k r i s a n d r o

First of all, no worries that I will spoil anything about the movie in this post because I hate movie reviews that give away too much about the plot and make me feel like printing the blog post down and marching down to the blogger and shoving the paper down his/her throat.

I got to thank my iPhone and my data plan on instances like this when I was travelling underground in the MRT and received the invitation from Alvin of Omy.sg, telling me that United International Pictures (UIP) are giving away 10 pairs of tickets to the SG Blog Awards finalists watch the VIP Gala Premiere of Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen.

KuKuNehNeh (KKNN) was extremely excited when I got news that I was one of the lucky 10 bloggers who got the tickets as she was a big fan of the first installment of the movie even though she can hardly tell an Autobot from a Decepticon much less recognizing who Optimus Prime was when a group of mascots appeared at the Cathay were the premiere was held.

A retro and movie version of Optimus Prime were there amongst the insanely popular Bumble Bee and one Decepticon in the form of Starscream or Megatron. I couldn’t really tell as it looked as though they carefully crafted all the nice Autobot costumes and didn’t know what to do with the remaining material and thus decided to put them together and paint it all grey to make it look like one of the bad guys. I don’t have a picture of that poor dude in that Starscream/Megatron costume but trust me, it was baaaaaad.

KKNN was even more excited after spotting quite a few bloggers from the SG Blog Awards and especially at the local celebrities and came in dribs and drabs like Elvin Ng from Mediacorp.

The picture above summarizes very well what happened: Me before spotting Elvin Ng, KKNN after seeing Elvin, Me after seeing KKNN see Elvin.

So I mopped the remains of the starstruck KKNN from the floor and went up to the cinema theatre where she hoped for Elvin to sit in our theatre while I hoped for Megan Fox to do the same.

The movie was AWESOME! There were more robots and favorities from the original cartoon, longer and cooler fight sequences and the animation was top notch. It was a little draggy in parts because of the over dramatization of certain scences which sometimes involves Megan Fox running in slow motion in a top that left little to the imagination but that didn’t stop us from enjoying the movie thoroughly. I am definitely going to watch it a 2nd time just to check out all the action again.

I do realize that even if I say the movie sucked, people are still going to watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen just because of the love for action, the Transformers & Megan Fox.

Thanks to Omy.sg and UIP for the tickets and all the sponsors for the goodie bag!

Yep, it’s official! I am shortlisted in Omy’s Singapore Blog Awards 2009 in the Best Laugh-Out-Loud Blog category. I am feeling weird to be shortlisted this year knowing that I failed to be shortlisted last year even though last year was probably my most “LOL” year and I did win Ping.sg’s Most Entertaining Blog and Blog of The Year awards. I have been quite serious this year with all the marathon training posts but maybe the judges felt that running a marathon is the most hilarious thing they have ever heard and I am more deserving this year.

So if you do support me in my quest to win Omy’s Singapore Blog Awards 2009, do head down to the voting page and cast a vote for me. Voters stand a chance to win a Creative Vado (5 to be won. Worth S169) or a 250GB Portable External Hard Disk (5 to be won).

You have to register for an Omy.sg account to vote and it’s free to sign up for one over here.

Head down to Omy here and do the following:

Click on the category ‘Best Laugh-Out-Blog’ and click on the word ‘Vote’ on the top of my avatar.

Log in with your Omy credentials.

Use your own L33T intelligence to navigate after that because I forgot my own Omy credentials to login and I cannot screenshot the rest of the process nor vote for myself. WAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!

I cannot find the voting information as of yet but I think Voters are allowed to cast a vote once a day for each category. So do vote as often as you can!

And in the event that you do not wish to vote for me, do vote for other peeps in my category except for this particular contestant. Anybody should win except him. I do not need to say much. A picture of this particular nominee will do…

Yup. The words and actions on the picture below the said individual says it all.

Voting ends on 31st July 2009, 2359H.

Social Media Breakfast (SMB) is happening again! It’s the 6th time that it has been organized it’s going to be held at Tangs this Saturday.

Date: Saturday, March 28, 2009
Time: 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Location: Island Cafe, Tangs, Orchard

Yeah I know, everyone is wondering why Social Media BREAKFAST is held during dinnertime but let’s not go there.

I do realize that I have been attending only the even numbered SMBs so far, and it’s not even on purpose! And on this 3rd time that I will be attending, I am actually on the panel! Daryl invited me to share about ‘Business to Consumer Engagement’ and I am still not sure how much I can offer to the attendees considering how hard it is for businesses to get money or participation from me.

So register yourself on the Facebook event page and come down this Saturday if you are interested in the local social media scene and network with all the great people that will be there. There will also be the launch of the Virtual Tangs Store in Second Life and support for Earth Hour at 8.30pm.

If that isn’t interesting enough, come down and watch me make a fool out of myself!

It was a blast at the “Your Blog” event yesterday at the Open Room. The event is organized by the good folks at Ogilvy and the topic was on “How to market your blog Like a brand”.

Yongfook

The speakers came from very different backgrounds; we have Yongfook, the handsome-enough-to-make-me-question-my-sexuality CEO of Egg Co., who produced cult favorite projects like Open Source Food (now known as Nibbledish) & Sweetcron;  Arti Mulchand, who has spent much of her career life in SPH and probably regards words as any guy would regard porn; Design Sojourn,  a serious award winning industrial design leader who still has enough humor to tweet this; and not forgetting Andy from ToysREvil who made me laugh so hard from his Singlish and subtle hand-wanking gestures that I teared up.

All of the speakers (apart from Arti who owns a small personal blog) have very successful blogs in their own right and the amazing thing is that none of them made money directly from blogging. The success I am referring to is of course the niche traffic that they have built up over the years and it was the personal branding in their blogs that led them to other opportunities. All these happened because of their blogs; Yongfook dated a hot girl (he also got a job in a big media company in Japan but I like to emphasize the ‘hot girl’ part), Design Sojourn is working for a huge electronics giant; and Andy has… toys. (You guys will never understand how important that is to him)

The great thing about the speakers is that they shared their own experiences on how they evolved as a blogger through the years and it’s exactly what I am or what most of you bloggers are going through. I started off writing in 2004, just wanting to have a voice and not caring about what I say because who is to judge me on my own space? Soon the readers rose from one (myself) to a couple (colleagues, friends) and I found blogging tools like wordpress that relieves me of my lousy html skills. Soon, strangers started popping out of nowhere because of search engines and referrals and I found my voice becoming restricted. I could actually hurt somebody and thus hurt myself from the things I say! I came soon to accept that true opinions (the ones with FUCK YOU! ALL YOU FUCKING BASTARDS!!!) are not meant to be on the web especially when I am not very anonymous.

I soon turned to the ‘dark side’ and got into the hype of putting ads on my blog so that I can eventually strut around in my berms in Orchard during daytime, scoffing at all the stressed out peeps in suits and ties while checking out my adsense account.

It didn’t work. So now I am back to where I started, and realize that not everyone can make money through blogging directly (certainly not me).

Their blogs were a brand. People who knew of Yongfook, Design Sojourn & Andy knew what they were about and their success were built upon shaping their blogs to their strengths for a niche audience. Getting success in terms of traffic hits are not much of a secret these days considering how much information is out there. Barring bloggers who cannot write coherently or has no opinion whatsoever, we all can succeed in our own right.

So what’s my niche to work on. Humor methinks.

It’s a little on the ‘Lame’ side of humor but I’ll get whatever laughs I can get.

Don’t make me come over and tickle you.

(Check out the key take aways summarized by Brian Koh of Ogilvy)

(Oh and Arti, if you are reading this. You were shaking so bad throughout most of your speech but the points that you put across were definitely a lot of food for thought.)