k r i s a n d r o

It was a blast at the “Your Blog” event yesterday at the Open Room. The event is organized by the good folks at Ogilvy and the topic was on “How to market your blog Like a brand”.

Yongfook

 

The speakers came from very different backgrounds; we have Yongfook, the handsome-enough-to-make-me-question-my-sexuality CEO of Egg Co., who produced cult favorite projects like Open Source Food (now known as Nibbledish) & Sweetcron;  Arti Mulchand, who has spent much of her career life in SPH and probably regards words as any guy would regard porn; Design Sojourn,  a serious award winning industrial design leader who still has enough humor to ; and not forgetting Andy from ToysREvil who made me laugh so hard from his Singlish and subtle hand-wanking gestures that I teared up.

All of the speakers (apart from Arti who owns a small personal blog) have very successful blogs in their own right and the amazing thing is that none of them made money directly from blogging. The success I am referring to is of course the niche traffic that they have built up over the years and it was the personal branding in their blogs that led them to other opportunities. All these happened because of their blogs; Yongfook dated a hot girl (he also got a job in a big media company in Japan but I like to emphasize the ‘hot girl’ part), Design Sojourn is working for a huge electronics giant; and Andy has… toys. (You guys will never understand how important that is to him)

The great thing about the speakers is that they shared their own experiences on how they evolved as a blogger through the years and it’s exactly what I am or what most of you bloggers are going through. I started off writing in 2004, just wanting to have a voice and not caring about what I say because who is to judge me on my own space? Soon the readers rose from one (myself) to a couple (colleagues, friends) and I found blogging tools like wordpress that relieves me of my lousy html skills. Soon, strangers started popping out of nowhere because of search engines and referrals and I found my voice becoming restricted. I could actually hurt somebody and thus hurt myself from the things I say! I came soon to accept that true opinions (the ones with FUCK YOU! ALL YOU FUCKING BASTARDS!!!) are not meant to be on the web especially when I am not very anonymous.

I soon turned to the ‘dark side’ and got into the hype of putting ads on my blog so that I can eventually strut around in my berms in Orchard during daytime, scoffing at all the stressed out peeps in suits and ties while checking out my adsense account.

It didn’t work. So now I am back to where I started, and realize that not everyone can make money through blogging directly (certainly not me).

Their blogs were a brand. People who knew of Yongfook, Design Sojourn & Andy knew what they were about and their success were built upon shaping their blogs to their strengths for a niche audience. Getting success in terms of traffic hits are not much of a secret these days considering how much information is out there. Barring bloggers who cannot write coherently or has no opinion whatsoever, we all can succeed in our own right.

So what’s my niche to work on. Humor methinks.

It’s a little on the ‘Lame’ side of humor but I’ll get whatever laughs I can get.

Don’t make me come over and tickle you.

(Check out the key take aways summarized by Brian Koh of Ogilvy)

(Oh and Arti, if you are reading this. You were shaking so bad throughout most of your speech but the points that you put across were definitely a lot of food for thought.)

Nokia has officially launched their ‘Comes with Music‘ service in Singapore on the 27th February.

The service brings you unlimited downloads of music for 12 months from their ‘Comes with Music’ store, which boasts an extensive library of 4 million (and counting) tracks from huge music labels and even some asian labels such as Ocean Butterflies and Rock Records.

The catch for such a good deal is that you must own one of their ‘Comes with Music’ handsets. There are 6 of them as of now and they are the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia 5320 XpressMusic, Nokia 5220 XpressMusic, N96, N85 and N79. Users can download from the ‘Comes with Music’ store right off most of the mentioned handsets or on their PCs through an application.

There is no subscription fee or download limit to speak of if you are wondering about that. Users can also keep their music after their 12 months of free, unlimited downloads.

I got to attend their media event held at Zouk prior to ‘Earn Your Stripes’ party thanks to the awesome folks at Text 100 who remembered that I am was an avid user of the Nokia N95 8GB. It’s kinda ironic attending a Nokia event based on that fact, seeing that I have move to the Apple iPhone after a decade of using Nokia products like the indestructable Nokia 3210.

Pictures of the event.

Funny Hosts – Vernon and Justin

The All-American Rejects who sat 3 feet from me!

 

The issue of DRM is pretty important for users like me and unfortunately, Nokia ‘Comes with Music’ isn’t DRM free. The good news is that Nokia is working to change that. If this is materialized, users will definitely benefit seeing that there isn’t even a hint of the Apple iTunes music store being made available to Singapore.

I still love Nokia and seeing Nokia bring a legal music download service to Singapore ahead of Apple, brings much joy to a Nokia fanboy.

For those who have been dwelling in underground vaults and marvelling at how fast your Intel Core 2 processor is and how l33t you are, well, I got news for you. Intel has released their bleeding-ly fast successor to the Intel Core 2 with the Intel Core i7 processors and once again, kept bloody Moore’s Law alive and threatens to bleed my wallet dry.

 

It’s such a love hate relationship I have with processors and graphic cards. One would feel excited that technology is keeping up the pace and a great company like Intel creates great products like the Core 2. You wait a few months for the prices to plunge before making the purchase. You buy it after saving up for a couple months surviving on scraps from the rubbish dump and water from the bowl of your neighbours pet. And before you can bask in the full glory of owning one of the fastest processors around, Intel steps in and taps on your shoulder and says, “Oh! We have just released the Fastest Desktop Processor On The Planet! The Intel Core i7!!!”

[Photo from Pat Law]

 

At least I got to attend the media event to help me regain some love for Intel and I can always count on the peeps at Ogilvy to tickle me and Nadnut with the labelling of our media passes.

[Photo from Pat Law]

 

Yes, I was Christopher Tan for that night and no, I didn’t do anything kinky with Nadia Bennylava.

For the uninitiated, is a social medial tool and used for micro-blogging whereby one sends updates in 140 characters or less to the service. Plurk is very active in the local scene and most of the social media lovers are using Plurk very frequently to take part in various discussions, ranging from how great the Obama win was, to how lovely it is to take a dump in the toilet. Whatever the topics might be, Plurk is a great way to share and communicate.

We now have a and had two ‘official’ gatherings so far with the last one at SMU’s Ice Cold Beer. A total of 17,352,451,726 30+ people turned up! We had loads of fun playing bar games with each other and laughing at a couple of people that totally sucked in certain games. It may sound evil that we laugh at them so openly but they are all alive so far and are looking forward to the next gathering that I was volunteered to organize. =P

Group shot at Plurk Gathering v2 – Thanks to Willy and David of Live! Studios for most of the photos that night!

 

I enjoyed myself thoroughly at the outing and it’s always great to put faces to the names/nicknames that I talk to so frequently online.

on Plurk!

 

Blog posts about the gathering so far:

Wenderella

Clauds

Claudia

Cloudi3

Limetouch

iammyy