Cowboy Caleb wrote an article about irritating local bloggers, and subsequently Patlaw wrote a piece to share what she thinks Singapore blogosphere needs.

The one thing I agree with them strongly is this: While it is perfectly alright for one to use their blog as an electronic diary and write everything about themselves, it is almost clear that unless there’s something really exceptional about your life – e.g. heiress to a chain of hotels or a singer claiming to be a virgin after you lost it at 17 or 14 – no one really gives a flying damn about your life. Especially when you endlessly whine about your own boyfriend / girlfriend, spouse, parents, colleagues, work, wants, or even the lack of money and blog traffic, with nothing insightful to offer in between.

Thus, I would like to say Patlaw’s blog post is thought provoking. It is interesting to see ideas being thrown out as an attempt to improve the local blogging scene. I recalled a friend once pointed out that one can tell that a blog (or a forum) is a local one just by looking at the quality of the content and the comments. By his measure, most local blogs do not measure up at all. When he said that, it reminded me of a few blog posts recently written by a blogger about why no companies are looking at local bloggers to do marketing etc. (I will not refer to them to start flame wars.)

In those posts, he wrote about an incident of some nasty remarks being said behind his back and events he is involved in. He further went on to claim that such vicious pettiness and backstabbing impacts the credibility of all local bloggers as a whole and such acts is what deterred companies from the idea of using local bloggers. Just how very noble his concern for improving the local blogosphere!

Unfortunately after all is said, no one – other than his own inner circle or the good friend who carried the tale to him – has a clue who, and what incident he is talking about. For all intentions and purposes, whatever written there might as well have been fictional. Even if any of that has any nuance of truth, it makes one wonder if those attacks is not actually a response for his own nastiness and haughtiness elsewhere. I mean, it is as if people has nothing better to do than to attack him for no reasons at all? It looks to be more like a sign of desperation, where he conveniently blames others for his own failures because his vision of social media isn’t taking off. Really, I must say if he does some self evaluation to figure out why he is being attacked, it would have been a lot better than that load of hubris.

So much for all that talk about credibility when one has nothing to show! I would rather read my friend nocturne, who all along called himself the ‘Incredible Hulk’ – pun intended!

Anyway, let me just say there is one specific point raised in Cowboy Caleb’s posts which I need to comment on. For starters, I am guilty of using micro-blogging tools like Twitter & Plurk to publicise announce my new blog post. The only redeeming aspect of that is that my Plurk and Twitter is on private mode, and none of those following me has expressed any objection as yet (I hope they won’t). I think that shouldn’t be a real concern to me since I also at times ask my colleagues and friends who aren’t bloggers if they have read my latest blog post too.

Next, I definitely agree that blogs with too much advertisements are irritating. I have come across some blogs which I have ceased to visit due to exactly that reason. There is an ad between every paragraph break, or the ads themselves occupy more space than the actual blog content. It simply makes one wonder if the content isn’t added as an after-thought.

As for those so-called ‘crappy blogs’ , there is only one kind I disliked intensely – the kind belonging to teenagers who thinks their ‘wealth of experience’ grant them the right to have an opinion that the others are wrong when they don’t like what they read. And as if that isn’t bad enough, they seem to think those whom they considered to be in error shouldn’t even be allowed to express their opinion anymore! For e.g. a blogger who formerly live in some Pacific Island start telling Singaporeans near the MacRitchie Reservoir to stop complaining by saying how bad floods are back home. When pointed out just our ridiculous that point of view is, they resort to other avenues – namely Plurk or Twitter – to ‘provide more insight to readers into their opinion’ : by means of denouncing and gossiping among sycophants and bootlickers.

However, I do not agree with Cowboy Caleb’s examples that those blogs sites ‘connect very strongly with their audience’ . While those sites are updated regularly and the person updating it should be given an award for diligence, not to mention provide a service and convenience to those who did not set up (or know how to set up) their own RSS news feeds, I do not actually recall that they ‘have their own opinions’ . Maybe I should again drop by and visit these sites again to re-evaluate them since it was a long time ago when I remarked that sites regurgitating news articles from new sources is stealing, and not offering any compelling content. In fact, I would think even Google Alerts could have done even better in providing those content if the search parameters are done correctly.

That’s all I have to say for now.