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.

Today on Kottu there are a few popular topics. One is reactions to the death of Titus Thotawatte, director, editor but – to many young people in Sri Lanka – remembered for his creative dubbing of popular cartoons, localizing them beyond language. Another trending topic is teenyboppers, or, what’s with the kids these days.

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.

Janith has released the secret recipe for Kottu. It’s MSG. Little bit of cocaine. Alternately, it’s a bunch of php files now stored on GitHub. The whole thing is released under the Affero GPL (as per Chanux’s suggestion). This means the code is free as in speech. Do something cool with it if you can.

Sri Lanka is frequently broken down into Sinhala and Tamil (or Sinhala vs. Tamil), but the country is actually a lot more diverse. There is a huge and largely multilingual Muslim population, but even that doesn’t do people justice. There are also Malays, mostly Muslim but diverse in their own way. Here are two posts on the subject.

Kottu has been completely recoded by Janith Leanage. What’s different? Well, it got too big and now Kottu has tools to make the experience a bit more relevant again. You can filter by language on top (English, Sinhala, Tamil). The popular posts thing is now back, except smarter. Before a few people would sit and click all day and mess up the rankings. Now clicks are only one factor in an algorithm, other factors are buzz on Twitter, FB, Twitter and Google Plus.