Endoh’s Dungeon

Some thoughts arose after reading Krisandro’s post, and I went in search of the big “hoo haa” he indicated in his post. It was disappointing, I found none. I thought I could find something substantial to read with regards to the development of local blogosphere but after going through almost 3 days of postings, there just wasn’t a single post that indicated any such thing. It would be crazy to go through the entire shoutbox, hence I didn’t waste my time on that.

What generally went wrong was, some bloggers were unhappy that “shallow” posts were being “ponged” more often than others, which discussed “serious” topics more extensively. Who are these complainants, obviously it wasn’t indicated. Such ambiguous was Kris’s post, it left readers to venture out with their own understanding and imagination.

What’s peculiar was the absence of any possible leads or evidence that there was such a “hoo haa” in the first place. A very quick check with the common sources I use (Twitter, SG Daily etc) also failed to turn up any realistic suggestions of who and what is being said. Is this a self-manufactured promotional gimmick? Afterall, any such issues are quickly publicized across our small community in Singapore.

There could be more than what the eyes meet, but given the lack of open evidence of such an incident even taking place, then we can reasonably assume that this episode transpired out of private inter-personal conversations. Here’s the tricky part… who knows what’s being said privately is true or untrue?

Take for example, my blog displays my personal thoughts about social issues and stuffs that I think are essential to our everyday lives. It may appeal to a small handful of people who share that same interest with me, for we are not surrounded only by fun but also very realistic issues that determine our incomes, our political choices, morals and such. Yet, it may not appeal to those people who couldn’t care less who is elected into parliament, or couldn’t bother themselves with how many ERP gantries are being erected all over Singapore.

There is nothing wrong with it. Over my course of blogging, it is apparent that bloggers who wish to make a living out of their blogs would be particular about their popularity and rankings, more than bloggers like me. Perhaps, a realistic open evidence is that most bloggers like myself, don’t even care if we get into top pole positions like in Formula 1. There’s thousands and one examples, if we use a general search engine to see how many of these blogs were not even registered to the communities.

I guess, for us to put up such a strong statement, it is advisable to indicate where and who the complaints are coming from. It is hard to imagine a blogosphere that says one thing online, but says another offline. It can be very easily mis-read that someone (or a group of people) have been going around with untruthful statements. Ever take a minute to wonder why the majority of companies still cannot trust bloggers enough? Maybe… maybe… this is the kind of episode that tells companies that bloggers cannot be trusted? Can we blame them though?

Are we building our blogosphere into an arena, that anyone can accuse another group of people without evidence? I feel this is a very bad (and sad) move. Such intriguing are human relationships, we will never know what’s the hidden agenda behind a single post online. It’s an open platform afterall.

On a lighter note, my stand has always been drawing a line between the virtual world and real life. Such a suggested “activism” above is a good indication why I prefer to stay out of sight. I don’t enjoy the back-end gossiping, and most of the times I don’t even care. For a long time I was recommended many other bloggers to read, but my reply is always standardized… those are not my cup of tea.

Like Kris, I depend more on Wordpress under the inbound links section than Ping. That is a more factual presentation of who reads my posts and took the time to understand, rather than a mere pong. I can pong a post in Ping.sg but leave the site in less than 3 seconds, who knows? Hence, I hold “pongs” with very little regards not that it isn’t good. But a “pong” itself does not tell me if a reader has indeed spent time reading the issues I discuss, and took reasonable amount of effort to do “research” to balance things up.

The second rule is, don’t like - don’t read. There’s nothing more to it.

Last but not least, we know it’s only a game of popularity and it always has been. My advice is, quit this popularity race unless you are depending on it to make a (clean) living.

Of course, alarm bells bound to be ringing when such a post is put up with little (or zero) substantial evidences of the said episode. Popularity in itself, says little about the credibility or trustworthiness of a blogger. Being overly obsessed with elaborated plots to raise one’s popularity may backfire in the face, that’s my belief too.

And I thought we have had a fair share of examples that are easily available online… all within a click.