All Tomorrow's Tupperware Parties

I've been trying very hard to not say anything about Tomorrow.sg here, because it's still early and because the team behind it includes a few people I hold in high regard. It's been over a month now, though, and it's about time I ejected this elephant from my living room.

Tomorrow.sg sucks. No offence to mb, La Idler or the conspicuously invisible Adri, but it does. What could have been Singapore's BoingBoing or Volokh Conspiracy or something in between has instead turned out as (continuing in that High Concept vein) Her World meets Chicken Soup for the Singaporean Soul, with a sprinkling of bafflingly punchline-free humour posts, bafflingly pointless news items and the simply baffling. Rarely have I seen so much cachet expended on so inconsequential a venture.

What's missing? In a word, focus. 11 editors (not contributors—editors!) is overkill to begin with; I would call it 'blogging by committee', but committees at least have agendas to guide them. Tomorrow, perhaps allowing what the the word connotes (bias, spin) to overwhelm what it denotes ('A list or program of things to be done or considered'), has an unwarranted phobia of agendas—

We are just a bunch of Singapore bloggers trying to kick Straits Time ass do bo liao things. Really, this comes from a bloggers dinner we have dunno how long ago, sound like a fun idea and so we just do it.

Don't ask us what this is for - we don't know also.

Don't ask us what's our agenda - we don't have one (except to bring interesting articles written from bloggers in Singapore together.)

That sounds like a focus, but it really isn't. What is an interesting article? 11 people naturally have 11 different ideas of 'interesting', and some of them are rather. . . undemanding? Eclecticism can be a good thing, but there's no utility in a spotlight that shines on absofuckinglutely everything. There comes a point when simply clicking the Next Blog button on the Blogger toolbar starts to look like an attractive alternative to following the links highlighted by Tomorrow.sg.

What I'd do, in no particular order:

1) Realise that 'agenda' is not a dirty word. Then decide on an actual agenda, and follow it.

2) Include a little more commentary along with the links when their newsworthiness isn't blindingly obvious. 'Anonymous letters are the saddest' is not sufficient to justify the inclusion of a common or garden letter 'From a deeply hurt Daughter', nor is 'Jay-Walk ponders the multiethnic staff at Kandang Kerbau' justification enough to link to a post that amounts to 'My wife delivered and by the way KKH has workers from a few different races and they work together in harmony just like in the ads!'

If you're posting a link, that means you think it's worth reading; as the reader, I expect you to tell me, briefly, why.

3) Lose the dead wood. For instance, TinkerTailor is doing no one any favours with commentary like 'dunno how they did the study' when the answer took up two whole paragraphs of the page linked. RTFA, n00b.

4) Raise the bar. How high? High enough to exclude maudlin, commonplace crap like this anyway. If I wanted adolescent (in spirit, anyway) ramblings on luurve, I would go to LiveJournal.

Come on, guys. Surely you can do better.