Blogscapes

There’s been greater interest in digital media as Singapore recently announced its new Media Fusion 2015 masterplan which “aims to create 10,000 new jobs and value-added contribution of S$10 billion by year 2015.” The plan is meant to help “propel Singapore’s media industry forward in the digital age, as part of the creative economy and aligned with the growth formula of World Singapore,” according to the article, Singapore’s New Media Push.

Not only that, there is an overseas push for MDA’s IDM plan as well, as the masterplan ”includes plans to push Singapore companies overseas” with “a very export-driven strategy”, which includes helping some of the smaller companies here grow and make their mark on the international scene as well. 

All this spells further developments in the area of new media development and IDM - something for us to watch out for and be prepared for!

A couple of weeks ago, MySpace, the popular social networking site deleted 29,000 convicted sex offenders on its service. This follows reports of its young users falling victims to adult predators roaming MySpace masquerading as minors.

This would be a signal to the online community that it’s serious about trying to protect its young users, but I do believe that the move, alone, will not do much to stem the increasing use of  online chatrooms and social networking sites by sexual predators to seek out new prey. Even in the kid’s version of Second Life, adults have been found to create kids’ accounts and seek out the minors there.

It’s better that the young become more savvy about going online, not so much in terms of technical and technological know-how, but in terms of using the Internet responsibly as well as being aware of the dangers of revealing too much about themselves. In a way, sad but true, it’s innocence-lost at a younger age, as kids nowadays need to stop being so innocent and naive and think that every person they come across online is a friend.

 Today is the COMING-OUT DAY of this blog!

Wait a minute, in case you are starting to get strange ideas, let me clarify. By coming-out, I mean I made my blog known to the people around me. Since I started the blog a few weeks back, besides the readers out there in the blogosphere who have read the blog, I’ve only told a very small handful of people about it. These are people I know who have been reading blogs. In a way,  I guess they have been my sounding board (or guinea pigs! I’m sure you don’t mind, right?)

I know it may seem ironic that those who do not know me personally might have seen and read my blog before those who do know me personally. So why am I telling more people about it now? I guess I felt that it was time-I had to be sure I would be able to sustain it. It does take effort and there’s the pressure of writing new posts on a regular basis. Initially I thought I would update the blog weekly, but lately, it’s been more regular than that, and I figured it’s about time that I let others in on it as well. 

Of course, there’s also the initial tentativeness about revealing your thoughts and feelings to others who know you as you’re more likely to be judged..you know what I mean. Anyway, time to take that risk.  After all, blogging IS about making connections, so the more connections you make, the better! So, new readers, do feel free to read and leave comments and feedback.

Now, before you start wondering what this post has to do with blog name and blog titles, I’d wanted to name this blog post Coming-Out Day but then I thought about how it would look in a list of searches and the audience/reader/user who would be keying in those search terms!! Not quite the readership I’d be expecting and they would be sorely disappointed too.

I read somewhere that the blog name and blog titles should be terms that people often key into search engines. It needs to be snappy and memorable and should say something about you or the business you do. According to Elliott Back’s article, What do YOU call your blog?, the top three search words are “blog”, “life” and “weblog”, so if you have these terms in your title, it’s more likely that your blog would be featured in search results and hence is more likely to be read. Des Walsh in his article Choosing Your Blog Name  advises businesses to include their business terms in the titles. So if you are a plumber, you should have a name such as plumbingworks.wordpress.com.

Looking at my title Blogscapes, I wonder how anyone would even key it in as a search term! Oh well. Perhaps I should have named it “Blog about weblogs” (2 out of 3of the top 3 search words ain’t bad). Looking back on the previous post titles, I realised how old-school they are. They would work pretty well as titles of articles in conventional texts such as papers and magazines, but given the nature of the Internet and search engines, they would hardly be picked out by search engines, and they don’t give a clue about what they are about.

Looks like my blog titles will need to get more literal. Tell it as it is. Avoid anything too  literary or  metaphorical.  So what’s in a name? A lot. It’s search term, summary, key word all bundled together. Best to KISS: Keep it simple, stupid!