Marina's Bloggariffic

I like to use statcounter. I think it’s very useful and exciting to see who my visitors are. That was when I noticed this very curious visitor who stopped by my old blog. Who can that be?

When I traced the stats at my old blog, and saw that it was referred to from rocketboom. How strange.

Rocketboom is an awesome vidcast webpage that I’d occasionally go to. But I haven’t been there recently. And I don’t usually post comments in there. So why would I have a visitor from there?

I scanned through and saw this message:

I see my name. And I see it linked to my old blog. But that’s not me! How sneaky these spammers are! Not only do they intrude my email with promises of enlarging my non-existent manhood, now they resort to using *MY* name to spam. What the heck?

I wonder if there are other people who experienced this? Should I be worried?

In happier news, I’ve just discovered Joost! 😀 Thanks aplink and CJ for the invite!

Joost is a software where you can watch real time streaming of tv shows on demand. It’s like watching on demand cable on the internet. I’ve heard so much about it but didn’t give it a try till just yesterday when aplink and CJ were offering their invites on the ping.sg shoutbox.

The picture quality for Joost is quite good. It is still relatively sharp even when enlarged to full screen. What really impressed me the most was that it was almost instantaneous to stream.

Having watching clips on youtube and comparing the streaming speed to Joost, Joost is much much faster. The thing that was constantly on my mind was, “Woah! How did they do that?”

This is a screenshot of the show that I’m watching on at the moment, called Bridezilla. This reality show revolves around several women who are about to get married and how they turn absolutely crazy as their day of matrimony comes nearer. Yikes! I hope I don’t turn into one of those!

To get Joost, you’d need an invitation. I don’t have any since I’m a new member. But there are loads of other bloggers that are offering invites. Just ask 🙂

I’ve stumbled on to this blog from mybloglog and have been following her blog for a while. In the blog, she talks about many different blogging tip and tricks.

Recently, the webmaster, Divya, has launched a new website – Blogging to fame. It looked promising – the site promises to give recognition to talented bloggers.

I was quite excited about this. Even though I may have not the same notoriety as some of the more well known blogs, I know that I’m a good blogger and I think that Marina’s Bloggariffic deserves more recognition.

Plus, the prizes awarded too, looks super sweet. The top prize is :

• $25,000 in cash
• Blogging to Fame Gold Trophy
• Pass to attend the Seminar and award ceremony
• Return Travel Tickets from Hometown to Chicago and Back
• Hotel Reservations for Four Days, Three Nights
• Blog Launching and Consultancy be an A-List Blogger

Now, which blogger doesnt want that? I jumped to register into the contest. 25K would be very useful for our wedding ceremony. And a chance to meet other renowed bloggers. Alvin mentioned that the Secondlife convention will be held at the same place too. If I win, that’ll be like a double whammy as I would love for to meet other secondlifers. This contest sounds awesome!

On the other hand, although blogging contests can be good at propelling for a blog, many of them end up biased and turn out to being a popularity contest.

Take for example, the bloggers choice awards. It started out innocently enough with bloggers nominating blogs whom they feel should have more recognition. But as time went by, blogs which had a higher readership and more supporters, had the upper hand.

Same goes for these websites –

The weblog awards. Which isn’t all that bad, as each nominations are scanned and benchmarked. I see many quality blogs in there. But eventually, again it is the most popular blog will have the most votes.

There is also Sgfriends.net. Though the people manning the forums are one of the nicest moderators I’ve come across, the website could be a little overwhelming.

I think there’s something wrong when blogs are awarded due to their popularity, rather than their actual content as people with more aquaintances will have the added advantage. Maybe the organizers should rename these contests as popularity contests instead?

So I try to avoid blogging contests. Because this blog just don’t have that much of an impact to make a huge difference. Lets take blogexplosion for example

Eastcoastlife has a point. In Blogexplosion’s battle of the blog, many Asian blogs don’t usually win, even if their blog content is superior to their western counterparts.

In my last battle, my last post was about when Cartcart was in Singapore. I wrote about real life experiences and insights, posted pictures about places to visit while in Singapore. My opponent wrote brief posts about soccer. I know my posts had more substance and I thought I’d have a landslide win. Imagine my surprise to see such a close run. Maybe there were many soccer fans on that night? 😛

But in the end, even if I don’t win the coveted awards, that doesn’t mean that my value as a blogger is depreciated. I am self assured of my capabilities and I’d like to think that my blogging style is real, approachable and down to earth.

So, do you think this blog is worthy? Would you vote for Marina’s Bloggariffic? And what are your thoughts about blogging contests? Why not join the contest too. Maybe we could go to Chicago together. Or maybe your blog would be so popular that mine would be knocked off into oblivion, hehehe.

Anyway, good luck!

Sidenote : I’m curious to know how the organizers amassed that much money to fund for this contest. $100k is a lot of money. And I don’t see any sponsors link anywhere.