Bjorno.licio.us

Its been more than (exactly) a year, discounting 3 “out-of-the-blue” articles, since i wrote anything here. It sure took many efforts to overcome blogging inertia.

So, i randomly came up with a somewhat apt title of this renewed (hopefully!) bout of blogging… and to fit the title, i thought i might as well list whats changed since then till now…

From a Garden to the Wasteland.

My blog used to be like a garden of bountiful harvests, from job offers, attendees for my E27 unconferences, networking invitations, advertisers etc.. It was like Doraemon’s magic pocket, where you can pull a treasure out every single time to make one’s life better. Now, its become such a drag as its overgrown with digital “weeds” aka spam comments which only makes me hate blogging much as a lazy garden owner hated weeding.. Not to mention that i no longer get interesting projects or job offers or spare passive income…

From firing neurons to deadwood…

… my brain, thats what. okay, i hope not.

But its true that not blogging for such a prolonged period of time, IMO, slows down the creative thinking function of those of us who work in the attention-deficient web industry, where information overload and our longish times in front of radiation-emitting screens can conspire to dull some parts of our brains. When I blogged, i at least synthesized all the gigabytes of data i consumed everyday for a good hour– finding patterns in articles across my RSS feeds, mapping them into specific memes and then crafting them coherently in words… That kind of information synthesis is priceless. After I stopped, i felt no ill effect for the short term, but today, after a year, i do feel something’s real amiss.. like a slow-acting poison…

its one thing to write powerpoint presentations for a business audience and another to write a blog article for an uncertain global audience. while the pressure to perform might be the same for both, the frequency and unscripted, freewheeling nature of the latter made for a healthier brain.

Viral vs Word-of-mouth

thought i should share this anyway since its the best differentiation among the two seemingly similar terms in the marketing world.

“Viral marketing is typically reserved for programs where the advertising is talked about as opposed to the product itself.”

” Word of mouth is the actual sharing of an opinion about a product or service between consumers”

More here from Dave Balter of BzzAgent, a service thats trying to create media for word-of-mouth mktg agents that i am playing with recently.

Thats it. My first post in almost a year. Hope the next one comes faster than that!

… which means we should celebrate!!!

Well, not quite yet, so hold your guns and bottles.. Just wanted to oil my rusty gears again with this post… I finally get my first fully paid advertisement on my new domain! AdultLearn is an online education provider for their client educational sites. This came via my earlier blog post on Victoria Junior College here . Amazing, ain’t it?

With this, I have diversified my blog’s revenue model and certainly goes some way to paying my hosting fees. Who says blogging doesn’t pay? I don’t even have to rely on ethically dubiously practices like Pay-per-Post. I am also consciously shying away from using Google Adsense which often serves up irrelevant ads especially for a blog like mine. At least Adultlearn provides a more contextually relevant ad placement. If you are keen to blog for money, USA Today has some pointers.

Having said that, I am trying to think of creative ways to make my ads more engaging and relevant, a challenge since I dun want static display ads with no relevance to your reading experience. Anyone has bright ideas?

.. and the award goes to.. *drum roll* Victoria Junior College! And their 3 blogs at Cosiety, SecondLifeVJC and an unverified GeneralPaper.

Ok, i expect an uproar of controversy and conspiracies out there if I am wrong. Truth to be told, I read so much these days I hardly have time to explore every nook and cranny of the blogosphere. Hence, whenever I can connect the dots, I try to hail it as a “trend” and hope my readers or friends either validate it or debunk me.

Victoria Junior College (VJC for short) has had its student-run blog for a year now! Hurrah for the students who made this happen, their site “Cosiety” has improved by leaps and bound and you can see improvements made to the site design, useability and reader-oriented articles and coverage. I like their Subjectif section:

Subjectif is Victoria JC’s weblog of student opinion, mindless ramblings, colourful ideas and chic talk. It’s your finger on the pulse of the life of the college, and is updated weekly by irregular wits, specialist columnists, flowery tongues and sizeable speakers.

In terms of student participation, vibrancy of content and the authenticity of its bloggers, Cosiety beats any varsity-run online bulletin/ magazine , especially my alma mater’s Hooked, which is a sorry study of old-media-thinking transplanted forcibly on the internet platform. Sorry to its original founder and my friend Justin but more blogger-scrutiny might do it some good. Perhaps Justin could blog and shed some light separately..

SecondLifeVJC is really new and started its virgin post this month of April 2007. It taps on the enthusiasm of the local community’s growing Sl interest and our Lion City project inside and also appears to be aggregating relevant moves by local enterprises such as PR firm Text 100 in this area.GeneralPaper is much more established and also celebrates one year of blogging last month, same time as VJC’s cosiety. Their blogroll also gives prominence to SecondLifeVJC and you can see where my deductive skills is implying here. Helmed by an true educationer, Gimster aka Hoe Kim Yau, its intention to be a blog-based learning resource for General Paper (a test on English writing skills for the GCE A levels high school examination) students is clear. I think its a really cool idea to expose high school/ JC students to new ideas and concepts on the web and do it through a blog. I really wished I learnt this way during my time in JC too because I would definitely have learnt much more from my GP teachers.And there you have it, VJC leads the way in blogging, moving aggressively in entertainment (Cosiety), innovation (SecondLife incarnation of an actual VJC college in Lion City?) and education (GeneralPaper).Anyone contesting this claim?

Sponsored Listing Want to get an online degree? Check out this educational site that offers information on many online universities such as the University of Phoenix and other accredited schools!

This happened on March 24, 3 days ago. Prominent female blogger Kathy Sierra decided to skip her speaking gig at a conference and shut herself at home, terrified and shell-shocked of what had happened over the past month. Unmentionable acts of terror and violence that had been directed at her from the blogs of other prominent bloggers (in the comment threads of posts) had become impossible for her to ignore. It had breached a personal security barrier and shakened the very roots of her life.

This is no fiction. I think this is the most revolting and shocking news I have read in a long while. The blogosphere reaction has been vociferous, to say the least. Even BBC has picked up on it. Being a fellow blogger, I believe the least I can do is voice my abject condemnation of such abhorrent behavior by online readers. If you want the details, click here for Kathy’s original post, be cautioned though because some sections are disturbing.

In summary:

• an anonymous contributor on a site, which was started as a “flaming” platform of prominent bloggers by prominent bloggers, invoked imageries of death when flaming Kathy.
• the original post attracted more violent and hateful comments.
• The offensive attacks continued for almost a month, gaining in strength and believability until Kathy could take it no longer and highlighted it with her absence at the Etech conference and her blog.
• Both offensive sites at meankids.org and unclebobisms.com now defunct.
• In the 2 days since the incident, trackbacks and feed readers are exploding as the blogosphere reacts with condemnation of the offenders by the top bloggers while apologies and explanations are solicited.

This issue is discussed by many other bloggers in better forms than myself here. But i wish to bring to light two core issues here:

1. Gender discrimination of female bloggers

As Robert Scoble put it best, “whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn’t happen if the interviewee were a man”. What happened to Kathy on those horrible comments was what could happen when such careless comments are left unchecked and unfiltered to embolden human scum to hurl unwarranted gender-targeted abuse. I regard this as a call to responsibility of any online content publisher. It might be easy to set up a blog today BUT also very easy for readers and commenters to abuse it and hurt the community. The least we should do is patrol our content and user comments and not think, or worse, assume that free speech will always be responsible speech.

2. Abuse of anonymity rights

There are louder calls for Open ID to verify and authenticate online identities to impose higher accountability of online users. The laissez faire nature of the blogosphere might take a conservative route if this comes to pass. I had mentioned in an earlier post making a case for anonymity on consumer web services due to the existence of reputation systems that ensured social credibility. But such reputation systems are only effective when the community polices itself. In the case of Kathy Sierra, the flaming culture of those sites, where the hate-filled comments and posts were created, merely served to amplify the impact and influence of the initial comments, encouraging ever-more extremist thoughts and users to surface and fuel the fire of misogyny. On hindsight, it was terrible social software design. Encouraging “flaming cultures” on sites require higher policing not just from the community but also the website administrators. In such cases, anonymity might not be such a good idea since bad comments can easily degenerate to hurtful abuse in a rapid race to the bottom as commenters seek to outdo each other to gain attention on a public site.

Conclusion

The blogosphere will probably continue the hunt for the culprits which have spreaded such fear and mistrust. Some bloggers are calling for a community-drafted code of conduct for bloggers which might stave off governmental intervention, the latter of which might be prone to step in and regulate online content publishers the same way they regulate their offline counterparts.

On a local context in Singapore, this incident will reflect upon sensitivities in our society and possibly be held up as a case study of how things could go wrong on the web. It is important social software developers and content publishers understand the nuances of this case and learn to exercise discipline and responsibility in their management of user communities, and not be overly blinded by having a no-holds barred approach.

For more on problems of anonymity, read Seth Godin 3-year old article here

Beginning a new chapter in my blogging life, I have a new list of action items:

1. Installing Google Analytics to understand my readers and website traffic. I used to have a basic version at the old blog that only gives me more questions than answers.

2. Getting Google Adsense to get a sense of how online advertising works. (okay, maybe only direct response ads for Adsense but i want to play with more vendors in future)

3. Understanding what i call “website architecture”. Having my own domain means I don’t have to be limited to only Wordpress as my blogging platform. I could tinker around with more WP plugins, third party apps & widgets that was not possible on the old WP-hosted blog.

On a sidenote, have you ever wondered how bloggers get their traffic? Rohit Bhargava has a good summary here.

I get really irritated when mainstream media misinterpret internet media for lack of knowledge or lack of consideration in fair and unbiased explanation of this new form of media to their readers whom they have a responsibility to educate and inform.

The focus of my ire now is David Pogue, a blogger under the NYT blog portfolio that is prominently featured under the New York Times Technology section. The full link is here. The root of his argument was his moaning of the lack of civility on the internet, especially how other responders on Digg, blogs lack “respect for adults” and “how hostile *ordinary* people are to each other online these days..”. He also mentions the ‘kneejerk “everyone else is an idiot” tenor (that) is poisoning the potential the Internet once had.‘ Read the rest of this entry »

George Yeo finally came out of the fog of the old media and is now a blogger. Well, make that a guest blogger under Ephraim Loy’s blog here. For the clueless, George is the current Foreign Minister of Singapore and his previous web presence, other than coverage of his official speeches on the national newspapers, belonged to the domain of political satire under TalkingCock.com , a local humor site poking fun at local politicians.

Here’s an excerpt from his recent post on the Singapore Idol:

[Singapore Idol]
1. It was fun being there when the results were announced. The crowd had a good time. Some stood up to rock to the music.

2. Singapore being Singapore, there were sensitivities. Having only come back from New York that morning, I did not know that the dark blue shirt I wore indicated support for Hady. Lucas Chow, the CEO of MediaCorp, who was dressed in a white jacket, said he would ‘balance’ me since white was for Jonathan. I was given two clappers, one white and one blue, to be politically correct. Boy, sometimes I wish I weren’t a minister.

3. But I did observe the audience critically to see whether the support for Hady and Jonathan was divided along ethnic lines. I was glad to learn later that the results showed a decisive 70% win for Hady, meaning that many Chinese Singaporeans voted for him. He had the better voice although I thought Jonathan had stronger stage presence. My wife said he had the Korean K-pop look. But the murmurs persist in social conversations. Some say that Hady received support from JB which I find hard to believe. One Chinese friend said that we can’t have Malays winning every time. Well, this is multi-racial Singapore. Anyway, 70% is much better than my 56% win in Aljunied.

I must say I am proud that George Yeo is somewhat of a trailblazer in adopting new media compared to his colleagues, considering that he’s my local representative for the Parliament. This should at least score him some brownie points. Although I feel he should get his own blog instead of co-blogging with Ephraim whose style is simply jarring with george’s style. His blogging style is refreshing honest and personal and definitely steered clear of the sanitized, PR-filtered mambo-jumbo the national media has been feeding the public.

Its time to show more personal character, so you go, George!

I couldn’t focus on my real work, which is researching for my thesis. So i decided to do the next best thing: helping you find good reads.

Noah Kagan, owner of Okdork.com and founder of Entrepreneur 27, has tons of gems and precious posts of wisdom and creativity in his blog. He’s one of the reasons why many of us don’t have to read so much anymore but just rely on him to read all the crap and sieve out the good stuff for us.
I randomly picked out some I enjoyed.

1. How to Get People’s Attention (and then keep it)
2. How an American taught leadership to Korean schoolkids creatively (and what we can learn in crossing cultural barriers)
3. 17 Great Insights for Startups
4. The People Experience Series (about interactions with products and services) @ The Bank, Apple, Coffee
5. The Evil but Brilliant Cigarette Marketing Campaign of Philip Morris

Ok, confession here. Noah actually has this new “Road to 1000″ competition he thought up to drum up traffic for his blog to 1000 unique visitors. Some of you might think this is traffic-whoring, I respect your decision but I believe good stuff should be shared and circulated widely on the web. Hence, I am putting up a badge on my sidebar till September 30th to direct any interested readers to Noah’s “Sexy Business Blog”.

So if any of u like his blog, go to Noah’s blog, look for my name “Bjorn Lee” on the right sidebar and vote for it. Actually, you can click on anybody’s name anyway cos I won’t win even if I send all my traffic to him (hence i have no selfish motive) =) Think of your vote as a reward to Noah for the good articles he writes and hence motivate him to write more.

In my very first virgin blog post last year, I sought to make this blog as a repository of my thoughts, an online investment of my time to accumulate knowledge I might find useful in future. I thought of it as an expanded version of del.icio.us but one which allows me to capture the context of my interaction with material or experiences I had come across in my life.

Looking back, I have surprised myself by blogging thus far. I never thought I would be blogging this consistently after I got back to Singapore. I was never one to write diaries nor do I love to write. I never set out to write to get traffic or readers too or get famous. But what blogging has really helped me is in the articulation and expression of my thoughts.

Have you ever read a newspaper or magazine article and just felt the compelling need to share your thoughts with someone, anyone? Read the rest of this entry »

After the Americans, yes, they do, and a lot too, it seems.

“Outside the USA, France is one of the leading ‘blogging’ countries and its “blogosphere” (bloggers and/or blogs’ creators) is growing fast.”

Mediapost brings us an update on the census study of the French blogosphere.

1. 26.7% of the French online population visit a blog at least once a month.
2. 18.8% have posted a comment on a blog
3. 8.1% have created there own blog
4. 92.2% of onliners agree that blogs enable the greatest freedom of expression
5. 81.3% are both reactive and interactive
6. 75.7% say blogsd create a closest possible relationship between people
7. 62.9% of blogs are considered more critical than any other source of information

 

Laurent Florès, CEO of crmmetrix, says “Thanks to blogs, the Internet has become a primary source of information for French Internet users… This marks a significant move from ‘interruption marketing’ to ‘conversation marketing’, where listening and conversing become critical for brands and organizations as a source of… learning from what people are saying about them.”

Personal blogs are by far the most consulted (90%), followed by group and association blogs (46.3%) and media blogs (38.2%), while nearly one-third (29.9%) of French blog readers have visited a brand’s blog. They see blogs as a great opportunity to open dialogue with the brand and engage with the brand on a new level.

More of the report can be found from the blog of crmmetrix who commissioned this report.

I wonder what the census of the Singaporean blogosphere will look like, perhaps this should be a topic for online media research in the local colleges.