Bemonet Alumni and First Indonesian Bloggers

My friend Budi Putra, reputedly the first full-time Indonesian blogger, is currently doing a research on the history of first Indonesian bloggers. I agree with him that articles with regard to this matter are rarely found on the Internet, and I fully support his initiative and efforts in doing the research. I foresee that this will be quite a difficult task for him, but once the task is done, I believe the research results will be very much rewarding, not only for him, but also for us and the Indonesian blogosphere in general.

Currently, he's in the early stage of gathering all the necessary information. Some fruitful inputs and feedbacks have been received as comments on the article. Based on the inputs and feedbacks, it seems that the year 2000 is the start of the blogging era for Indonesia.

It was noted that some of the first Indonesian bloggers, such as Harry Sufehmi, Priyadi Iman Nurcahyo, T.A. Coen, Kukuh T. Wicaksono and Kuncoro Wastuwibowo are coming from the BemoNet community, a BBS community which I joined during the Indonesian BBS era in the 90's. The start of the Internet era marked the end of the BBS era in Indonesia, and the members of the community had to move on to use Internet as their communication media. Some of them used the mailing list, and some other used blogs.

T.A. Coen, the Bemonet coordinator, started a poliblog called Bemo Live, which I was one of the contributors. The first post of BemoLive was dated 7 April 2000. At that time, I already had a Blogger account even though I haven't started to blog, as yet. On the same year, Idban Secandri also started another poliblog called Blog Suka-Suka, and he was also very kind to add me as one of the contributors. The first post of Blog Suka-Suka was dated 23 August 2000.

At that time, Coen and Idban should have started their own blogs as well, so I believe we can safely say that they were some of the first Indonesian bloggers who has started blogging since early 2000. On top of that, some of the active contributors of the two poliblog sites, such as Kukuh and Kuncoro, can be considered as first Indonesian bloggers as well.

Again, I would like to emphasize that I have not started to actively blog at that time. At that time, I chose to use the bemo-batavia mailing list, setup by Heryudi Ganesha, to get in touch with other Bemonetters. I only started to blog on year 2004 (based on my first post on this blog), and only started to actively blog on year 2005, when I launched Rumah Indra and The Journey of Inka and Irza. Therefore, of course, I am NOT one of the first Indonesian bloggers I have mentioned above. :)

On a side note, the official domain of the Bemonet community, bemo.or.id, is currently down at the moment. Couple of months back, I had a chat with Coen about the possibility of reactivating this domain and host the site in my facility, however so far there's no further updates on when can the domain be reactivated. Perhaps Coen or Priyadi can shed some light on the status of the domain? :)

Last but not least, I hope the above short article can help Budi in doing his research. Again, I fully support his efforts in doing this research and I am looking forward to see the results of the research. Good luck. :)