After the presentation was over, Arzhou took the lead to walk out of Geek Terminal to head towards The Pump Room. The road was long and treacherous. It was hot, wet (as in sweaty), and paved with restaurants who tried to convince us to give their food a shot. Thank goodness I had the company of Joanne of Ogilvy tp brave this journey together. It was quite amusing initially because she was trying to get my name right; and when she finally realised that my name was Jean, she was wondering if I was Jean of Simply Jean.

Heh heh… I enjoyed the anonymity while it lasted.

We talked about social media on the whole and she was trying to get a grasp of social media and advertisers. She’s so hard working that she was even reading up a book on Website-something-Measurement! Impressed… impressed. Of course, when she later realised that my course of study had nothing to do with the Internet nor social media, she was quite surprised.

“So you are a Bernard Leong!” Oh man, I felt so flattered. Heh heh…

By the time we got to The Pump Room, we had to queue for our turn and while everyone was hot, I was wet drenched. I had no choice but to strip my jacket off for a moment. When it was finally our turn to get in, we were told to “move in and turn left”. Of course, everyone was expecting some seats, but we were greeted with surprise when we were refused entry into an area which we now realised was the VIP area.

So what was all the “move in and turn left” about? Then we realised. We were supposed to stand. Haha… everyone’s hopes dashed when that was confirmed by someone in the crowd. Oh well.

I didn’t get a beer, but for those who did, most commented that it was almost like water - and most importantly, Tian Hong didn’t even turn red! You see, he has a high propensity of turning red regardless of what alcoholic drinks he takes and he didn’t even turn red on this!

***

The music was pretty nice, although all the songs we heard were “oldies”. The band playing was Jive Talking, and the vocalists and musicians were very good! The male vocalist had an evil sense of humour too. Apparently, some girl got sabo’ed into going onto stage because it was her birthday, and she was asked for a dance by the male vocalist! Haha…

Can’t see much, but I thought she reminded me of The Mermaid, just a little taller. Shortly after the dance, another ang mo took over.

Hmm… give me the cheeky vocalist anytime. Haha… =)

The group lasted for about a  few songs - with the most popular one being “That thing you do”. I guess almost everyone was familiar with the song. Yeah, I remember hearing it when I was just a small kid. =P

After the band announced that they were taking a break, the rest of us decided to take a break too. In fact, I think the few of us decided to call it a day. It wasn’t so much about the bed beckoning, but it was more of… “mood”?

Oh well.

On our way out, we met miccheng who was having a lonesome beer at the bar. Just as he was about to leave with us, Arzhou came along and convinced him to stay for another beer. So I guess that leaves Ridz, DK and me.

So was it calling a day? Nope. There was still more aftermath - probably not in the context of Podfire event or post event, but more of… being trapped outside my gates! More later. Starbucks chasing people out now. =P

For once, I managed to arrive early enough for an event this week. This week was jam packed with events - the Open Room event on Monday, the Cisco launch on Tuesday and now, the Podfire Launch on Wednesday!

Podfire is the baby of Miccheng, whose aim is to provide turn key solutions for podcasts and vidcasts. He’s just gotten Tech65 and the Geek Goddess show into his portfolio and is looking to provide better solutions for others who are interested in doing the same.

And like every other glamour event, here’s the who’s who (in the likes of Singapore Tatler).

We had the usual suspects present at the event - and because I do not know who wants to remain anonymous and who doesn’t, here’s a rough list in no particular order, of who’s there (at least from the photos): Bernard Leong, Derrick (sorry, I didn’t get your URL), Arzhou, Ren Hao (sorry, I also didn’t get your URL), Adam (yours too, if you blog), Uzyn, Nadnut, DK, Andrew Peters (erm, which URL should I use?), Jairus (sorry, I also didn’t get your URL), Claudia , Nicole, Mintea, Daphne Maia, Sabrina, Tian Hong, and Charlene (she doesn’t blog =P) just to name a few. Of course, Miccheng was there too since this event is his baby.

I thought the event was rather good because (after Bernard Leong lowered our expectations in the background) sufficient skills were seen in the post production result of what they screened during the launch event. One comment though - the mic (microphone, not miccheng) might have to be adjusted (tweak, re-positioned, etc.) to give a balance in the vidcast. A few of us thought the Geek Goddess sounded 1 octave higher. Haha…

The food was ok. French fries, potato wedges, onion rings and spring rolls were served. However, I guess the highlight of the day was Danny’s customized drinks for the girls! Darn, I didn’t even get to taste any. =( Maybe… not friend enough =(

Looks nice right?! Too bad I didn’t get to try it. Shucks. =(

As with any event, there was lots and lots of interacting and mixing around. People around us are beginning to wake up to social media - in the good sense I hope. Maybe I’ll write something on it one day. =)

Following this wonderful event, we headed to our next destination - The Pump Room, which was quite a let down (yes, this form of social media do bring brands down - but I guess bloggers don’t lambast for the sake of bringing anything or anyone down; it’s just honest-to-honest views, just like what yebber hopes to bring about).

Stay tuned for Part 2! =) Meanwhile, Happy Labour Day! =)

Got the invite via DK and Ridz from Brian of Ogilvy to the Open Room event. Apparently, they just acquired the new wing as part of an extension of their existing premises and advertisers, marketing professionals and bloggers were invited to this Blogger Social event. I thought it was a very kind gesture on the part of Brian and his team because bloggers were always seen in the bad light - that they will give unsolicited comments on products or slamming a product’s features. However, this can’t be further from the truth and I thank Brian and his team for providing an opportunity for bloggers to interact with the marketing professionals. The event was held at… the Open Room, which is on Level 3 of the Ogilvy Center, just back to back with SGX and opposite the Lau Pat Sat.

And in case you were lost…

You can always call for assistance. Disclaimer: I have no idea whose number this is. Just… don’t spam it, ok? =) On second thoughts, I’d be a responsible blogger and mask the number. =)

It’s unlikely that you’ll miss this screaming red wall with the logo artistically etched onto the wall. Of course, from here, it’s hard not to notice the registration counter…

And the goodie bags that beckon behind. =)

This event was meant for advertisers and marketing professionals to interact with the bloggers - and indeed it was. I was so busy interacting with people that I actually didn’t manage to take any photos of the exhibits. From what I recalled, there was a range of Canon Ixus cameras as well as the Canon HF10 and FS100 Camcorders; not forgetting their DSLR, the Canon EOS 40D. Yes, I am eyeing on reviewing that model because I am on the brink of getting a DSLR.

There’s also the Nokia N95, which I thought was a babe! I heard it comes with build in GPS, but I didn’t know that I could actually attach it to a TV to play games! I tried to play some games on it… but the screen was too big and I got a little too giddy. =( However, I am still a Nokia supporter! That’s probably why they are not letting me review any of their phones. =(

From a distance, I saw an oversize iPod, but before I could take a photo of it, it was gone! =( Well, it was quite a wasted chance for me to get it’s photo up here. Next time perhaps…

And here’s the people photos!

The prince and the princesses

3 Sexy ladies! =)

The loot left unattended…

The one-glass-turn-red Plaktoz

DK acting shy

And yes, that’s about as many photos as I can get. It was really a networking session for me so there’s less of camwhoring today. =P

Oh… there was a goodie bag for all who attended today’s event. Nice red bag! Reminds me of rednano… =P

Tadah! This is the much coveted goodie bag that was seen at the registration table. =) It’s really quite a packful inside!

That’s quite a fair bit of goodies we see here. There’s the PSP soft case holder (it’s really, really nice to feel - like soft wool), there’s a 1GB thumbdrive that’s kindly provided by Nokia n-gage, the Yahoo!Answer notepad - good for writing notes for your lectures, the muvee CD - which is a software that can do amazing movie stuffs and MTVs - you should try it, the PlayStation keychain - which also doubles up as a memory stick holder - w00t!, and other memorabilia from Yahoo!, SecureItLive! and n-gage. Lastly, of course, there’s my name tag. =)

And there’s something missing from these images! The last gift…

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It was brought to our attention on the post by iantimothy on ian.onthereddot.com with regards to the post titled "What DK, Simplyjean & Cobalt Paladin Tell Us About Ping.sg". In particular, we find a statement in his post misleading. The paragraph, reproduced without prejudice is as follows:

• Yesterday I met up with Ridz at the Starbucks located at Raffles City opposite Chijmes.
• DK was there and I think Jean from simplyjean was also there.
• I witnessed ( wah..make it sound so dramatic ) DK asking for a little back-scrating from Ridz to get Jean a pong for one of her entries.

The first 2 statements provided the context for the third (3rd) statement, where the misleading statement lies. Whilst it may be true that DK was asking for a little back-scrating (sic) from Ridz, but the objective was not "to get Jean a pong for one of her entries".

Simply Jean does not solicit the service of others for pongs in Ping.sg. While Simply Jean may publicise ping URLs corresponding to posts on Simply Jean, we do not encourage nor persuade others to propagate a mandatory pong. The provision of a pong should always be in the freewill of the respective readers.

A reply is made in iantimothy’s blog and is awaiting moderation. The reply is reproduced below:

Jean | 22-Apr-08 at 2:43 pm | Permalink

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Hi there!

Nice observations, and I agree with krisandro that it’s very well written. Just that… there’s a minor correction here (due to some confusion over construction of the sentence =P ):

DK was there and I think Jean from simplyjean was also there. I witnessed ( wah..make it sound so dramatic ) DK asking for a little back-scrating from Ridz to get Jean a pong for one of her entries.

I thought it sounded like:

1. DK asking for a little back-scratching from Ridz… (which I think was what the statement meant)

2. … to get Jean a pong for one of her entries (DK asking Ridz to give Jean a pong? i.e. DK asking Ridz to click on one of Jean’s post?)

Heh heh… I wasn’t involved in the entire discussion between Ridz and DK yesterday, but I think DK was asking Ridz to give him a pong on a post which was about me (”Simplyjean is a Power Blogger“?).

Yup yup. That was all I wanted to clarify. But yes, interesting observations you have there - gives me a little food for thought with regards to what’s happening in the real world.

The entire post is reproduced without prejudice below:

wanted to comment on this for sometime. Cobalt Paladin highlighted something which was part of what I wanted to say in his post DK is Power Blogger! Sometime ago, I wrote a post - Is There A Need For Ping.sg?

For those who might not remember the earlier days of Ping.sg and the leaderboard, entries entered the leaderboard based on the number of Pongs they got, just like now, except that then, anyone could contribute to a Pong. Now, you need to be a member and logged into the site to make your Read count as a Pong.

I’ve tried to look for stats on the site to see whether under the new system, the entries with the top Pongs are also those with the most Reads ( ‘Reads’ is the count of the number of people who click on an entry ). I couldn’t. If anyone knows of where these stats can be obtained, do leave a comment.

The earlier system gave rise to the practice of link-baiting to get the attention of the wider group of users who either are not members of the site or don’t log on when using the site. Link-baiting is definitely still going on but under the new system, they seem to rise less often to the leaderboard because the members of Ping.sg seem more savvy.

Based on my totally unscientific observations, the leaderboard has been exhibiting the DK-effect after the new system was implemented. What is the DK-effect? Simple really - it is where a core group of members pong each other entries until they get to the leaderboard and let the public (non-core group) take over. This is natural. If I know who you are, if we hang out, if we chat, if we msn, if we basically get social with each other, it is probably not presumptuous to say I’ll read your posts and more often than others.

This isn’t pong cheating in the sense of setting up multiple accounts and using them to pong entries of your own blogs.

However, this current state of affairs definitely reduce the effectiveness of the leaderboard being a filtering mechanism at least in the wider sense of what interests the readers of Ping.sg and probably more importantly, what are the posts worth reading. What the leaderboard has become then is a reflection of who the core members of Ping.sg are, maybe even who is the most popular people in this core group and their interests in the context of blog posts they read.

Which of course is perfectly fine.

Ping.sg never had any pretensions of being the community meta blog for ALL Singaporean bloggers nor was its main aim ( at least from what I have read about Ping.sg ) to be a tool for discovering and filtering. From the earliest post I can find on the blog, the aim was to build a thorough database of blogs and allow the bloggers to build communities.

Would like to digress and say there is nothing contradicting about the two aims of NOT building a community for ALL Singaporean bloggers and at the same time building a THOROUGH database of Singapore blogs.

Now, I’ve gone on a rather meandering path to get to this point. Ping.sg is now a place where a core group of people come together to play and the rest of the people are allowed to participate either as casual observers, people trying to join the core group or individuals trying to contribute to the community if not rise to prominence in the wider community without actually being part of the core group. This seems to me to be a natural progression of any type of group.

Yesterday I met up with Ridz at the Starbucks located at Raffles City opposite Chijmes. DK was there and I think Jean from simplyjean was also there. I witnessed ( wah..make it sound so dramatic ) DK asking for a little back-scrating from Ridz to get Jean a pong for one of her entries.

Back-scratching among a core group of people from any community is natural. In politics, more specifically, in Singapore politics, we call these core group the elites and a subset of that group is people affiliated with the PAP. When we talk about back-scratching happening in other countries, we use the term nepotism.

So, here is the thing. If we do it at our level, why should we expect any different from the people above.

Just because of the stuff they say and the stuff they do? Just because of how they police us in what we can say and do. If you trace past discussions on Ping.sg, you would notice at least one case where the core members of Ping.sg were up in arms against explicit pong cheating.

Same difference.

So back to the actual point of this post. Ping.sg to me is an interesting example of how communities progress. Not that it is unexpected. Just that it is rather ironic, that bloggers, not necessarily those in the core group of Ping.sg tend to be more vocal about the government yet the two main aggregaters of content online which are blogger community powered seem to exhibit the same attributes and tendencies as the very thing we seem to be against.

You only hate power when you don’t have it.

I will make the concession that yesterday was a one-off. That no other member has ever or will ever pong a post just for the sake to register a pong instead of it being a result of being genuinely interested to read the post of a friend/fellow member. However, this only means Ping.sg might not be a convenient example to use.

Once again, we would like to thank all our readers for supporting Simply Jean.

… but do you think so? I’m not hungry yet, so I am not hungry anyway. =)

Click when you are ready.

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Simply Jean is running heavy duty backup and maintenance scripts currently and some lag may be experienced. Meanwhile, if you are feeling a little free, do feel free to navigate around Simply Jean and help to report any bugs? Yes, things will start feeling strange as things get patched up slowly. Hehe.. so it does turn out that 15 April 2008 is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If we don’t close it, someone will close it for us. Sigh… but we want to close it in one piece mah!

Speaking of which, we are going to do the next post on how Simply Jean was being hacked. Yes, we have forensics scientists here who can almost re-enact how the site got hacked. guess how the site got hacked.

But don’t steal the script and hack elsewhere, ok? =)

Update: I need some help. All the wordpress pages have been removed. Does anyone know how I can retrieve these pages? Or if anyone has any history of them? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

Ya… not quite sure when it happened, but all the plugins got unloaded, got a lot of spam, but posts are still in tact. Restoring the whole site now. Is there something going on around blogs or some vulnerability that I do not know of?

Sian… another night burned. =(

Close blog doesn’t mean must tear down everything mah… these people so impatient! Hmmph!

Yes, yesterday was the 15th April 2008 - the deadline for filing of income tax for Singaporean tax payers. It’s also the date stipulated for the closure of (just) another local blog. Well, I guess all good things must come to an end - and it’s probably just a matter of time. Although some of the last few posts yesterday was rather controversial - including… ahem, the one about one of the authors being rather pissed off about some other people, we at Simply Jean still think that it still ended with a bang. =)

To all the readers who supported us till today, we thank you. =)

*takes a bow*

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Ed: Did we hear fireworks?

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I can’t believe it. miccheng actually bought cheapestfoodgowhere.com and redirected it to his blog after my last post entry.

I am so damn bl**dy disgusted.

Many Saturdays ago (actually, just 2), I was invited to a Nuffnang event for "Open Your Heart" - an AIDS awareness for the Youth . The showcase was primarily to bring awareness to the people all around that the AIDS victims do need care and concern just like any other person, sick or otherwise. It is a sad truth that people who do not belong to the norm get ostracised; and if normal people are already discriminated by their race, language and religions, the stigma that AIDS victims face is unimaginable.

It’s thus not unusual for AIDS victims to keep to themselves of their status in order to preserve whatever sanity they have left. Exposure of their condition will usually not just create a risk of rejection from the society, but from their friends, colleagues and possibly immediate family members. As the discussion of AIDS is such a taboo topic amongst family members and friends, understanding of AIDS becomes limited within the society.

Within understanding of AIDS - the transmission and the prognosis of the disease, it’s difficult for people to accept AIDS victims into the society. For instance - will you avoid a person who fell down and had some scratches? Will you avoid a person who lost his limps in an accident? Or perhaps something closer - will you avoid someone who caught… the common flu? Well, you might, but you understand how it can be spread and live in the comfort that even if you do catch the flu virus, you will just fall sick for a couple of days and then recover. You understand the consequences of getting flu… how it’s transmitted… and how bad it can get.

However, for AIDS, it’s almost an entirely different story. Most people do not understand how it can spread and thus may end up avoiding the AIDS victim like the plague. Some may even have fear sitting just next to them - fear that the virus would just jump and hop onto them and infecting them; but this is not true. AIDS can only be spread through direct blood contact where the HIV can "migrate" from one person to another. Think of blood as their rocket shuttle from the Earth to the Moon - that’s how HIV is being transmitted.

Perhaps there is not enough knowledge… perhaps there’s not enough publicity. However, you can make a difference. Just keep your mind and your hearts open. You’d never know when your friend may be an AIDS victim.

Why do you see me through tinted glasses?
It breaks my heart into a million pieces.
The day I knew I was positive,
all people around me turned negative.

Some of you think that I deserve it,
and so in your society I no longer fit.
But just like you I did not know,
so now my tears abundantly flow.

I had faith in my partner,
that he loved me and none other.
But the truth was revealed;
that one mistake and my fate’s been sealed.

Please don’t look at me through tinted glasses,
support me as I pick up my life’s broken pieces.

Anonymous

Yes, now that I have finished ranting about the stigmatisation of AIDS victims, I can talk about the event itself. Nuffnang and HPB has kindly arranged for this session for us to understand more about how the AIDS victim feel and what the avenues are for them. Although the emphasis is that they can still lead a normal, prolonged life, the truth is that the medication available for it is usually costly and not many can afford it. This session also provided an opportunity for many of us to experience how it is like to be stigmatised and left out of company through an interaction game that HPB has kindly arranged for the bloggers.

Overall, the experience was good (comes with good food too) and I hope all bloggers got the take home message that we should all keep our hearts and minds open to AIDS victims.