memoirs on a rainy day

How the viral phenomenon works. (via Jakob)

Blogging has become a part of my life since I started in 2006. I blogged in other ways before in HTML files that were constantly updated from 1998-2003. I wrote this post about my blogging habit. Today, I will go into the reasons why I love blogging.

Suplado tagged me with a meme, so here are my reasons for blogging.

1. Power of blogs

More than once, I have seen a positive change in my life due to blogs. For example, there was the time that I had topped my upload limit in a month on Zooomr. I blogged about this. A few hours later I received a comment and an email from Kris Tate CFO of Zooomr. He reset my upload limit for the month so I could upload my photos. I really appreciated that. Earlier this year, I had trouble uploading my photos. Kris managed to resolve my issue in a few minutes.

More recently, I blogged about losing a Better Bottle from CamelBak. I was running at full speed in order to catch the bus. I made the bus, but immediately noticed once in the bus, that I had lost my bottle in my full out run. I asked myself which I preferred, losing a bottle or being in time for my university classes. It took only a fraction of a second to decide that I’d rather go to school on time. I will receive a new Better Bottle from CamelBak later this week, courtesy of their marketing department.

2. Immediate results

As an aspiring writer, photographer and artist, I love seeing an immediate result. This happens when I push the “Post” button in my WP dashboard. Immediately, my post is published on my blog and sent through my RSS subscriptions. With a good Pagerank, what you write has immediate impact as well. The power of your blog relies on how easy it is to find your content.

3. Exposing racism and other injustices

As a visible minority in a largely Caucasian population, I am extremely sensitive to racism. This means that I notice it easily. A look, a word, a gesture. I can interpret these when they are racist. I have said before that between France, Germany and Canada, Quebec is by far the most racist place I have ever lived. I won’t count Taiwan, since the Taiwanese are pretty much racist towards anybody. That’s not necessarily true, but from a certain point of view, it is.

4. Sharing my writing, my photos and art

From paperblogging, to watercolors, to photography, to creative writing, I do create things. Some of them are crap, others are good. In an effort to better myself, I post these. Hopefully some people will like them. I don’t really post them to receive criticism. In that sense, I am my own harshest critic.

I’ve been pretty busy today writing up applications and proposals for the Google Summer of Code. I’ve got about four applications down. I’ll write a few more in the coming hours. I have until 5PM tomorrow to complete them. Most of the projects are above my coding expertise. However there are a few research projects that are very interesting.

I’ll be happy if I get selected, but I’m not getting my hopes up. There must be thousands of applicants and only 1500 bursars. I’m just a bit miffed that WordPress hasn’t got that many project ideas. I think that I’ll still propose an idea of mine to WordPress. Most of them involve a lot of coding. I don’t know how I feel about that. Still, I would like to work for WordPress through Google.

It’s really powerful that you can be anywhere in the world and code for the Summer of Code. I find that interesting. I wanted to apply last year, but missed the deadline. At least this time, I’ll have a few proposals submitted. I’ve checked and I haven’t found that many pure math projects either. It’s too bad. There must be a lot of ideas for that. I’ll try to pitch a few, but I think that those kinds of proposals need more time to polish.

I just ran out of time with the looming end of semester.

Speaking of code, I’m starting to really like the WP dashboard. It’s really faster and better than the old one. I’ve already gotten used to it enough to no longer miss the old one. There are tons of little new tweaks that I really like.

Writing these proposals is mentally exhausting.

Skellie has a great article on 25 different ways on how to get a popular blog. I’m getting tired of the XX ways to do XX model that I’ve been seeing too much of lately, but her post was informative and to the point with examples.

The Mullet Strategy involves letting users of crowd generated content argue and discuss issues on secondary pages, while professional editors maintain the front page. (via kottke)

I saw this on some blogs, I’m willing to try it

You do not have to be tagged to play along. This game is simple and so are the rules.

1. Copy from *Start Copy Here* through *End Copy Here*

2. Add your site(s) to the list. Just be sure to post the “Big Bang” at each site you add.

3. Tag or don’t tag, your choice, however, the more tags you create the longer the list will grow.

4. Let me know your blog’s name and url by leaving me a comment HERE. I will add you to the master list. (If you would like a scroll box code, leave me your email address and I will email it to you.) Scroll Box Example. (I decided not to use the box for the Big Bang for ease of copying.)

5. Come back and copy the master list back to your site, often. This process will allow late-comers to get as much link benefit as the first ones in. Once you are on the master list people who have participated earlier will update their bookmarks and help everyone lower than them out on the list.

Continue reading ‘Big Bang List Part 1′

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing marketplace. (wiki)

Social Alerter sends you an email when your site is about to become popular on Digg and del.icio.us. (via tamar)

OpenCalais sounds a bit like Twine, an intelligent aggregator.

Dosh Dosh explains how he got 10000 subscribers to his blog.