groups himself), who denounced the “gung-ho patriotism” of one of the largest US news networks in covering the war: “This is happening in the United States and if it continues will undermine the credibility of the US electronic news media.

At the same time, Asian news sources are not without their share of criticism. Biased and inadequate reportage is often cited as the major failure of the national media. The SARS outbreak in early 2003 demonstrated the deadly consequence of stifling news flows. The knee-jerk reaction was to control the release of information on the disease. This initially led to ignorance about SARS, even on the part of medical practitioners, and contributed to the early spread of the disease. As news leaked through interpersonal channels about the outbreak, and as the official sources of information continued to maintain their silence, people braced themselves for the worst and believed all snippets of information which came their way, no matter how inaccurate they were. When the official news channels began to tackle the epidemic in a transparent way, it took them a while to recover the confidence of the public and very precious time had been lost in mobilising preventive and containment measures within the affected communities.

In spite of the occasional failures of the local sources of information, the international news organisations do not monopolise the Asia-Pacific readership. Asians continue to log on to their national news websites for the local perspective on current affairs. The Asian diaspora, dispersed around the world, has also found in the national news sites the near perfect channel for keeping abreast with the latest happenings back home. It is thought that these people account for a significant number of hits logged at these websites. Although reportage by foreign online media remains controversial – especially about significant political and economic affairs in the region – their availability online to all Internet users has encouraged national and regional media to be more forthright and candid in their coverage of events at home. This, more than any form of gate-keeping, will serve in the long run to check the influence of foreign news sources on Asia-Pacific communities.

One of the original and most rewarding uses of the Internet is in support of R&D. Many of the national networks in the Asia Pacific began within the academe and the R&D community before popular demand for connectivity commercialised the Internet, overwhelmed the R&D networks and relegated the digital pioneers from the academe to the backwaters of the sector. However, the R&D networks continue to thrive quietly in the background, deploying ICTs in efficient ways and with socially meaningful impact. A good example of this can be found in Vietnam, where 70 percent of universities are connected to the Internet. A number of them are building electronic libraries, bringing new research and learning resources to faculty members and students. The Hanoi Polytechnic University offers an outstanding example of an electronic library with linkages to electronic libraries of universities abroad.

  Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training has launched the Education Gateway Project, which will eventually connect all universities, colleges and vocational schools (p. 298). Most of the other countries in the region have initiated similar networks. China’s CERNET links national educational and research organisations, offering information in both Chinese and English (p. 76). The Institute for Afghan Studies, run by young Afghan scholars from around the world, has compiled and made available on the Web comprehensive collections of historical information, analyses and bibliographies that are useful to ongoing efforts to reconstruct Afghanistan (p. 25). The National Library of Bhutan has also made available on the Web both current and historical information about the country, which used to be inaccessible to researchers with an interest in the country who work outside Bhutan (p. 69).

Documentation on some of the darker episodes of recent Asian history has also been made accessible: Yale University’s Genocide Documentation Project has mounted its documents on the Web in both Khmer and English (p. 132).

Researchers dedicated to development issues have been energised in their work by the advent of numerous websites sharing research results and resources. The Global Environment Centre in Japan has placed online seven databases specialising in environmental topics, such as water treatment, air pollution control, soil and groundwater contamination, and energy conservation (p. 124). The Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat website is the source of documents on regional policies and action plans as well as information on political, development and economic issues (p. 309). R&D information on rice, the staple of the majority of Asians, is available from the International Rice Research Institute based in the Philippines (p. 219).

The original purpose of the Internet is very much alive and continues to make significant contributions to broader efforts to improve the quality of life in the region. The developmental impact of these strands of the Web is sometimes forgotten in the rush to nurture the commercial side of the Internet. However, the significant but difficult-to-quantify return on investment of the R&D-supporting initiatives of the Internet should not be underestimated nor ignored.

Turning to the lighter side of the Web and the coverage of sporting events, cricket websites are a uniquely South Asian phenomenon. CricInfo <http://www.cricinfo.com> of Pakistan claims to be the world’s top cricket website. It generated in excess of 1.5 billion pageviews by 15 million users in 180 countries in 2001. The company is also helping to produce eight of the ten official websites for Test-playing countries. Cricket.org and CricketNext.com are the two notable Indian websites for this sport. Sri Lanka’s equivalent is <http://www.lankacricket.lk>. They are all world-class online media operating in a highly competitive environment. Their coverage during major Test matches is both intense and unrelenting. Each move on the field is quickly reported on the Web. This is one rare niche in online content that is dominated globally by Asians.

Content
Online services
Innovative and key initiatives
Enabling policies
Some trends and concerns