Interview: Enda Nasution, father of Indonesian blogosphere

Presenting a brief email interview with Enda Nasution, who is a prominent Indonesian blogger and author of the Politikana blog. 34 years old Enda has been blogging since 2001 and is better known as father of Indonesian blogger. He is accredited as TED India fellow and I interviewed him as a part of TED India Fellows project, wherein a group of enthusiastic bloggers interviewed TED India fellows, so as to introduce them better to others. Refer links at end of the post for other TED India fellows who have been interviewed by other bloggers. I thank Enda for agreeing and responding to my interview questions, speaking about various aspects concerning the blogosphere.- Shrinidhi

Interview of Enda Nasution

Q: With lots of companies considering advertising through social media, do you see a serious threat to conventional advertising such as print and television?

Enda: Yes, but it depends on the market, market segments demographics and the product itself. Some products such as pet food or soap dishes are not meant to be advertise through social media for example. But a product targeting a young, urban person such as cell phone products needs to be communicating through social media, because that is where its target market is.

Q What’s your take on recent FTC ruling that bloggers must declare any financial/non-financial benefit they would have gained for publishing a post? What would be the best way to bring in credibility in the blogging world?

Enda: There's and probably there will be no easy solution to bloggers’ credibility, it needs time to build and time to be recognized as well and it is difficult to judge a credibility of a blogger from her/his blog face value. And the FTC ruling is fine but it is apply only to certain categories of bloggers, bloggers who blogs professionally. This way they can be included with mainstream media as channel of information.

Q: Lots of technologies have come and gone. Several years since its inception, blogging continues to retain its prominence. But what’s your outlook for blogosphere? Do you see it getting obsolete in near future?

Enda: It will not be going obsolete, like newspaper and magazine have not gone obsolete even after few hundred years and several technologies that tried to replace it. But it will become more sophisticated format-wise, we'll see more video blogging once broadband connection is more available for public, we'll see experimentation in term of collaboration as well. Blog will merge (use) as a person online identity home based, where all of his/her online persona in different places come together.

Q: Can you share with us a few memorable incidents in your blogging tenure?

Enda: Connecting with other people through sharing your personal experience has always been a memorable experience. For me a particular post about "quarter life crisis" strike conversation and receive well responds. I wrote it when I think I was going through it, now when I've passed that stages, the post still receives comments left by people few years younger than me, who are apparently going through the same thing.

Q: How is the broadband penetration and mobile internet growing in Indonesia? At par with other countries or do you feel it is lagging behind?

Enda: We got about 2 million broadband subscribers, that's very small compare with the total population of 237 million people. Mobile internet is freely available with cheaper price, there are about 150 mil mobile users, but not all of them perhaps access internet through their mobile. If I can make a wish, probably we need more reliable and fast internet connection (infrastructure), on this case I am hoping Indonesian government can create an innovative policy that gives a good incentives for online private sectors to create a massive and reliable online infrastructure

Q: If someone wants to take up blogging as a career option and make a living out of it, what would be your suggestion?

Enda: It won't be as fun as when you blog for yourself, because blogging for money means blogging becomes work. But if you want to do it bear in mind, it won't be easy and needed a lot of patient. Not impossible because people doing it, but it won't be a walk in the park either.

Q Have you ever felt very low and dejected during blogging- say a phase where you felt no one is reading your blog, or receiving highly discouraging comments and the likes? How did you cope up with it?

Enda: Not for me, I always tried to ignore negative comments and focus with what we can do practically.

Q. Any message for your blogging counterparts in India

Enda: Hmm! I think just that we need to communicate more closely. I am sure there are so many things that we can learn from each other due to similarity that our countries shares. And I am looking forward to meet some of Indian bloggers at TED India!

My other interviews: Kamal Quadir, CEO, Cellbazaar.com * Interview of Club Mahindra senior executive