2020 review

 Last year I sadly neglected this blog quite a bit, at first it was a quiet time, and then a serious sickness kept me from working on this project. In the second half of 2020 a bit more happened on the subdivisions, though I have succeeded to keep my XML as well as the Excel sheet updated, its not yet documented here.

So a short list what I have to write about

• December 20, the Provincial Administrative Organizations had their first elections since 2014, now all have a new chairman as well as councillors.
• On March 28 2021, the municipality mayor and council elections are planned to take place. [Bangkok Post]. The constituencies of them were announced in the last quarter of 2020. Apparently the TAO elections will be held later this year then.
• There were some more municipal changes after my last list from April.
• The DOPA population statistics for December 31 2020 is already online, but not yet directly accessible on the website.

In short the main numbers for December 31

• 30 city municipalities (Thesaban Nakhon)
• 195 town municipalites (Thesaban Mueang)
• 2247 subdistrict municipalities (Thesaban Tambon)
• 5300 subdistrict administrative organizations (TAO)
• Total population as of December 31 2020 from the registry: 6,6186,727 (3,2375,532 male and 3,3811,195 female)

RIP Gwillim Law

Gwillim Law, the author of the incredible website statoids.com, has passed away recently. I was lucky to be able to get a used copy of his book "Administrative Subdivisions of Countries" when I started writing in Wikipedia on these, and later his website became a great resource to find up-to-date information. With time, I was able to get into the Thai subdivision to a much deeper degree and getting access to the primary sources, so for example for the 2010 census I was able to provide him with data as a way to return the favor.

His daughter Shirley has taken over the enormous task of keeping his website running - knowing how much time I spend on just a single country, covering the whole world down to the second level subdivisions must be a full time work. I only hope she can keep up the heritage of her father, and of course whenever there are any changes in Thailand to be included I will notify her same as I did before with him.

Blog cited in academic publications

For academic publications it is essential to have lots of references, and maybe even more to get cited by other publications - the only way to quantify the quality of a publication is how often it gets cited in other publications. When I studied (a field totally unrelated to the geography, politics and history topics I write here) I never made it to have anything published, and I have been out of the academic world since then. As blogs same as other amateur written, not peer-reviewed content is often not considered cite-worthy, I discovered that at least in four publication my content was cited. Rarely, a scholar or student contacts me directly and I am always happy to help if possible, yet out of the four citations I could find with Google I only had a short conversation with the author of the last one.

• Peerasit Kamnnuansilpa, "The challenges of Rapid Urbanization for Local Governments in Thailand" cites "Preliminary census results"
• M. Shamshul Haque, "Decentralizing local governance in Thailand: Contemporary trends and Challenges" cites "Number of administrative entities 2008".
• Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker , "Reviving Democracy at Thailand's 2011 Election" cites "Provincial Governor Reshuffle List 2011"
• Audrey Baron-Gutty, "Paradigme politique et évolution des institutions éducatives : le cas d'une société non-occidentale : la Thaïlande", mentions the blog in general

As I have no access to any academic journal, only those paper which happen to be freely accessible on the Internet, so if there are any further citations I haven't noticed yet I would be curious to know.

1000

After almost five years of blogging, I have reached the magic number of 1000 posts. When I started with this blog, I never expected that I would have enough topics to write about to fill such a big number of postings, or have the patience to keep up with writing up something regularly over such a long time. Though I recently haven't been posting as often as I did in the beginning, when I had five postings a week, this is not because I have run out of topics or out of steam. One reason is that there are not many news on changes in the subdivisions - the Mae Sot act is still on the agenda of the parliament, there's still just one new district in the planning and no concrete developments on that one either, so its mostly just the status changes of the local government units which are taking place. And I somehow take much more time nowadays for the research before having an article ready for posting, no wonder since the simple topics have been dealt with here already. But after a bit of vacation time, I now have several new things to post soon...

When looking at the access statistics of this blog, I see a slow but steady increase with now about 1000 hits a month. Nothing impressive compared with other blogs or websites, but given the special topic of the blog it is more than I expected. And though I had some interesting feedback from readers over the years, I still would love to read more comments or questions, just to get an idea if I am writing something which isn't just for myself. My main hope and original reason to start blogging hasn't yet materialized - getting into contact with someone within the Thai administrative system, to get more insight or have someone to send my questions, suggestions etc. Almost all attempts to contact anyone directly have failed so far.

Looking at the most popular postings, by far the most popular one was my analysis of the board game "King of Siam", whether the country divisions used in that game set at the times of King Chulalongkorn have any valid background. Even more marginally related to the main topic of the blog is second popular posting on road signs. Those postings most relevant to me or the topic and probably of most use for any researcher stumbling on this blog are in the long tail of less often accessed postings.

Though I doubt I will be able to reach the second thousand postings in a similar amount of time like for the first thousand, I will certainly continue to write about noteworthy news or interesting background articles, and continue to give status reports on my data collection project. But as mentioned - don't hesitate to give me feedback, knowing that I do something which gets noticed and used is the best motivation to continue working on it.

Amphur Bar & Cafe

I have found the perfect place for the first Changwat Amphoe Tambon blog reader meetup - the Amphur Bar & Cafe in Surat Thani. Only drawback is its location, not just a bit far off in the South of Thailand, but also already a bit outside the town center. And it will be still a long time till this event, as I am already back in Germany when this posting will become public, so no earlier than 2012. And I am still a bit reserved to go to a place which does not use the officical RTGS transcription.

But seriously, the reason for naming this bar Amphur is simply that it is located on the Amphur road (ถนนอำเภอ, literally district road), in the west of Surat Thani city. I have no idea why that street was named this way, as the district office is located on the other side of the city. But the street signs fit perfectly for my blog, now I only have to find a Changwat road and a Tambon road somewhere...

Interview in ThaiZeit

My posting on the Wikipedia anniversary had caught the interest of one of the writers of the German language magazine Thaizeit published in Bangkok. He was doing an article on blogs, showcasing the most fascinating or readable ones like the ones authored by Richard Barrow or Bkk Greg, and since he thought the story behind my blog and the odd topic to be interesting he asked me for an email interview.

Only knowing the so-called newspapers spread to tourists or expats in Hua Hin or Pattaya I was a bit skeptical about it, but after looking at the website - where one can see the complete current issue of the printed magazine - I found that the content is much better than what I expected. And the website even has many more articles from older issues or which haven't been published yet, so it is definitely worth visiting for anyone speaking German. I just miss some RSS feeds, so I can easier find out about new content in my fields of interest.

Though neither the blog article nor the interview hasn't been published in the paper version yet - maybe the forthcoming June edition, then I can pick my proof copy personally in Bangkok - both are on their website for quite some time already. For those readers who cannot speak German, there's not much beyond what I wrote in January anyway. Quite notable is the headline which was chosen for the interview - "Einer muss den Job ja machen" (There needs to be someone to do that job), which quite nicely summarizes one of my motivations, the fact that there was a big void in the accessible information on the net on these topics.

On the way to Bangkok

In the next three weeks I will be traveling in Thailand again. The blog won't be quiet, I have prepare some postings to be auto-published during my absence, and since I will have internet access I may post a few news or photo blog articles as well. But obviously the bigger issues like new announcements in the Royal Gazette will have to wait till I return home and have more time and resources.

I haven't packed the schedule of the trip much this time, only want to check out the Ratchaburi National Museum by myself after Ian already spotted the interesting old provincial symbol there. As usual, if I come close to a district office or other administrative building I will catch it on photo. And also will try to visit few more of the district museums, but since I have done most of the one easily reachable ones already it won't be that many. Though not much likely to find anything on the blog topic, I'll visit several book stores as well adding new items to my library.

If any of my readers in Bangkok, Surat Thani or Phuket wants to meet me in person, just contact me and see if there'll be a chance to meet for a coffee, beer or whatever.

How this blog started

On Saturday Wikipedia celebrated its 10th anniversary, growing from an obscure hardly known website where a few nerds wrote about their favorite topics to an outstanding encyclopaedia larger than all the printed ones, and albeit varying quality a website many would terribly miss if it would disappear. When I discovered Wikipedia it was already 2 years old, but still had many areas totally uncovered with articles. And this was how a physicist and software developer became a specialist on territorial administration in far away country.

So when I was starting with Wikipedia, one of the earliest articles I created was the one on my hometown and the district in which it is located. This made me (virtually) meet another editor who systematically started all the districts of Germany, and I joined in doing all those in the Bundesland I live, but finally I did maybe half of the 313 districts of Germany. Being freshly married with a Thai woman, I did the same for her home province Surat Thani, and with the experiences from the German districts I later began to create articles on all Thai provinces as well.

As I knew hardly anything on Thailand at that time, and even less on the administrative system, I had to do a lot of researching to make these articles of an acceptable quality, and also fell into traps like misunderstanding the Mueang districts to be the same as the capital towns. To assist in the collection of the data, I made the first versions of the spreadsheet which has grown a lot since then. Those few English source available on the internet at that time were sometimes rather confusing, but several mentioned the Monthon as a past structure. But as I could not make much sense out of those sources, I finally ordered the Tej Bunnags book "The provincial administration of Siam, 1892-1915" in library which gave me lots of new information, and also made me more interested into the topic.

The next step deeper into the topic began when with the help of a Thai editor the project of having articles on every district in Thailand came into full action - while he translated the content from amphoe.com, I added the population data and the table of subdistricts. After doing them manually for some days I realized that as a programmer I could much easier do a small software to grab the data from the DOPA website and make it into the table ready to insert into the Wikipedia article. At district level the local administrative units TAO and municipality come into focus, a new topic I had not known much about before.

Finally in 2007, I only learned about several changes in the administration late - there was a new minor district in Khon Kaen I didn't know about yet, there was the upgrade of all minor districts to full districts, and also two municipalities in Hat Yai district which had changed status. About all three I only learned more by coincidence. Then I discovered the Royal Gazette online archive, maybe the best source of data I have so far. And shortly thereafter I began with blogging to share my findings.

So Wikipedia not only helped me to learn a lot while researching for writing articles on topics which I was originally interested, it is also to blame for getting me so deep into this obscure topic - but of course I don't regret.

Three years of blogging

Time flies like an arrow, it is already three years since I started this blog, and still not running out of topics. Actually quite the contrary, especially with the now forthcoming new province there are even more things to write about, and its not rare I have postings for several weeks already prepared. It was also the coverage of this plan which made the readership of this blog jump by more than 20 readers well above the 100 reader mark, at least if I can believe Feedburner. But also in the normal access statistics with Google Analytics the month of August was the first one with more than 1000 visitors. This boost of readers is really welcome, as otherwise the numbers were stagnant in all of 2010, and I already thought I have reached most of those interested in the very technical topics of this blog. But oddly still the most popular posting by far is the one on the board game "König von Siam" two years ago. To illustrate the slow but steady growth of readership, below are the graphs both for the direct website hits as well as the feed reader count.

Website hits

Feed readers

Another good development was that Gwillim Law, the webmaster of the statoids website (see my old posting about it) updated his Thailand pages and added a link to this blog. Though it does only give a few extra visitors so far, these are visitors who are probably really interested in these topics and will likely become regular readers.

And last but not least my humble blog was also chosen as September's Blog of the Month by the prime Thailand blog directory Thailand Voice.

As I always do in this annual review posting, I invite every reader to participate in this blog by posting comments - I publish all except spam and those which I think might get me into trouble in Thailand - sometimes an innocent questions turns out to become an interesting posting. If you don't want to discuss publicly, you can also contact me by email.

There are also many more ways to help me to provide a great read here - like helping me to access resources I cannot reach being based in Germany (thanks Ian), collecting the coordinates of administrative offices to make my list more complete, or hinting me to news reports, academic papers or books which contain something to write about.

Trip in review

Back in cold Germany, here's a short overview of the things I did in Thailand related to the topic of this blog, so you can get an idea of what new postings may be written about.

• I have visited another five of the BMA local museums - Suan Luang, Yannawa, Bang Rak, Bang Sue and Dusit. The indiviual reports will be posted on my travel blog however.
• For have seen the first of the graphic license plates in Bangkok, a total of eight times. I wonder if I the previous years it was bad luck I never noticed any, or these new license plates actually just started to be issued recently.
• I could take photos of several administrative entity offices, including those in Ranong and Nakhon Pathom town. Also in Ranong I visited the graveyard of the first governor, and since I long planned to write up a Wikipedia article on him, maybe I'll start with a posting on him here first.

News topics which accumulated during my time of limited internet access include the first round of the district council elections in Bangkok, a province governor reshuffle which finalized the changes done after the red shirt riots in four provinces, and a few municipal decisions in the board meeting transcripts. However only one announcement in the Royal Gazette, another petition to split Lopburi province into two provinces, a topic I planned to wrote about for quite some time already anyway.

Bangkok, here I come

The annual vacation trip to Thailand is coming close, so for the next three weeks it will mostly have postings already written and posted by automatic, though I will have some internet access and might even write something while staying there.

Luckily at least temporarily the troubles around the red shirt rally are over, but with all the uncertainty of the current situation I haven't made much travel plans yet, so it will be a very spontaneous traveling this time. Of the few things planned for sure is of course the book shopping - my prime target Chula Books wasn't affected by the arson attacks around Siam Square, so I hope I can get some of my book shopping list there. Another must-visit place is the old province hall of Nonthaburi which now houses a really good local museum - much better than the district museums of Bangkok, of which I also plan to visit a few more. On a more touristic side, the Monkey School in Surat Thani should get a revisit.

Since I will also stay several days in Bangkok, any of my readers who'd like to meet me for a coffee, beer or anything else chatting over more pleasant topics than just the current color-coded politics - simply drop me an email.

Calendar with administrative events

As I missed this year's Prince Damrong day simply because I did not note the event in any calendar, I have now played with yet another of the cloud applications offered by Google and created a public calendar which I will fill with all events around the administrative units. Right now it is still very empty, but now whenever I will find anything worth noting - a local election date, the official creation of the new district Galyani Vadhana, award ceremonies at the Department of provincial administration, a big OTOP fair - I will add them into the calendar. Don't know if anyone else will find this one useful, or will even suggest me events for inclusion, but nevertheless I present it here.

Administrations who blog

Googeling the websites of the local government units - municipalities and subdistrict administrative organizations - I have come across some who are present on the blogging sites Blogspot or Wordpress. Announcing news from the administration is something where a RSS feed comes most handy, so one does not have to visit the website every now and then only to notice that something interesting was announced on short notice and is over already. While any decent content management system would allow RSS feeds to include into the website itself, as well as presenting such news on the site, only very few have such sophisticated websites using all the possibilities. The blogging websites offer a free alternative, and much easier to setup and use than a complex content management system.

In no particular order, there are four such blogs I discovered so far, with a varying depth of content. But of course all only in Thai language.

• Nong Chik district, Pattani: nongjik.blogspot.com
• Luang Nuae subdistrict municipality, Chiang Mai: tambonloungnuae.wordpress.com/
• Yaha subdistrict municipality, Yala: tesbanyaha.blogspot.com
• Mueang Kao subdistrict municipality, Khon Kaen: mk-mainblog.blogspot.com

While the above seem to be by the administrations itself, also some of the officers have personal work-related blogs. So far I only found one of this kind, written by the Financial and accounting officer of TAO Siao, Pho Si Suwan, Sisaket. Her blog is named แนะนำอบต.เสียว (Counsel TAO Siao). It's a pity I can only read these blogs with online translators like Google Translate, they could provide some interesting insights on the daily work in the local government.

There is another group of government units using blogs, however these seem to have misunderstood blogging with free webhosting. Instead of more-or-less regularily post news or stories, they have only once posted several articles with the informations on the entity, like the history, location, subdivisions. Two examples are

• TAO Wat Pa, Lom Sak district, Phetchabun: watpa-sao.blogspot.com
• TAO Ko Kaeo, Selaphum district, Roi Et: kohkaew101.blogspot.com

And some other even made it that far, they have empty blogs where only the header or the sidebar indicate that they were intended to be about the administration.

• TAO Mae Mok, Thoen district, Lampang: maemok.blogspot.com
• TAO Na Khaem, Mueang Loei district, Loei: tambolnakham.blogspot.com
• TAO Ban Mai Nong Sai, Aranyaprathet district, Sa Kaeo: banmainongsai.wordpress.com

2nd birthday of blog

This blog now exists for two years, and again my worrying that I would run out of topics was strongly rebutted. In fact, I currently have so many topics that I have pre-written postings for two months, only leaving spaces for the current news like fresh announcements in the Royal Gazette. And of course a big number of postings thanks to the many new municipalities, in contrast to what I expected for this year, helped to enable me to write a posting every day, I even had to post some on the weekend to reduce the queue.

Whereas the Google hits have more-or-less stagnated at 650 a month in the last year, the number of readers using the RSS feed (or subscribing by email) reached a maximum of 100 subscribers according to feedburner which is way beyond what I expected before for such a technical and obscure topic. Though I guess most of my readers aren't as deep into the topic as myself, I can only repeat my invitation from the last birthday posting of using the comment function to interact, even if only to thank me for presenting something not found in the non-Thai web beforehand.

But it's of course not that I get no feedback at all, and I even got into contact with a few interesting people by this blog already, like an academic working with the Thai census data who could use the tabular data collected in the spreadsheet very well. In return, her questions let me look once again through the geocodes used in the past censuses and notice new facts I previously overlooked.

Websites left unattended

Just few weeks ago my computer was infected with the Gumblar troyan, which I only noticed because it led me to strange website when clicking a link returned from a Google search. And that even though I use FireFox and has a virus scanner running, and that one even failed to removed it, which I finally could do by fixing the registry manually. Why do I mention it here - because I am very sure it must have been one of the TAO websites I had been checking out recently.

While I don't know which of the websites was the culprit, in Google search results relatively often on sees warning lines saying "This site may harm your computer", like in the (somewhat doctored) screenshot above. In that case, the website of TAO Yuan (หย่วน), Chiang Kham district, Phayao province is compromised, and will probably try to install malware. While this can happen quite easy as always new security holes show up, I have the impression that Thai websites are quite often affected. amphoe.com was compromised twice already, just right now even the website of the Thai cabinet is installing malware.

But since I mostly check TAO and municipality websites I rather often notice this warning in Google. Adding the non-responsiveness of the email addresses at these websites, and even partially broken websites with 404 internal links, it seems to me like many of these websites are set up once by a contracted web company and then never taken care anymore - thus noone ever notices if anything gets wrong. And even clearer sign in this direction are the forums quite often present in such websites, for example the one of Huai Phai (ห้วยไผ่) in Mueang Ratchaburi district which only contains topics like "asian teen lesbian group sex" or "teen sex boy chat page". I doubt of the 6500 citizen there'll ever be enough online to have a real forum discussion going there, but probably the forum was part of the standard web package so they just added it.

Or like several TAO websites hosted by ob.tc which all only show an error message, for example Takhian (ตะเคียน), Dan Khun Thot district, Nakhon Ratchasima.

And while I am in rant mode I should also mention that Thai websites seem to change their domain name every two years, maybe because they simply forget to renew the name registration and once they notice it is already in the hand of a domain grabber. The PAO of Surat Thani was previously at www.suratpao.com and www.suratpao.org, and now they are at the (actually much more fitting) domain name suratpao.go.th.

Given all the broken websites, it is a good thing that Si Sunthon (ศรีสุนทร) on Phuket has some redundancy - they have two websites in different designs online at the same time, one at phuketsrisunthon.org and one at srisunthon.go.th.

Trip in review

I am back now from Thailand, and as usual by far not all of the plans made before turned out to be possible, but then on the other hand many other interesting things happened instead. So in order to give an idea what might be the contents of this blog for the next months, here a small list of the new input.

• Though I haven't found any new book specific to the topic of the blog, there will be some excerpts from a German travel report from 1899. I discovered a reprint from 1986 at the National Book Fair.
• This trip was the most successful ever in taking photographs of the offices of the various administrative entities - province halls, districts offices, municipality and TAO offices, and also some city pillar shrines. So a lot of content for illustrated postings on these places.
• I had planned to visit more of the district museums in Bangkok, and this year I did a total of six new ones. Each interesting in itself, and also quite some new information on the whole project, so expect several posts on this.
• Instead of the Siam Flag museum we visited the House of Museums in Thawi Watthana.

An observation: I haven't seen a single car having a license plate with the provincial graphics, though I have seen some cars which much have gotten their license in an auction and thus would have been eligible for such a car sign.

And of course, there are also several new places which will get featured in my travel blog. But those I won't tell you before, so it'll be a surprise to my readers which sites I will write about.

There were not many things in the Royal Gazette during the last four weeks regarding my topics, only one announcement of the same kind I have reported here before, and three constituency definitions of municipalities. There haven't been any new transcripts with the municipality upgrades for quite some time now, the latest one is still from the end of November. Once these get updated there'll be lots of posts on the municipalities again.

Thailand trip 2009

I will leave for the annual vacation in Thailand shortly, and thus will only be occasionally be able to respond to email or comments. I'll also switch on comment moderation, so I won't get surprise by any inappropriate comments later on. Also probably all the postings in the next weeks will be those I have prepared already and set to get public by automatic, but if I have time and internet I might post a photo blog like postings now and then.

Some places I plan to visit and which are related to the topics of this blog

• Siam Flag Museum in Lat Phrao district, Bangkok
• Yaowarat Chinatown Heritage Centre, the new local museum in Wat Traimitr. And if possible also the BMA district museum of Samphanthawong, originally located there but now moved to Pathum Kongka School nearby.
• Already mentioned here, the city pillar shrine of Suphanburi
• The Nation Book Week, to have a look-out on new books, and of course also several bookstores. One book on my shopping list is the second volume of ธงไทย.
  
• Buying the third series of provincial emblem stamps, and the fourth series should also go on sale during my stay.
• As usual, I will try to catch more district offices or TAO offices on photo.

In case  you have any last-minute recommendations to be added to this list, or want me to contact you in Thailand, you'd better hurry so I can get the message before I leave.

Why Thai authorities don't reply to English email?

I often run into confusing facts while researching the administrative subdivisions, or also sometimes I am able to spot error on websites or in other documents published by government authorities. I have tried several times to get into contact with someone at these authorities, but so far almost all the time my email apparently landed in a black hole, as I never got any reply. To be honest, there were exceptions - I once got a reply from the Public Relation Department when I asked for a RSS feed for their English news, and two of the Catholic dioceses also replied me.

It seems I am not alone with this problem, at the Bangkok Bugle I found that even hotels and other Thai companies fail to reply to English inquiries and loose business opportunities in this, even quite significant ones.

But what are the reasons for this. Is it just that the person who reads the email is not speaking English at all. Or maybe enough to read it, but not daring to write an answer in broken English, scaring the loose of face in showing the bad writing capabilities? Or are the emails not checked at all? Even though English is mandatory in Thai schools, as far as I know only those who can go to the better schools or university can learn decent English.

To give an example, when I was photographing the office of the TAO Bang Bai Mai (ตำบลบางใบไม้) near Surat Thani last year, trying to catch the emblem above the entrance with the camera, then someone from the office came out, asked me in quite good English to come inside, what I was looking for, and finally gave me a photocopy of the emblem. A few months later I asked by email if they can give me a few facts behind the emblem - who created it, when was it officially adopted, and what is the meaning of the boat and the other items depicted on it - but that email was never answered. So neither missing goodwill nor missing language knowledge could be the reason here.

Or when I tried to send DOPA corrections to the list of recommended romanized spellings of the subdistricts it was apparently also ignored, at least no answer ever came back. Which is really sad as a contact within DOPA would be most helpful, as over there those things I can only speculate about are known.

In fact I started blogging as an alternative way to get the answers I was seeking - if asking directly does not work, maybe posting the questions in a public way will make someone knowledgeable read it and give me the feedback I need. Well, it did not work much yet, I still don't receive much feedback, but blogging became enjoyable by itself instead then.

Geotagging blog posts

Google now added a new feature to the Blogger website which I was missing ever since I started blogging, especially once I started with my Travel blog - geotagging blog postings. A blog posting can be related to one specific location, so it makes a lot of sense adding this metainformation in a machine readable format to the posting. It not only helps users to have an easy way to get to a map of the area, it also makes it possible to search the other way round - which blog postings are related to the area I am interested in. Given the fact that Google has two great mapping tools - Google Maps and the Google Earth software, and also several other sites in the Google universe already allow to geotag contents - most notably the photo site Panoramio, but also the second photo site Picasa, even Youtube videos can be geotagged. So it was only a matter of time until they added it to Blogger, though I wished they did it earlier. Actually, it is not yet fully there, right now it is only available in the testing Blogger Draft engine, but that means I can already use it now.

I have already tagged all of the postings in my travel blog, and also in this blog all those specific for one location. For some the location is only approximate, like when I write about a specific municipality but don't know the exact location of its office which would be the best choice for a "central point". There are also few cases where I could not add a geotag yet, like the recent Muban renamed - I simply cannot find that one on any map...

Since there is still a small bug in the feed generated - the namespace for GeoRSS isn't included and thus GoogleMaps does not recognize it as a feed with geotags - the map below is created from the feed of my travel blog patched to make it show in GoogleMaps. But I am confident that this bug will be fixed soon and you can use the feeds of my blogs in whatever geographical mashups you can imagine...

The Muang conspiracy

There's a new political blog I only discovered because the author has made his readership of my blog public. Named "The Muang Conspiracy" it won't be on the current political chaos in Thailand, or commenting news on other current issues, but instead the author intends to post and discuss radical political ideas.

One of the ideas he already presented is to implement more decentralization, not just at the grassroot level as it is now with the TAO and municipalities, but also on a regional level by resurrecting the Monthon. Basically the same which was suggested some time ago by Khun Wisarut in the 2bangkok forum. But recalling how harsh PM Samak silenced his Interior Minister in January when he thought loudly solving the insurgency in the Pattani region by giving the area a regional autonomy it seems the current national politicians are not willing to give away any power (or might I say chances to grab money by corruption) to regions.