Betshopboy.net

This post was inspired and created after reading and commenting on Michael Kwan’s blog post. In it, he talked about one of the ill trappings of modern society - net addiction, and how people treat the Internet as if their lives depended on it. That led me to embark on a little research on the topic, which eventually cumulated into this post.

International Shutdown Day is back for the second year running, this time on 3rd May, 2008.

Shutdown Day was founded with the sole purpose of spreading awareness about the pitfalls and dangers that lie in the excessive use of television, computers, and computing equipment like game boxes, cell phones, music players, online social websites, etc. that impinge on social space and interaction amongst our communities.

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Earlier on I ran a little contest offering 4 lucky readers a chance to win free ad spots, it is also my small gesture of giving back to the community. Over the course of 2 weeks, the contest received a total of 10 entries. As there are 4 ad spots available to be won, the chances of winning are pretty high.

Without further ado, let’s announce the winner….

Etienne Teo @ EtienneTeo.com
Kirk @ Jamaipanese.com
Mark @ MeAndMyDrum.com
Michael Kwan @ Beyond The Rhetoric

Congratulations to the 4 lucky winners for winning a month of free advertising! You should have each received an email from me explaining the details. While I cannot offer all participants a month’s free advertising, I can send you a little link love here as thanks for entering the contest.

Derek Semmler
Goodies Hunter
Paolo U
QuaChee
Romandock
Super Blogging

Thanks everyone for entering the contest and do stay tuned for more fun and games, as you never know when I will launch another contest.

Coming back from my family vacation, it’s time to turn my attention back to blogging and having reach a new month, I need to make an update on my blog progress report with respect to my blogging goals.

I won’t try to paint a rosy picture about my blogging endeavor over the past month and will report the ugly truth. In fact, it will be the last time I’ll bore you with my uneventful progress report. To be honest, I haven’t written anything meaningful for a long while now, most of my posts are contest entries, peppered with some gaming related posts and some personal ramblings.

With many Distractions vying for my time and attention, I can’t even churn out engaging posts on a regular basis, and with this deficiency, my targeted posting frequencies had gone down the drain, dragging down both the daily unique visitors and RSS subscriber base which I’ve targeted to achieve. This lack of quality content and thus, visitors’ count and pageviews, has caused my Alexa ranking to erode from March’s level of 140k to today’s level of 208k! It is a big disgrace and I wish the earth would open up and swallow me right now!

The only silver lining across the gloomy sky is my PageRank 4 status but I’m not putting it to great use. Over the past month, I’ve contemplated to sell this blog and give it up to someone who can revive and grow the blog to its fullest potential. Another option available to me would be to milk every dollar out of this PR4 blog by selling text links and writing paid reviews, before the eventual Google bitch slapping caught up with me.

As to which direction the blog will eventually be headed remains to be seen. In the meantime, I’m still feeling LOST.

It has been a long while since I posted anything meaningful. Initially I thought of apologizing to my readers but on second thought, do I still have any readers left? Save for the occassional EntreCard serial dropper that arrives and exits faster than you can spell D-I-S-T-R-A-C-T-I-O-N-S, I highly doubt anyone cares or bothers about my lack of postings.

For the past couple of weeks, I was tied down with entertaining clients from Japan on business trip here, as well as busy running around planning for a short family vacation next week.

But the main culprit that stole my motivation for blogging was caught on film and publicly shamed here.

These are my “drugs” for my Wii gaming fix!
Were you distracted or have you suffered from “backslide” in your blogging venture? What is or are the cause(s) of your blogging demotivation? How did you rediscover your blogging groove?

Photo by urban_dataSince it’s the beginning of a new month, I will do a progress report of the SMART blogging goals I set this blog for this year. I’ll recap each goal as I go along together with the progress and current standing of each goal.

Posting Frequency
Before the B-monster caught up with me towards the end of 2007, I was comfortably doing 3 postings per week. Ever since, I must admit I didn’t quite recover from the blockage and even setting this goal as a respond to reawaken the writer in me didn’t quite produce the desired effect so far. Instead of progressing and increasing on posting frequencies, this area has been on a regress. Celebrations for my birthday and the Chinese Lunar New Year in early February didn’t exactly help the cause but I will not take those as excuses.

Interim result: Thumbs down

Average Daily Unique Visitors
When a blog don’t consistently publish quality content or killer posts, it cannot expect to attract and increase its unique visitors’ count. This is exactly what is happening to this blog at this point, in fact, the daily unique visitors in February averages 30, another regress compared to the previous months’ averages. My target of getting 100 daily unique visitors on average for the whole year of 2008 seems like a steep mountain to climb at this point.

Interim result: Thumbs down

RSS subscribers
This is another sore point to report as you can well imagine the RSS subscriber base is not going to improve with limited postings and the content mostly crap (as confessed in the above 2 points)!

Interim result: Thumbs down

Alexa Ranking
At the time I set those blogging goals, the blog’s alexa rank was 163k+ and I’m happy to report that the current alexa rank has improved to 140k+. My goal is to hit below 100k by July 2008, so there’s still some way to go.

Interim result: Thumbs up

Google PageRank
This blog didn’t get ranked during the last PageRank update but the latest update indicated a forward leap to PR4! This piece of good news came a few days after this blog crossed the 6 months mark and is the only bright spark out of the various gloomy interim results posted above.

Interim result: Thumbs up

Posting this interim progress report provided me with mix feelings about my blogging venture. It certainly gave me a clear perspective of where I stand, how well (or crappy) I’m doing with the blog, and I ended up asking more questions (as in more doubts) rather than answering the critics (I’m my biggest critics).

As I mentioned above, this blog just crossed the 6 months mark (24th Feb) and I’ve already lost the momentum that started this blog and at times during the last month, I felt I was blogging in a vacuum. I won’t deny the thought of giving up or just fading into oblivion ever cross my mind.

The fact that I’m making this interim progress report shows that letting go is a hard to do and I will stick around some more, especially after getting some encouraging comments and a seal of approval from the big G itself. Now I need to buck up and strive for the seal of approval from the community of fellow bloggers and readers without whom this blog’s main purpose will be rendered meaningless.