Why Students Should Blog – Almost Winning A T-Shirt!

You might remember my “Why Students Should Blog” post in response to HackCollege’s contest. I finally caught up with episode 26 of the Hack College Podcast today by Chris and Kelly, and was thrilled to find that I made the final four to win a Hack College t-shirt!

The segment starts at about 18 minutes and I think the collection of answers are really good. I appear in the episode as a tweet. I know people go on about how social media and blogging and whatnot in North America doesn’t always apply here, but this one does.

In any case, I didn’t win that t-shirt, but dammit I’ll keep trying. Failing which I’ll just buy one for myself when I head up there later in the year. (But that’s not an excuse to not let me win, HackCollege!)

If you want to discover more, check out “The Case For Student Blogging” by HackCollege, I think it’s pretty good stuff. If you’ve been agonising over the perfect phrasing of your resume since forever, why not take a look at this and find a better way to supplement your case for future employment.

By the way, need more case studies on Blogging Yielding Fruit? Look no further than my Social Media Breakfast co-hoster Derrick Kwa who scored one with the one and only Seth Godin, as well as Corvida aka Shegeeks who scored one at ReadWriteWeb.

It’s happening people. Stop ignoring it.

Blogging Yields Fruit (Like An Internship)

Remember why students should blog? Well I’m happy to announce that the third internship worked out and I start on Wednesday. Exact details won’t be posted because of confidentiality issues, but suffice to say it’s social media related.

To me the biggest value is to be thrown into the “real world” and see if the stuff I’ve been blogging about makes sense, or am I living in this dream from the outside looking in. Could be a harsh slap of reality, but better now than later.

The downside is that it’s only six weeks (because I’ve committed the whole of July and half of August to my previous employer, MTV to work on the MTV Asia Awards held in Malaysia. That is going to be a blast!

However, rest assured the blogging here will not be changed in anyway. I definitely won’t be blogging about work unless given express permission, and if I do, it will be fully disclosed. I might end up blogging less than normal because of work hours, but that’s what RSS is for! (Don’t know how to subscribe, here’s my handy guide).

Finally, I want to thank everyone who’s been reading, commenting or interacting with this blog in any way. This could be the best blog in the world (it’s not), but if no one was reading it, it would be useful. So thanks for supporting me by reading, talking to someone else about me, attending Social Media Breakfast: Singapore. It’s because of you that I landed this internship. So let me end this post with: thank you for reading

My Social Media Breakfast: Singapore 2 Challenge

The attendee list on the Facebook Event page for Social Media Breakfast: Singapore 2 has been at 40 people for a couple of days now, about 60% were present at the first one. This is good in the sense that we’ll be familiar with each other and really move the conversation forward and talk about the crazy issues that plague all of us who’re trying to figure out the space.

However, there’s also something missing. New blood! I talked before about the fishbowl and being insular
, and if we want the landscape of social media to change, we have to reach out. To people who are just entering the social media domain, to people who are curious but still on the fence, to people who don’t even know about this world yet!

So here’s the challenge: Convince one other person (friend, classmate, colleague, family) that this is worth their while. Let them know it’s newbie friendly, after all, most of us are new to the space anyway!

That’s the mission if you choose to accept it, come back and let everyone know how it went by posting in the comments section!

Social Media Breakfast: Singapore 2! 24th May 2008

As Sham has already reported, SMB:S2 will be happening in three weeks on the 24th of May, 2008. All the details can be found at the Facebook event page.

Who should come?

Anyone interested and passionate about the social media space, be it blogging, podcasting, social networks, micro blogging etc. What this event is not, however, is a blogger outing that is so popular around Singapore. Read up about the original event and check out the blog coverage if you think you might be interested!

ps: The event is open to all so feel free to invite fellow friends to the Facebook event page, hopefully people who can help move the conversation further.

There’ll definitely be more news and updates as and when it happens, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, we already have 19 confirmed guests on the Facebook event page, won’t you be one of them too? What would you like to see that this SMB? More structure? A proper format and/or discussions? Let me know and we’ll see how we can factor it in.

Social Media Breakfast: Singapore – Blog Coverage

Taking the place of Icio Links this week, some great online coverage of SMB: Singapore.

First up, Michael’s video. 12 minutes of awesomeness (you have to click on the link because as usual, WordPress is giving me problems with video).

Hisham gives his recount of a crazy weekend .

Amsie the foodie of course has her food pictures up.

Andrew too had a busy weekend but made the time to appear for SMB

YuHui’s post is here.

Prof. Michael dropped in for awhile but then followed the various conversations online to chime in as well.

Jeff Pulver (from whom we borrowed the personal tagging idea) picked up our video and we’re also very happy to have been picked up by Mitch Joel in Episode #97 of Six Pixels Of Separation. If you haven’t listened to this podcast, you need to. It’s the spark that got the collaboration for SMB off in the first place!

Truly a remarkable experience with great connections and conversations going on as well as a great community being formed. Don’t miss the next one!

It’s very possible I didn’t get all the pingbacks/trackbacks/links/Google Alerts, so if you posted something up on SMB: Singapore. Do let me know and I’ll add you in!

Edit:

Also picked up: a comparison between journalists and bloggers.

Nabilah has a recount of the whole social media adventure of hers from class to our audio interview to the SMB.

Sheylara wrote a lengthy post (with lots of great pictures) that you should check out as well.

First Social Media Breakfast: Singapore A Success!

About 40 people turned up for the first Social Media Breakfast: Singapore at Frujch today and it was a really good experience for me and I just wanted to thank everyone for getting up early on a Saturday to have breakfast at 9am.

It never ceases to amaze me how “flat” interactions are between people involved in social media (ie I can be a student but people doing real research and real work are still interested in what I have to say on certain issues and vice versa). I don’t have pictures (because I was too busy running around) and I’m sure videos will be posted by Michael and Andre in the coming days, so look out for that.

Before going further, I just need to clarify that SMB: Singapore was not organised as part of the social media course I’m taking in SMU. I don’t get a grade for this. In fact, Derrick, who isn’t in SMU, started the ball rolling and I just joined him for the ride. The aim, as emphasised in my earlier post is community.

So, here are my memorable experiences (in no particular order):

Finding out ladyironchef.wordpress.com (aka Brad) is a guy and introducing him to the other foodie in the room, Amelia.

Finding out Jean is a researcher in life science (which you would not expect from a social media person). Thanks Xiao Hui for the introduction.

Meeting Andrew whose passion is virtual worlds.

Discovering Michael’s very cool site: Comiqs.

Putting faces to people like Michael Cheng, Debbie, Joanna, Brian, Enning & Supriya.

And meeting people I never even knew online before like Coleman, Hisham, Ridzuan, Yu Hui, Robert & Kenneth.

Of course, it was great seeing people from social media class: Andre, Amelia, Nabilah, Lydia, Yunying & Xiao Hui. As well to Prof. Michael who dropped by despite having classes to teach today.

Finally I need to say a big thank you to Derrick (for the initial idea to start SMB: Singapore), Sheylara (for really doing a lot of work to get it going and reminding me that if you wanna do something, gotta do it well), Nabilah for kindly letting us use Frujch even when they don’t open on Saturdays and Caleb for appearing out of nowhere and sponsoring SMB:Singapore for everyone. I think one thing the organisers felt really took off was the tagging concept (as explained in our video), but credit has to go to everyone who was game enough to help the activity take off.

Ps: I just know I missed out some people and there are people I didn’t even get to talk to today. So sorry about that, but hey, that means we gotta have another such event soon to make amends! Also, it was sad that Kevin and Vanessa couldn’t make it because they were speaking at NUS (I guess Kevin couldn’t have made it anyway unless he Skyped). Next time us Singaporean social media people must schedule properly! (And thanks for the Tech65 crew for postponing their podcast recording just to make it down. Means a lot!)

I have to say if today’s response, interaction and conversation is anything to go by, the social media community in Singapore is definitely present and definitely posed to progress strongly in the future. So if you’ve been a passive reader or consumer of the blogosphere and social media, it may be that time to get your virtual feet wet and jump right in.

Well that’s it for the first Social Media Breakfast: Singapore. Stay “tuned” for the blogosphere coverage that should occur over the weekend and I’ll post all the links up either late Sunday or early Monday. I’m really looking for feedback on today’s session, so any discussion in the comments or email would be greatly welcome and appreciated!

If you’d like to be in the mailing list for the next SMB: Singapore, just contact me directly or leave a comment below.