Blogging for Dummies: Singapore’s finest July 30, 2006
Posted by Andrew Wee in : blogging , trackbackSomething came to mind while reading today’s Sunday Times feature on blogging.
- It’s really popular
- It’s gone mainstream
- A lot of Singapore bloggers are clueless about the commercialization of blogging
Let’s look at these one at a time:
- It’s popular: when aunties, uncles and your friendly neighbourhood mamak stall owner have a blog, expect that it’ll plateauing. There’ll be some fallout soon. (remember bubble tea? -or boba tea to our American friends).
The publicity is helpful because you will no longer have shouting matches when someone asks you what you’ve been doing.
You say ‘blog’
They look at you strangely and say ‘log?’.
No, blog.
Log?
Blog!
Log?
No! B-L-O-G?
Huh? Blog? Is that some type of log?
Grrr.
But at least some of them might’ve read the papers today. The other times I tell them, hey go look at up on a wiki.
Weak?
No, wiki!
Wee Kee? Who?
No, wiki!
(ok, i’ll stop here).
- It’s gone mainstream: This is bad. Remember the intelligensia always say, the moment something makes it to the front page of Time, it’s dead.
Remember William Gibson? Cyberpunk? Neuromancer? Bruce Sterling? Islands in the Net?
Where are they now?
Yup.
Granted, the Sunday Times isn’t Time, well if you added a “S” and the word “Sunday” in front…
But the moment it’s hit the mainstream consciousness, the concept loses it’s ‘conceptual purity’, it has to be ‘dumbed’ down to it’s ‘blogging for dummies’, ‘blogging for the IT-challenged’ minorities.
Shall we celebrate?
Horray.
HL Mencken said: The masses are asses.
- A lot of Singapore bloggers are clueless about the commercialization of blogging
This is the part that really gets me. If you looked at the article, you’ll see that a ton of the blogs are hosted on blogger.com.
What’s wrong, you say?
Oh boy, we’ve just discovered another clueless one, Henry. prepare the surgical theatre, another sterilization on the way…
If you are planning to make big money out of something, it’s worthwhile checking it out.
Your domain is very important. It’s your lifeblood.
The domain is tied to your Google PageRank and Alexa ranking.
A lot of value is tied to that, especially the frequency of spidering, SERP (search engine results page) ranking, etc.
And you seriously want to tie your domain to a subdomain on Blogger.com or Wordpress.com???
(I don’t have anything against the software, merely hosting on the domain).
If you build your site to a PR5, Alexa sub-100,000 ranking, and your blogging provider decides to put web ads on your page. Good bye and good luck.
A domain name and hosting are very affordable.
Why not sign up for it?
It’ll:
- Build up your brand value
- You have control over your domain and what you want to write about
- You can sell it some day if you wanted to. (Try selling your blogger subdomain…)
If you really need help with registering a domain name (there are strategies) and choosing a web hosting, you can visit my Internet Marketing site.
If you have questions, you can drop me a note here.
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Hi,
thanks for dropping by my blog…Anyway, I think you’ve got a great site going..=)
Ermm…some of your links are faulty though(the ones in the entry) Just thought I should let you know…
Also, maybe you want people to comment without the need to log-in? Kind of troublesome to login just to comment…Cheers!
[...] Before I go into today’s topic, I was to give a shoutout to my buddy, Ridzuan Ashim at XSmatter.com. Although we haven’t met IRL (in real life) yet, he was so kind to help point out that my hyperlinks were messed up in my ‘Blogging for Dummies: Singapore’s finest‘ post and also mentioning that I could change my comment procedure. It’s now easier to leave comments (you don’t have to login anymore). It’s only with the help of friends like Ridzuan and others who’re more experienced in blogging and Internet Marketing, that’s helped me build this new blog to an Alexa 662,094 ranking (as of 1st Aug 06). Thanks for the help guys. [...]