New To-Dos

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.

New York Times’ Gross Misrepresentation of the Internet

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.‘

A Minister Blogs..

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!

5 Things You Should Know

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.

Why Blogging is Good For You (and Bad for Non-Thinkers)

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?

Do the French blog?

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.

Aggregators, Bloggers, Credibility – The ABC of Citizen Journalism

Getting confused by what blogging is all about? There are blogs AND there are other blogs. How does credibility go hand in hand with blogs, considering the high number of blogs in Singapore with an overwhelming focus on merely being a web diary that needlessly undermines the individual’s privacy and exposes it to global scutiny. Well, if you want to learn more about blogging, sit tight and be prepared to learn.

Bernard Leong of SGEntrepreneurs has a great article here on citizen journalism, specifically blogs. Check it out on the Singapore Angle blog.

ZoukOut? How About BlogOut?

I blogged before about the obscure keywords that the Google engine uses to refer visitors to my blog. So today, "Coffee CLub Raffles Place SIngapore" happens to be my current No.1 . Why the hell do pple search for that? Anyway, if you came to search for coffee, sorry, this blog is not about coffee, but I don't want to disappoint you with your love for this cafe, and since I have such good karma (thanks to the Google bots) with Coffee Club Raffles Place Singapore, I want to hold a meetup there now.

BlogOut 2006 – A Blog-PodCast Festival (Click the link for fun)

Date: Undetermined yet

Time: Also Undetermined

Venue: Coffee Club Raffles Place Singapore

No 7, Raffles Place, Singapore 048625
Tel : 6532 6273

HOW TO GET THERE:
TALE MRT TO RAFFLES PLACE MRT.
TAKE THE EXIT LEADING TO ARCADE/OCEAN TOWER.
COFFEE CLUB RAFFLES PLACE OUTLET IS LOCATED AT THE LAWN IN FRONT OF OCEAN TOWERS

Here's the map

What is this meetup about? Its for bloggers, but more importantly, for my non-blogging readers. See, a couple of my friends and I think there's a lot of potential for blogs in Singapore to dominate searches for Singapore-related places, shops, news on the search engines like Google. If i can be No. 4 now for "Coffee Club Raffles Place Singapore" by only blogging about it once here, I can be No. 1 after this post since i use the keyword so many times and who knows, I could generate significant revenue for Coffee Club and be more effective than their usual marketing media. haha… And if Google got rich by capturing the Long Tail of the economy through AdWords, I like to test my "secret formula" for capturing this LOng Tail too. So this meetup is for me to talk to my non-blogging readers to see if they want to help me blog about stuff (I already know what stuff) and help build a Weblogs Inc of Singapore. =)

Drop me a comment and I will email you back for those of you brave souls who are keen.

A Digg Clone Named Netscape and New-Age Journalism

"It's sort of like open-source journalism,'' says Jason Calacanis, the AOL executive and Weblogs Inc. founder who is spearheading the new effort.

The move's intriguing. Calacanis wants to move the social news meme out into the mainstream Internet, beyond the techie Slashdot/Digg crowd. And in a way, he's already there. Netscape relaunches tonight as a profitable site with 10 million unique visitors a month. A success by many measures. On the other hand, the venerable Netscape name is so tied to another era in many minds, and so indentified with browsers that most are not using anymore, can this new site do anything to lift the brand's profile?

From SiliconBeat.

With AOL jumping onto the bandwagon, social news is set to take off. While AOL used to be just another internet company, it has matured from the upstart of the bubble days to a titan in today's GYM-dominated world, as witnessed during the power struggle between Google and Microsoft last year. All it takes now is for Rupert Murdoch to issue another missive t his NewsCorp hordes to embrace social news on the web and push another nail in the coffin for conventional "editor-censored" journalism.

Will social news take off? Will the world move from a syndicated news industry to a perfectly competitive model where one-man purveyors of the truth or so-called citizen journalism dominate? I think not, citizen journalism will not be a dominant trend for it merely highlights the deficiency of modern journalistic practices that do not meet the information needs of a disenfranchised readership. And I am not just talking about the voyeuristic needs of the desire for more sensationalized news.

To me, news reporting s not just about the facts, its also about the opinions. There's only so many ways you can spin the facts. But there's 1001 ways to spin one single fact when u frame it as an opinion. And thats why blogs and news aggregators like Digg exist – to explore and find that alternative viewpoint you thought no one else had.

And opinion is not just an one-way process but a multi-directional exchange. Which is why newspapers today are trailing in circulation, especially in the States, to online news sites like Google News. Readers do not just want to read, they finish an article and they want to share and interact with the infornmation they have just received and processed according to their unique beliefs and opinions. Thats why editorials and commentaries are popular in newspapers or magazines like Economist. We, the readers want to interact. And that ability to interact is available on the web via comments, forum discussions. More on the multi-directional exchange. Put yourself in the shoes of a journalist, you want gratification and recognition of your efforts, the satisfaction that you get when someone responds negatively or positiively to your article. That satisfaction may be a sliver of what you get if you say, win the Pulitzer Prize, but its still a recognition of your achievements in life. And thats why some journalists turn to blogging now, or to podcasting, for one aim of seeking new channels to reach out to their Holy Grail of audience participation. To join in that conversation of social communing. To be able to trade perspectives and learn more in-depth from readers who may know more or have different belief systems. So that same journalist can progress in his career development, writ better articles that are more balanced and thoughtful. The same goes for passive readers. TO be able to read or hear what others have to say about a single issue is meaningful and adds value to his/ her learning about that topic. Thats why Digg is so successful and warrant copying. Because they do not just generate links from their communities for reading, but also interacting and bringing the underlying conversation among the readers to the forefront.

That, to me, is news — the process of informing from all possible angles of society through a (digital) conversation.

Screenshot for interesting comparison. The first pic is the new Netscape portal as of today. And the second pic is how Netscape looked like in 1998. Click on the pics to go to the sites.

Here's the 1998 site.

Related articles from Jeff Jarvis's BuzzMachine. Very forward thinking approach by Guardian of shifting their readership online. ST will probably do this after the whole world's done it and its no longer new.

In other news…

On STOMP — Latest Straits Times Offering

Check out their latest lame attempt at capturing online traffic after they bungled their ST Online subscription and pissed off the online community. STOMP is a dilemma-in-the-making as ST deliberates between whether it is a blog or magazine or portal. Take the first page and it wun look out of place as the front page of a magazine. Think, ST, think. The Web is not offline media. And such blatant advertising on frontpage of offline Straits Times too. Apparently, they just confirmed what they report everyday is trivial news as it appears today's headline is the launch of STOMP.

Giving away cars to boost traffic. haha.. sure, lets see how many cars they need to give away before their traffic becomes sustainable. I would love to see their alexa rankings in a few months time and them to make me eat my words. Justin has a great post here on bashing them. I refuse to give STOMP the visibility they want on the web by dedicating one entire post to them. Lets make them read my piece on new-age journalism.

Related articles from SGEntrepreneurs and Legal Janitor. 

Naked Conversations

no, this is not a lurid post. So, back off, all you pervs out there…

Naked Conversations is this book I have been trying to finish for the past 2 months. Its about corporate blogging and how it can be useful in strengthening customer relationships. Its written by Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble who has been acclaimed by some people for single-handedly softening the image of Microsoft from "The Evil Empire" responsible for our Windows crashes and security vulnerabilities to "A Benevolent and Slightly Less Evil Empire" image. SO what the hell, yes i dun like Microsoft. Google rocks, please hire me… lol

So here's an excerpt I am reproducing from the book:

(Conversation with Michel-Edouard Leclerc, President, Assocation des Centres Distributeurs E. Leclerc)

Said LeClerc, "In order to save energy and capitalize on already formulated answers, I decided to create a personal site. My colleagues, younger than me and more expert on the Internet, convinced me to blog in order to be more interactive and in line with the current events." He said it serves two purposes. On a personal level, it is a space where he can structure and organize his ideas, helping him clarify his vision. On a professional level, it provides an efficient mechanism in which he can communicate with people who are interested in the organization."

LeClerc is an enormously busy person, perpetually in meetings, at conferences or in transit. "I am constantly questioned about my organization and how i view the company, the economy and social relations." The blog is a place where the questions more frequently asked of him can be answered, and anyone who wants to know can go to read him."

Here's my little pitch today about the importance of blogging and how it can communicate more about you as a person to a broader audience. Humans are social creatures, with internet, we gain access to a digital pipeline that connects us with an unprecedented number of people around the world. Yes, there might be negatives consequences of such unparalleled openness and access across the world, leading to privacy issues. However, we also gain by being able to communicate with like-minded people across the world that we learn from or help through interaction with them on the web. I am also an advocate of using blogging to express your personal views on issues that concern you in the world.

Some of my friends ask me: "why is your blog so boring? Its very different from what I am used to reading where people blog about their daily life." Yes, my answer is, I think blogs that showcase what clothes people wear, what they eat, where they went to study today, the things they do are but only one genre of blogs. In Singapore, such aforementioned blogs form an overwhelming majority. I am cool with that, I believe blogs are about self-expression, feel free to choose to express yourself anyway you like, by all means. I choose to express myself on issues I am concrned about such as technology, entrepreneurship, media, politics, space travel blah blah…

Oh, i also wanted throw in another pitch for blogging for businesses and corporations. I remember a professor who once mentioned that there are only two reasons why businesses hide and conceal information from the public –> INCOMPETENCE or ILLEGALITY. Transparency is the name of the game today in corporate governance. The "keep-customers-at-arms-length" approach is not going to work anymore for developed economies with sophisticated consumers who can blog about your crappy product on the internet, IM (instant-message) 20 friends that this product sucks. Think about the network effect of this negative publicity. No one is going to buy this product especially if the company is unable to speak up and respond directly on the internet which is where communication happens and resides today. Blogs solve that problem. Why? Because the internet is about conversations between its users. Get with the program, and join this naked conversation!

Addendum: Applause to my school, NUS Business School, for taking up my suggestion for a corporate blog. Helen, the Vice-Dean for Undergraduate Affairs, is a real evangelist now.

Check them out here