It's Wednesday, and I'm already thinking of Friday. Why? Well, aren't you? OK then, primarily because I'll be presenting to my bosses my plans for AllMalaysia.info and AMBP, and because, heck, it'll be a Friday. ;-)

In my last post, I promised I would reveal to you what takes place on the Seventh Floor of this building, at which I work. Well, the short answer would be: much. So where do I begin? Probably with a deep breath.

And so: On this hallowed floor, you'll find the ever-zany In.Techers, the polite mStar staffers, the hardworking folks of The Star Online and the I.Star geeks.

Generally, the In.Techers and m.Star staffers are responsible for the IT pullout In.Tech (distributed with The Star newspaper every Tuesday and Thursday), and our Bahasa Malaysia news portal mStar Online respectively, while the Star Online and I.Star teams maintain all The Star's English language portals.

Both the In.Tech and m.Star divisions function like how a newspaper should: they send out their journos; the (sub/assistant) editors ensure everything's in order; the final copy is sent to the printers or updated online; and voila, you get your pullout/online updates. That's oversimplifying the process but I think you get the idea.

The Star Online and I.Star teams serve a different purpose. I wrote a piece describing the functions of these two teams a couple of years back, and I'm rehashing a small part of it here 'cos well, it's a whole lot easier to cut-and-paste.

The Star Online
The Star Online folks ensure that stories from The Star's print edition make it onto the respective sites by a certain time everyday. While this may sound simple, it is in reality, a tedious and time-consuming task because of the tight deadline and sheer volume of content involved.

Also, each story has to be "repurposed" for online usage which means additional work - placement of pictures, links and galleries, changes in headlines to suit the international audience, etc - is required to ensure it is applicable for online, as opposed to print, usage.

These hardworking folks work in two shifts. The first shift begins before 7am and ends at about 3pm; the second from 2-10pm.

I.Star
The I.Star team comprises a VP, two managers, a personal secretary, an online support exec, four content writers, four graphic designers, 10 multimedia developers, and five brand developers. All in, 27 dedicated, creative, and diligent individuals, 19 of whom are four-eyed, which should in itself say something.

We are collectively responsible for the smooth running of all of The Star's portals which include The Star Online, Classifieds Online, Star-Jobs, Star-space, Star-Motoring, Kuali.com, CloveTWO, Global Malaysians Network, eCentral and AllMalaysia.info, among others.

All service improvements, and promotion and branding exercise (contests, mini/microsites, events etc) for these portals also come under the purview of I.Star.

The AMBP

Now, you must be wondering, how does the AMBP fit into this puzzle? Who's in charge? Why isn't there more features on this site? Where do the freebies come from? 

Rather well, yours truly, lots of reasons, and sponsors are the answers in my head.

OK, I'll elaborate.

My job entails overseeing the direction of the AllMalaysia.info portal, and that includes planning and executing marketing and branding ideas/projects,  thinking up content ideas and features, as well as engaging prospective partners, clients, sponsors, and readers. This of course, includes you, the blogger.

So, about a year ago, I wrote a proposal for a pilot project which detailed how we could  engage the very influential blogging community. It came to fruition when we managed to find a sponsor, y'know, just to kickstart this little project as a contest. To cut a long story short, the AMBP was born as a subset of the AllMalaysia.info portal, and that's how it fits into the big online Star family. As for who's overseeing it - that's me.

About the lack of features: well it's simply because we try to build and develop in-house first. So no Wordpress-type engine here. It's all done by our own multimedia developers (the poor overstretched worker bees) and you know that that could be a little tricky. Yes, we know, we're a stubborn lot.

Naturally, we understand that in order to compete, the AMBP has to be attractive in terms of how much we could offer both online and on-the-ground. At the moment, I can only ask for your patience; we're working on it!

Understand that like any big organisation we have to steer through the choppy waters of bureaucracy, as well as show reasons why we should stay the course in the first place. Thankfully, the future of AMBP looks bright; you'll just have to stay tuned to find out why.

Read my post tomorrow to find out what sort of changes you can expect here. Gotta run. Ta!