Sarinee Achavanuntakul, 32, better known as "Fringer" in cyberspace, loves to write and share information, knowledge and wisdom with like-minded people. Fourteen months ago, she set up the fringer.org website as a forum for these pursuits.

"It liberates me," says the US-educated former financial executive, who believes that blogs, or web logs, and personal websites hold new promise

for the advance of mankind's knowledge.

She shares the opinion of Rupert Murdoch that the advent of blogs, of which there are now several hundred million worldwide, is probably comparable to the invention of the printing press some five centuries ago in terms of knowledge dissemination and creation.

Blogs (the term "blog" entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2003) were a natural progression from Internet chat rooms, ICQ and online diaries.

Sarinee, who earned an economics degree from Harvard University in 1996, says blogs can also be considered part of the "creative destruction" process in which traditional mass-media outlets will find themselves increasingly being displaced by the new media.

In the era of Netizenship, many consumers of news and information will also become co-producers, posing new challenges to the gatekeepers at traditional mainstream media outlets such as newspapers and TV networks.

The polarisation of news and information prior to the September 19 coup that overthrew the Thaksin administration is a good example.

For months, information from both anti-Thaksin and pro-Thaksin camps was completely slanted. The mainstream media outlets, especially TV, were exercising a sort of self-censorship.

"Then, we got the anti-Thaksin 'Manager' website which was quite good at disseminating news and information, but it still made some factual mistakes," says Sarinee.

"We also heard that there were people hired to post messages on websites to counter criticisms of the former Thaksin government, whereas some other sites were clearly anti-Thaksin.

"Hence it was quite difficult for the general public to get unbiased facts [during the months-long lead-up to the coup]. They needed to rely on their own judgement to get the truth.

"And since the many issues at play were complex and complicated, I thought it would be useful to share information so that we could better separate rumour from fact, or cross-check whether information from certain sources was credible," she says.

As a result, fringer.org became a popular blog during this period. At its peak in March-April 2006, there were more than 20,000 downloads of Saranee's articles on the controversial "nominee" issue in the Shin Corp-Temasek deal by followers of her bilingual blog.

At the time, the pro-Thaksin camp defended the use of nominees in the Bt73-billion transaction as "acceptable", arguing that such a practice was commonplace among Thai business entities that had significant foreign ownership.

On the other hand, the anti-Thaksin camp countered that the deal was "unacceptable" and illegal since it violated the country's foreign-ownership law, which bars foreigners from holding more than 49 per cent in Thai entities.

At the most recent count, Fringer.org has already published 69 articles on politics, 21 articles on economics and 23 articles on books. In the area of politics, the issue of policy corruption has been one of the favourite topics since it's rather complicated for the general public.

For instance, the Bt16-billion tax break awarded a few years ago to Shin Satellite Plc, a unit of Shin Corp, could be regarded as a form of policy corruption since there weren't sufficient economic reasons for the state to forego such a huge amount of tax revenue.

Sarinee says a simple evaluation of Shin Satellite's business showed that its undertaking was viable and quite competitive back then, so there was no need for state assistance, adding that neither did the tax privileges encourage the company to make further investments.

In other words, she says, a competitive business shouldn't be granted tax privileges since it's a waste of public money.

On a lighter topic, Sarinee says Bhutanese Prince Jigme's June visit to Thailand for the celebrations of His Majesty the King's 60th anniversary on the throne also attracted lots of visitors to her blog which featured articles on the prince and his native land.

 During his brief stay in Thailand, the handsome young prince quickly became a heart-throb among Thai girls and women.

As a result, there was a lot of interest in the prince and Bhutan, which is well known for its eco-tourism and emphasis on the people's happiness rather than the economic or GDP growth rate as the goal of national development.

Nophakhun Limsamarnphun

nop1122@yahoo.com