Update 14th May 2009: Yay! My cousin has come around to my point of view and is happy with the compromise. She also conceded that the day was a happy one, even if the eventuality wasn’t.

Tonight I got a message from a cousin, asking me to remove her wedding photos from my blog. As you might guess, the marriage had broken down and I assume that looking at the photos of happier days is difficult for her. At the same time, she probably also don’t want them available on the general Internet.

My first reaction was of annoyance. This is my blog, it is a record of my life and thoughts. I was there at the wedding and I had a blast with my family and relatives. She may not think of it positively now, but we were all truly happy for her. As such, asking me to remove the photos and the post was like asking me to forget that the day had existed. I’m not going to do that because I can’t.

The other thing that got me perplexed was that it’s not as if no one in our immediate family and social circles don’t know about her current situation, and about her having married once. Seeing her in a wedding dress in a photo from a few years back isn’t going to shock anyone. This is true even if she thinks that divorce is a bigger social stigma than it really is these days. No one is judging her and I don’t think anyone in our family is too. Disappointed and a little bit sad we maybe, but no one is judging because we haven’t walked in her shoes and not many of us know the full story.

Though in the end, after having a long thought about it I decided to compromise. I will still be seeing her and it’s best to keep things cordial and civil at least. I emailed her to let her know that I will remove any photos with her ex-husband in it but the ones with her and her family, and us the relatives I’m keeping up. And I’m not deleting the post because reading through what I wrote, I didn’t find anything that deserves to be deleted.

This post also serves as notice to everyone that I know. I blog. It’s what I do. It’s a big part of me. If you come into contact with me in any way, shape or form you might end up as words here.

I’ve already promise you that I won’t write or post anything compromising about you. In fact I believe I’ve toned down a lot – I’ve learnt my lesson. In my opinion, it’s made my blog a little less exciting and I have to think more about what people may think these days. It takes a lot of willpower to keep my fingers from the keyboard sometimes.

So in return, I hope you understand that it’s difficult and sometimes frustrating for me when you request that I remove something which I have already carefully thought out about. I will compromise a little, like I have done for my cousin but it doesn’t mean it’s something that I like to do.

I don’t expect you to have a thick skin like I do, but I hope that you respect me enough to understand my position.

p.s. to those of you who remain friends with me, knowing that I blog, I love youse all!

I’ve talked about self-censorship and keeping my mouth shut before. But it remains a tricky proposition. Some friends are ok with it, some friends are so-so about it, and some don’t even know this blog exists which is good and bad in itself.

I’ve written about a friend recently who got freaked out by seeing their name online in a public forum. They requested that I either delete the post, or take their name out of it. I chose the latter because hey, I like the stuff that I write. I’m kinda narcissistic that way.

But I do respect people’s request to not be mentioned on this blog, at least not directly anyway. You only have to tell me once and as far as this blog is concerned, you will not exist anymore. Or as Thama likes to do from time to time, he preempts juicy stories by saying “off the record”. Damn you Thama!

Though what’s really privacy anyway? The tax office knows how much we earn and where we live. The banks and credit card companies know how much money we have and, how and where we spend it. The medical insurance people know how healthy we are and what’s been ailing us.

That leaves us with sex, love, embarrassing things and other grey areas of our lives. In the spirit of showing you all that I should walk the walk if I talk the talk, I’ve already written about most of those things. But there’s one skeleton left in my closet: I loved bubble-gum pop in the 90s.

Because why?

Because of You. I Do, Cherish You. I Want You Back. Tearing Up My Heart And I Want It That Way! Bye Bye Bye!

I shall end this post by saying,

I really dig Britney’s new CD.

So remember that time I blogged about the Mother energy drink and received some goodies in the mail? To be exact: 9 cans of the stuff and a set of big plastic bull nuts.

Well, chocolatesuze did the same thing and not only did she get 6 cans of Mother at first, but then four days later she received a whole slab of 24 cans more!!! Argh. I think it’s because she’s prettier than me.

I am shaking my head at this seriously inept attempt to plagiarise my posts. The guy has linked me on his blogroll thus ensuring that I would know about his existence if I did a vanity check on my incoming links, and then he proceeds to copy and paste 4 of my posts in their entirety on his front page without acknowledging that I was the original writer.

The posts that were copied are the following:

• Men are dense
• Annoying girlfriend behaviour
• What’s wrong with being comfortable?
• Getting to work early: the secret

Copying posts in their entirety without adding a word of your own thoughts is bad enough; doing so without giving credit where credit is due is worse. Furthermore, in one of the posts I had use a photo on a Creative Commons license which I had credited the photo owner for, but this guy just copies it wholesale without doing the same.

I’m not gonna give him any link love but here is the address:
adneo.wordpress.com

I’ve already sent him a polite email and a comment trying to explain to him how it might feel if someone else had done the same to him. The posts are still up there. So I guess I’m going to have to say a bit more on the subject.

You don’t get ahead in blogging by plagiarising. You will not gain loyal readers because they will notice that the writing style is suddenly different. And you lose credibility the moment that you are caught. Even if you do become a good writer down the track, you’ve done irreparable damage and people will be less inclined to believe a word that you have to say.

So don’t be stupid like this guy. Practice your writing by writing your own words and you will get better. Plagiarise and you’d go nowhere.

Typically my page views per day hover around the 500-550 mark. If I hit 600-700, that’s a good day. But the morning after I wrote about the Edison Chen sex photos scandal, this was what I woke up to:

Along with the expected visitors from around Asia, I also got visitors from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and Europe. I guess I underestimated the number of Chinese people who are actually interested about the news, which first broke about 2 weeks ago. And yet, people are still searching for the photos! Check out these search terms that landed people on my site:

And this was how many times the post was read:

Holy smokes! And the traffic is going to go even higher because Friday isn’t over yet. Now it’s #3 #1 on my list of all-time most popular posts! While the other posts had slowly creep up the list as people read and commented on them, this Edison Chen one got up there in less than 3 days!

It’s so big news that it’s even got CNN talking about it yesterday, which probably caused a lot more people to go google it.

The glorious Internet age eh?

Last Saturday night at Ambar for Kid Kenobi/Malente, I bumped into another stranger who recognised me from my photos and videos of the clubbing events and raves that I have attended in the past two years. We talked for a while and one question he asked stuck with me:

All those photos and videos that you take at these things, how do you have fun?

My answer:

Well, I don’t. Not completely anyway.

This is a question that I have pondered about before – Is blogging cramping my “real life”? The gist is that when I’m worrying about the timing and the positioning of taking good pictures and video, I can’t concentrate on enjoying myself. I’m not getting my money’s worth either. Even my friends have noticed this and they’ve asked me many times to just put the camera away and enjoy myself.

I had persisted with it because quite a few people have recognised me at events and have complimented me on my photos. Most have said to me that it’s great how I helped them remember an excellent day or night out. Plus I usually get a lot of web search hits during the days immediately after the event. All this feeds into the cycle: page views and compliments from strangers make me want to do it, and as I do it even more, the more page views I get and the more strangers recognise and talk to me. It’s a buzz.

But I’ve come to realise that most of the events have taken place at the usual venues, and even I’m bored from taking photos at the same places. So unless it’s a truly special event or at a location that I haven’t shown you guys yet, I’ve decided to put my camera away for the events that I go to this year. We’ll see what happens next year.

I followed that rule for the first event this year – Summadayze, and what d’ya know? I had so much fun.

claudecf @ flickrYou know sometimes I wish people don’t tell me the things that they do because it then becomes something that I have to tell someone, and by extension – blog. In the recent past, unless the secret was truly sensitive or horrible, I didn’t think twice about writing it so long as I left the specifics out of it.

As my readership increases, so does the potential of offending someone because they know someone who knows someone who knows me. Now, it’s not just the stories of friends and family that I sometimes self-censor on, but I am also wary of writing about things that happened to friends of friends, people separated by two or three degrees of separations even. Oh, the things that I could write about if I didn’t give a shit about still having friends who’d willingly talk to me without worrying about me spilling their deepest and darkest secrets.

Being known for blogging is a double-edged sword. I want to be read because I like talking to an audience instead of an empty room. But that also means that I can’t write as freely as I could as before when only a small circle of family and friends knew the existence of this.

It’s frustrating at times when I know it makes for a good story, especially when I’m stuck for material. So it’s with a heavy heart to say that although I’ve been told and have overheard some fairly interesting things lately I can’t tell you any of them. So you’ll just have to make do with this: my mother made me a chicken-mayo sandwich for lunch today, using leftover Nando bits. It was very nice. Spank you very much.