I signed up sgping.com

I knew that sgping.com exists quite a long time ago when some bloggers reported in on ping.sg. I have never considered signing up for it until today. Part of the reasons why I signed up was because I had a fall in readership but it’s not like I had a wonderful and healthy traffic anyway. And no, it’s not for the money that sgping.com promised to share. Remember, I had a low readership so it’s not going to be even 1ct a day. It was simply done to increase exposure to the blog. What’s the point of a public blog if no one is reading it?

I must first thank kriscell for his patience and guiding me in submitting articles. Unlike ping.sg the article submission is manual so it’s somewhat like digg in a certain way. Some would dislike this feature but I wouldn’t entirely call it a drawback. After all, this completely stops those ‘top bloggers’ (aka link-sters) whose blogs contains nothing but a bunch of kriffing links or articles they plagiarized from another site and shamelessly slapped their own ‘copyright’ on it. That’s not mentioning with this you have a greater choice over what you want to ping and what not to ping. 🙂

Next, when you submit an article, it gets 1 ping right away, and it goes into upcoming. Only after another registered user pings it (correct me if I am wrong), will it then gets 2 pings and move up into published. (Note, clicking on the link doesn’t ping it!! Only by clicking on ‘Ping it’ is it pinged.)

In this aspect it is somewhat like ping.sg whereby only ‘reads’ of members are counted. That also prevents one from pinging his own posts repeatedly to create a false popularity. Of course, it still doesn’t stop people from singing up as say multiple accounts like Milky, Shabby, Princely etc and start ‘cross-pinging’ one another to make their own post popular.

Still, the ideas behind it is not too bad. And like I have said previously, there is no conflict between using sgping.com and ping.sg because no one is going to quit using ping.sg by signing up with sgping. It is merely just another avenue for one to increase exposure for one’s blog.

And if one doesn’t want exposure for one’s own blog then just take it completely private.

Nuff-Nazis… Sieg Heil! LOL!

This is quite amusing. Hot on the heels of blogger Limetouch’s ban, now blogger sisuahlai is banned for 2 weeks (or was it 2 months?) on Innit. At first, it seems like the nuffnang clowns have learnt a little from the previous bad publicity as a result of Limetouch’s ban and have made an attempt at a lighter touch this round. But I was wrong. Behind what I perceived as a lighter touch, was a threat to sue!!

Now I must say I felt Limetouch was lucky. And here’s the next best part: poor sisuahlai first a public reply on his blog, and then some anonymous coward citing some ‘rules on confidentiality’, seems to have scared him into removing it. Bleah!! [Update: The entry has now been reposted after he obtained ‘permission’ to do so.]

But the good news is… Shadoxfox [whom I called 邪道狐 in Chinese] has a screen capture of sisuahlai’s post here, so all of you can see sisuahlai’s reply in its full glory.

As I went through nuffnang’s letter, I find this the most amusing. I quote:

‘What you have said in your blog is misleading in nature and would cause uncertainties among the bloggers who are not as informed as others.’

Can I say I am LMAO [laughing my ass off] when I read this? Frankly, just who, other than the very people running, or perhaps working for, nuffnang are any the wiser when compared to the rest of the common bloggers? In other words, the condition that ‘bloggers who are not as informed as others’ does not exist – the simple reason being that everyone is about just as informed as the others, not!

If that condition exists, then why does sisuahlai seem less informed than the rest (since he’s been asking all those questions)? Why are there certain bloggers privy to matters which sisuahlai or other bloggers are not? Should not certain knowledge be common and made known to all bloggers on nuffnang’s corporate website to prevent such… uncertainties? * In Darth Vader’s Voice * “I find your lack of a public, corporate response… disturbing.”

Oh… I forgot, absofxxkinglutely no corporate announcement of that sort exists on nuffnang corporate website. It has appeared to me they have always preferred to selectively answer to only certain bloggers in the comment section as they deem fit. Now no wonder they can now brag about ‘bloggers who are not as informed as others’ !

It’s a condition that exists on their own making!

Well done, nuff-nazis [short for nuffnang nazis]! Is this where I do the straight arm salute and scream ‘Sieg Heil!’ ? And sing ’nuffnang, nuffnang ueber alles?’

Anyway, now that I have started raving, and I have put myself into a writing mood, I might as well also talk about some of the new things happening in Blogosphere, and the one I wanna talk about is sgping.com.

When the news broke, I was wondering what uzyn’s response will be. But after awhile, I realized that it probably doesn’t matter to uzyn at all. After all, Uzyn has been rather passive when innit came up, so why would uzyn give a flying fxxk to sgping.com? From what I gathered, uzyn mentioned at the ping party last year he put ping.sg together because he simply wanted to be able to read blog posts of people in Singapore. So, putting up ads on ping.sg – i.e. using ping.sg as a means of income – appeared to me to be an after-thought, unlike sgping.com which made it clear they are going to share the earnings with bloggers.

Anyway, many bloggers registered at ping for no other purpose other than an avenue to publicise their blogs. That ping.sg turned into an avenue for some to make new friends was almost a side effect. In other words, there is no conflict between ping.sg and sgping.com.

While elements within ping.sg users have talked about the lack of loyalty among pingsters who publicised sgping.com thru ping.sg, I beg to differ. (There maybe an element of ‘politics’ behind some did what they did, but I would prefer not to talk about them in public nor to get involved.)

First of all, there was never a question of loyalty. It has been clear to me that many bloggers have no loyalty other than to themselves and / or to the few bucks they can earn from monetising their blog. In other words, signing up to both sgping.com and ping.sg would give them the best of both worlds.

sgping.com can serve as an indirect means of monetizing one’s blog, while ping.sg continues to serve your purposes. Unless sgping.com moves more aggressively to make itself a virtual social activity outlet, at this point of time I don’t see a conflict between the two.

Now that I have get this off my chest, I believe some may consider I am making a sales pitch for sgping.com. As I have said before, some may even consider this a seditious and subversive posts and probably call for my head.

Whatever the case is, I do hope that the people running ping.sg are way more enlightened than the nuff-nazis, since ping.sg and nuffnang are pretty different. But if they turned into ping-nazis, there’s nothing much I can do about that anyway. All I can say is this:

Relax… you have a life beyond ping.sg. Don’t be too uptight about such small stuff.