The wonder of social media — and the Internet at large — is not the wealth of information out there. Instead, it is really how the information is shared.

When the World Wide Web was first introduced about 15 years ago, many people embraced it wholeheartedly. Yet, there was also murmurs of complaint — that there was too much information. Wikipedia itself has over 14 million articles to date!

The existence of search engines like Yahoo!, Google and now Bing! no doubt helped us with the filtering, but there was still a lot out there to sieve through.

Of course, the emergence of blogs didn’t help matters. Suddenly, there were millions of ”publishers” out there attempting to fill up any possible information gap in the infinite world of the Internet.

But who and what should you read? Here at R.AGE, we say everyone, and as much as you can.

That is why in November last year, we started testing our weekly featured blogger section on https://rage.com.my. The idea was simple, we would select and feature three new bloggers each week. The only restriction we had was that these bloggers had to be young Malaysians.

Well, I am happy to announce that the response has been pretty positive. For one, the bloggers themselves see it as a great boost for their blogs. Plus, it’s always nice to see your name and picture in the papers, right?

I have been blogging since 2003 (www.nikicheong.com/blog) but I never get tired of seeing my name in print.

Since we introduced the section, R.AGE has been inundated (okay, so I exaggerate a little) with emails by young bloggers asking how they can be listed as a featured blogger.

Many of these emails come with the standard line: ”I may not be a top blogger but …”.

That’s good enough for us, I say. The ”but” indicates that this bloggers feels that he or she has something to offer. As The Star’s youth section, R.AGE has always been about representing young voices and giving Malaysian youths a platform to express themselves.

This featured blogger section was created to partially fulfill that commitment. While bloggers already have their own ”publishing tools” to air their views, we hope to bring them together to build a community.

This way, we add another filter to the information available on the net — a repository of sorts to find out what young people are into these days, what they are thinking and what they are all about.

So, it doesn’t matter if you’re a top blogger or a n00b (yes, there’s space for you too!), or if you blog about travels, technology, cars or your daily life — we want you to share it with us.

The nature of the Internet is such that all information (well, at least the ones you willingly share) is public — in a way, by blogging, your thoughts and ideas belong to everybody! And this is a good thing!

* Be part of the R.AGE community! Want to find out how to get your blog featured? Well, all you need to do is click here!