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.

I’ll be in Singapore till the 2nd of January, 2008. While I’m there, I will be meeting up with friends old and new, going out partying and drinking, and eating lotsa yummy food so I should have lotsa pictures to show and stories to tell.

Blogging may or may not be sporadic … ah heck, who am I kidding?! Of course I’ll be blogging! The best way to know when I’ve updated is to create yourself a feed reader account (Bloglines or Google Reader) and subscribe to my RSS feed.

If that is too much hassle, you can also receive my updates via email.

scol22 @ stock.xchng

Writing here has not only been a creative outlet for me but it’s also how I deal with things that I feel strongly about. For example, the stuff about irrational jealousy and my grandmother. The first has lost me a friend but I have yet to hear anything about the second. Though my father has mentioned perhaps I should not have posted it, even if most of the family knows that I did not make up anything in what I wrote.

Amongst people whom I know in real life, I think that I’m the most comfortable with laying my life bare online. And sometimes it’s easy to forget that not everyone in my life is as comfortable with that as I am. My skin is probably too thick for my own good. I may not care what people think of me, especially people that I don’t care for, but others care about how they are perceived and I should be more sensitive to that.

When blogging crashes into real life, I would definitely choose real life over it. An online life can be great but not when it is detrimental to the real. Over the past two years, I believe that I have allowed the fine line between what’s bloggable and what’s not to blur, especially where it concerns the people in my life. To friends and family who I may have caused trouble for, I sincerely apologise.

Self-censorship will be tricky but it looks like it’s gonna be a necessity. All of us being so interconnected by technology, we don’t know whose path we may cross now or in the future. I may throw myself at the mercy of the Internet gods, but from hereon I promise not to drag you down with me.