Roku is the latest project by Janith, with some ideological input from me. If he’s Prabhakaran, I’m Balasingham. Here is his introduction, which I excerpt below. Roku (working title) is a new type of commenting debate/system. Instead of just commenting in one big thread below, you can take sides (for, against, or neutral). You can upvote each comment, which creates a final score, a ‘winner’ for that particular debate.

It’s amazing the power we have under our clothes. Simply by taking of our clothes, we can immediately shock and/or attract everybody. Aliaa Magda Elmahdy posted nude photographs of herself on her blog as a rebellion against Egypt’s conservative culture and “sexual complexes”. That conservative culture bit back in droves, with even liberals distancing themselves from her.

The BBC is reporting other people reporting that a lot of websites are blocked, including unp.lk (opposition party) and other media sites (lankanewsweb, Sri Lanka Guardian, etc). Those media sites do seem to be blocked, but I can still access the UNP’s site*. In other news, the government has also asked any news websites to register including, presumably, this one.

Was browsing thru Typo In Colombo and this is the funniest HitAd I’ve ever seen (via David Blacker). “Good to attracting the badu. Loud beet silancer. for sale or exchange, owner also available. contact Eastside Chimpunk.” Just, amazing.

There’s a great new Tumblr called Typo In Colombo. Tumblrs are great for visual gags that profit by repetition (Women Looking Dissatisfied In Bed, Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses), and the hilarious English in Sri Lanka is one example. Typo In Colombo has started doing this for some of the unintentional humor of the Colombo streets.

Kottu’s been going through a lot of ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. Janith has rebuilt everything from scratch and I’ve been scratching at the surface. Every post now has chilis next to it, like a menu, so you can tell how spicy it is. By spicy we mean popular (clicks, tweets, likes). Anyways, where was I, oh yeah. Kottu needs a logo.

My main innovation with Kottu was Wordpress and I guess the color red. Both are now gone now, leaving only ideas. Kottu is now truly designed by the younger, faster and better Janith Leanage, and it is good.

I read HeyDude’s blog now and then, he tells some quite good stories. This is a classic about moving to another country, not having much money and loving your kid. I know a bit how it feels: “This story is not funny at all. We hadn’t brought much cash with us when we arrived here. And everything was unexpectedly, artificially and humorously expensive. What we had we had to spend so carefully till we got our first month’s salaries. The little one who had a roomful of toys at home (both his and his sister’s) was fingering the toys in the shops here and but never asked for them. We gritted our teeth and prayed for the salary.”

Kottu now has tags. THANKS TO JANITH. Boy is a genius, seriously. I work in duct tape and he works in marble. There’s a thin line between categories and chaos, but I think Kottu is walking it now. Basically, bloggers can tag posts as they please. Kottu takes the first three tags, sese if they fit into our taxonomy and files them accordingly. What I think is especially cool is that language and popularity and category filters all work together. Thus, you can get a vegetarian kottu with extra chili but no onions, so to speak.

Janith has set up tags (or categories) on Kottu. Announced on Twitter. We’ve thought about this and I think he’s implemented it in a good way. Too many tags are worse than no tags at all, so there’s going to be a set amount. Hashtags, whatever, come and go. But there will be a few set categories. If bloggers categorize their posts, we can pull that from the feed. Check it out at kottu.org/tags.php.