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… 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?

In a few more hours time, Hungarian-American Charles Simonyi becomes the next man to go into space on April 6-7 (today), after the last private space “tourist”/ explorer Anousheh Ansari. Charles is a legend for developing the Microsoft Word and Excel applications that have gone on to revolutionize the working lives of millions of people (or, if you are a sceptic, to “terrorize” thousands of Word-and-Excel-slaves in corporate cubicles worldwide).

Charles will be another ex-Microsoftie, after Paul Allen of SpaceShipOne fame, who has taken up the space frontier as his new challenge.

Like Anousheh, Charles will be blogging his adventures to communicate his experience and thoughts with children over the world. I really like how such a simple act will inspire young kids to envision a future for mankind in space when they grow up. Check out his blog Charles In Space from tomorrow onwards.

A ham radio enthusiast, Charles will also be attempting to connect with several schools during time in orbit. He is also reportedly dating Martha Stewart who will designing what could be the fanciest meal in space ever (via CNN):

… quail roasted in Madiran wine, duck breast confit with capers, shredded chicken parmentier, apple fondant pieces, rice pudding with candied fruit, and semolina cake with dried apricots.

I wonder if Martha intends to freeze-dry them. Hmm..

For those who are into trivia, Wikipedia says that the next in line for the space tourism customer queue includes a Japanese, Daisuke Enomoto, whose original flight plan was taken over by Anousheh due to his health problems.

I depart on a new adventure for Vietnam, the land where i hear 60% are below 24 years old which means I should be considered a middle-aged expat when I arrive. Lets hope the kids in Ho Chi Minh City will be kind to the elderly.

If all things work out, I will be helping a friend in a venture cap firm that is working on a new fund for digital media investments. It will be interesting to cross the fence and look through the lens from different perspectives on how startups are funded within the trenches of the VCs. I will be entering this short stint with no high expectations but only to get some good exposure of the Vietnamese startup scene plus some cheap beer in an exotic land 2 hours away from Singapore.

Having never been to Vietnam, I have miraculously worked closely with quite a number of Vietnamese in my course of work in the SF Bay Area. I also hear much of Vietnam’s investment potential and booming economy but this being an Easter Friday holiday, I shouldn’t bore with your dry economics… WHO also seems to be giving Vietnam pressure for their bird flu cases which brings me to thank concerned friends and family who had prepared me with their doomsday prophecies..  Of course, Russell Peters also provide more comedic views of the place which had really psyched me about visiting this place some time back, such as how motorbikes are used as vans there..

Boy, I can’t wait..

.. 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!

.. for the business folks and website owners, at least.

If you are a Adwords consultant or rely on Google Analytics for your bread and butter, salvation is here. Google launched their “third leg in the stool” called the Google Website Optimizer.

Google considers Website Optimizer the third leg of the proverbial stool with AdWords dedicated to driving Web traffic and Google Analytics focused on measuring Web activity… (It is ) a product designed to help Web site owners test drive different landing pages in order to determine which designs drive the most conversions.

Is it me or is Google getting more uninspiring with their naming? Google “Docs and Spreadsheets” anyone? In any case, I need to get to a website with real stuff to sell or pitch to try out this stuff..

First popularized on Sex and The City, Frenemies (noun, pl): Friends, yet enemies (via Urban Dictionary)

(via)

Thats Steve “iPod” Jobs on the left and Bill Gates on the right. Dun you wish you could hear their conversation?

We have friends and then, enemies. Sometimes, it ain’t too good to listen to your friends all the time. You run the risk of what is commonly called the “echo chamber” syndrome, where positive, lyrical feedback lull you into warm and fuzzy complacency. We do need a social blanket to satisfy our own ego at times, for sure yeaaa, who doesn’t like being sung praises to all the time?

But you are not an Egyptian pharoah or Chinese Emperor so you must never forget to listen to that ranter at the fringe of your social comfort zone..  He/ she might have some good ol’ fashioned wake-up call to your stubborn and pig-headed ways. This applies to any social relationship and business too..

I was just reading Noah’s blog about his career path. Lets just say he’s working in smaller and smaller companies (Intel to Facebook to Mint) as he grows up (thot this sounded better than “ages”, Noah =)

I hate working in large companies and here’s my career path thus far:

Singapore Armed Forces: Biggest cluster-f”lower” organization you can ever work for in Singapore. Links you to almost every other friggin organization like Defence Science Technology Authority (DSTA or wateva), the Singapore Technologies (ST) group and all those little battalions.. The organization is about, say.. 10,000++ ?? I “worked” for 2.5 years, 1.5 years as a logistics officer. People always thinks its a crappy dark phase of their life but I actually learnt a lot about organizational culture and management when I was there. You simple have to when you work with so many different agencies and especially military drivers.

Motivation/ coercion takes on a whole new different meaning when you try to encourage someone to send 5 boxes into the jungle at 3am in the morning, or how about waking up to 35 missed calls by a senior commander between 2-4am in the morning. I always remind myself that the Israelis have it worse at dark periods of my life like that. Guess maybe thats why I stopped liking big organizations after 2002.

MOSS Equipment : Ahh.. Fond memories, my first startup with friends. 5 of us to be exact. Our biggest ever was 6 people, one hired hand. It sure felt good to do anything you want and smell that sweet air of liberty 1 year after leaving the thousand-member organization of the army. I enjoyed the independence of making decisions myself with no one being able to shove their own thoughts onto me. Did this for 15 months to leave for a new continent.

BitMicro: 50 employees I last counted. I went up the numbers game to a more hierarchical startup but in a different culture of Silicon Valley. It was much more cosmopolitan experience too, we had a Filipino management team, my entire department and my supervisor was Vietnamese and almost the entire company was Asian-American, save for 3 or 4 white guys and African-Americans. I quit after 6 months.

Alpha Innotech: Another startup in Silicon Valley. Again, small setup of about 50 people. My department was Iranian-American this time and I worked with a lot more white Americans. Being the only Chinese-speaking guy in my team, I worked with a lot more Chinese than ever in my life as I became the point man for a project with a Beijing-based company. Spent 13 months in this company.

Ahh, i count about 34 months worth of time spent in small organizations between 6-50 employees. My mentor thinks I should work in a big organization with a real brand name in order to make my resume look decent. His logic is that I can at least make my resume look like I fit within a big organization and be employable years down the road, should I fail in my startup. This beats having only small startups on my resume.

What would you do if you wear my shoes?

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

Just an observation of the “leaderboard” of popular postings at Ping.sg now:

7 out of 10 are directly related to Nexus. Almost 42 hours after the end of Nexus, this might be reflecting the peak of Nexus-chatter on Ping.sg, perhaps the only startup to get the most out of the web2.0 -centric event. Lets see how big they go on from here. Much activity going on now at the forums on developing a Diggnation-style vlog to market Ping.sg. It will be fun.. So head on over if you haven’t kept up with the post-Nexus conversation. Nexus the event will never really be over…

Just a sidenote, even if Ping.sg gets big (now that they up in the Alexa top 100K rankings) it will suffer the same problems in scaling outside of our shores.. like tomorrow.sg.. how will regional online communities ever warm up to a url that blatantly promotes only local sporean news? Something for Uzyn the founder to ponder upon while he completes his final year project .. heh heh

Yeah, this long tail — a book. Hope you ain’t disappointed.

I blogged about myself reading “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson some time back and how the internet was helping consumers all over the world “break the space-time continuum“. oohh.. big word.. what it all means is that the long tail might just turn out to be a shopaholic’s paradise if you buy big time over the web.

I break out of my self-imposed blogging freeze to break you this news — Chris Anderson’s exclusive interview by my good friend Bernard! You can check it all out here on the SGEntrepreneurs blog. Chris even mentions Singapore during the short interview and how he admires Lee Hsien Loong’s (Singapore’s Prime Minister) policies on creating a knowledge-based economy in Asia.

I am aware of IDA MDA’s i.JAM initiative and impressed with the efforts of your prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong for his policies of science and technology towards the creation of a knowledge based economy in Asia. The way I see it, the long tail is about reinforcing the diversity of culture and ideas and at the same time, recognizing the fact that you cannot predict a demand. The liberation of voices and ideas will lead to a messy and unpredictable situation in the marketplace. For example, YouTube is a chaotic television and you can see all sorts of content popping up that may not be acceptable for the Singapore government. The question or perhaps, the challenge for Singapore: is the Singapore government prepared to accept the chaotic and unrestricted ideas that emerges once the content creators and distributors are given the tools of production?