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If you have noticed, Mudah (Malaysia's fast-rising eMarketplace) is aggressively buying a whole lot of keywords in Google Adwords. This could be the main reason why they are one of the most visited sites in Malaysia within a few months of launching.

For example, when you google keywords like nikon, samsung or proton, Mudah's advertisement will appear in the search results page. Not only that, they even bid on their competitors' brand identity.

ebay...

lelong...

Year 2008 is approaching the end and thus it would be inconclusive not to mention, in what I believe, the best web initiative in Malaysia for this year.

YouthSays

YouthSays, one of the YouthMalaysia project, is undoubtedly the hottest online youth community in Malaysia now. It is open to any Malaysian age 35 and below, and claims to have more than 60,000 members at the time of writing. Quite an impressive feat given that YouthSays is only about 7 months old.



Crowd pulling factor? YouthSays is well publicized, being helped by the fact that it rewards members in cold hard cash. Members can earn money by answering surveys or inviting friends. It might be just peanuts, but it is still attractive enough for non-blogger netizens who might not have the experience (and thrill) of earning cash online.

You might be thinking, what's so great about that? Here comes the CIA, ooops TYI I mean...

Google has released the most searched terms in 2008 (up to November). It is a great way to recap the year by looking at the search trend and curiosity around the world in this year.

There must be reasons why Google is cooler than Yahoo. Unlike Yahoo's Year In Review 2008, Google brands its year end compilation as Google Zeitgeist 2008 (Zeitgeist means "the spirit of the time"). Another cool factor, we have statistics reflecting major event or emerging trend in each selected countries.

Let's start with Malaysia, followed by other Asian countries. Before that, you need to understand this: "Fastest Rising" represents zeitgeist as its search volume increased sizably in 2008 compared to 2007, while "Most Popular" shows the largest search volume for 2008.

Have you been wondering whether is there any Malaysian working in Google? The Malaysia based country consultant is quite publicized but I guess not many are aware of this US based chap, Colin Wong.



As promised, here are some of the quick facts about him:

- Was born in Batu Gajah, somewhere near Ipoh.
- Earned a scholarship at The University of Texas at Arlington and graduated there in 1996.
- Started his career in United States, notably in CRM field.
- Joined Google's Sales Engineering Group at Silicon Valley in 2002.
- Managed many of Google's largest AdSense and AdWords customers.
- Left Google in 2006 and founded Prosperati, a venture capital company.
- Became the CEO of ZoeCity in late 2007, a new internet startup company based in Seattle.

Remember Sun Java's tag line "Write once, run anywhere"? Google has introduced similar concept to their social platform, OpenSocial. Developers write social application on top of the social platform, which is hosted on major social network sites.

(Image Source)

Which social network sites contain OpenSocial? Click here for an impressive list of OpenSocial SNS containers.

If we are talking the big three in Malaysia, Friendster and Myspace are in the picture. On another hand, you are forced into the walled garden of Facebook, which also fancies PHP-oriented developers. OpenSocial only requires developers to be equipped with XML, HTML and JavaScript.

Perhaps some of you have read a few version on this, for example here. I did come across an "alternative" version from Sin Chew Daily, which I am not sure where it is quoted from. Since similar resource couldn't be located online, I will translate it to English here.

1. Swedish fish is the first (on the list) take-away snacks Google orders to its office.



2. Google celebrates Halloween every year in the office. The funniest dress-up was lava lamp in 2007, which I can't visualize how it looks like though.



3. There are no restrictions on Googlers dress code in the office, in which pajama, ugly sweater and even super hero costume were on the records.

With the advent of High Speed Broadband (HSBB), Malaysian can finally look forward (fingers crossed) to better technology infrastructure.

HSBB is a premium broadband service with speeds of 10Mbps (Megabits per seconds) to 100 Mbps for residential customers and up to 1Gbps (Gigabits per seconds) for businesses for high economic impact areas delivered via fibre optic infrastructure. (Source)

We all hope that this will become one of the key attraction for major technology companies like Google to step their foot in Malaysia, which is being rumoured since early this year.

Google Suggest has graduated from Google Labs and appears at their homepage (US site).

If "c" is entered, terms suggested by Google will appear as below. If you inspect the "suggested list", you can see that Google rank the terms by "popularity" instead of the number of returned results.