k r i s a n d r o

First of all, many thanks to Sabrina & Gavin for inviting me to the “Exclusive Yahoo! & LG Electronics Blogger’s Event” at Expo which happened on Wednesday. It is a first invite to an ‘exclusive blogger’ thingy for me and I really didn’t know what to expect.

I reach there right on time to only find myself waiting for almost half an hour without a familiar face in sight at 7-11. It turned out that Sabrina, Sheylara & Priss were waiting at the OTHER 7-11. We were soon joined by Yanjun and we were ushered down to the entrance of the exhibition to get our lanyards.

VIP HOKAYS! DUNCH PWAY PWAY!

It looks all nice but Sheylara quickly pointed out to me that…..

WAH LAU! SPELL WRONGLY DEY!

*Facepalm*

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We were led to the LG booth and up to a platform when I saw familiar faces like Leonard and Nadnut and DK later. Nadnut was kind enough to introduce me to the rest of the other bloggers but I don’t really recognize most of them and they probably didn’t recognize me as well, so it’s okay.

WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAAA!!!

Oh, before I continue, this post is gonna be picture free as I only had my Nokia N95 with me and despite my love for the phone, it’s not going to have good pictures in such light conditions and so I didn’t take any pictures at all.

We were brought around the LG booth by this pretty LG PR manager. I think it could be her first time dealing with local bloggers and when she picked up the new LG phone to talk about it, a SWARM of bloggers whipped out their cameras and surrounded her while flashing the sight out of her. She quickly recovered her composure and talked about the phone. Problem was, her soft voice was drowned out and my interest in the product drowned away as well.

All I can say is that it was a visually appealing phone. I will only talk about it in depth if I can get my hands on one.

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(Awkward silence)

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Okay. Next, we were led to an area where a humorous MC took the stage and said that a group of Korean dancers were going to perform for the crowd. At one point, he said,

“Hello everyone! Today we have Singapore’s Top Bloggers joining us today!”

I was completely shocked at this point. The MC then looked over our side and raised his voice a little.

“Singapore’s TOP BLOGGERS! Raise your hands!”

I think I subconsciously shuffled my feet AWAY from the group of bloggers as the rest of the crowd looked over at our group. The MC realized the lack of enthusiasm from the bloggers and the crowd and still managed to get the crowd to clap.

Not to put any of the bloggers there down, especially those who have much higher traffic than mine but…. “TOP BLOGGERS?”

WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

If the word ‘relatively’ is put in front. Then I think it’s true mostly. Maybe do a ‘mumble’ to make it nicer lar.

“Hello everyone! Today we have Singapore’s relatively Top Bloggers joining us today!”

The dance item was quite nice actually, so credits to LG for putting the show up.

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The next booth that we went to was more exciting for me. The Yahoo! booth. Adam Taggart who is Yahoo’s Senior Director for Product Marketing greeted us warmly and he totally captivated my attention with the way he presented himself and I can feel his excitement for the Yahoo Mobile Apps that he showed us. It’s quite a couple of products to talk about and you can visit Yahoo! Mobile’s site here to find out more. I’ve already downloaded one of the applications to my phone to test it out.

Will blog about it soon once I get familiar with the product!

OH! And Sabrina said that MrBrown and Dawn Yang came down as well. ARGH! WANTED TO MEET DAWN YANG MRBROWN SO MUCH! I AM TOTALLY INTO HER HIM. I HAD TO LEAVE EARLY! WHAT A BLOODY WASTE!!!

Meanwhile, you guys can surf to the following blogs for the coverage of the event and products and hopefully find pictures you like.

Leonard’s coverage.

Sheylara’s coverage.

After watching episode two of Blogger’s Treat, I decided to write a review on it. After all, the videocast is “created by bloggers, for bloggers and with bloggers”. So, how can a blogger not give his/her 2 cents worth on it?

A little background on Blogger’s Treat; It’s a videocast produced by Aaron Koh with support from Michael Cheng at Podfire.sg and the host is Sabrina.

This is how Aaron describes Blogger’s Treat:

Blogger’s Treat is a under 10 minutes videocast that features blogger’s favourite and popular food haunt.

It is created by bloggers, for bloggers and with bloggers.

Each episode you will see a guest blogger bring the Blogger’s Treat team to somewhere in Singapore to eat.

As you can see, the “with bloggers” element is very strong here as we often let the guest blogger determine where their favourite food haunt is.

We are limiting ourself to kopitiams, food stalls and small cafes because of budget. Hopefully, we can bring bloggers to high end restaurants in future episode, but I think that itself would be another series.

More of his introduction can be found here.

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So far, there are 4 episodes filmed and the 2 episodes available to the public right now are the ones below

Episode One with Guest Blogger, Daphne Maia

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Episode Two with Guest Blogger, Hillary Chan

The youtube videos can be very slow to load and if you can’t wait, the faster loading episodes can be found here(Ep1) and here(Ep2).

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On the positive side of things, it is a great idea by Aaron to create such a show. Who doesn’t like food? And what better way to introduce food online than with bloggers, who are quite the mini-celebrities in recent times. Aaron might have emphasized that the show is “for bloggers”, but I would see that the viewership of the program will extend to the interested readers of the various bloggers who appear on the show. The videos are also nicely edited with a very light and catchy acoustic guitar tune to kick every episode off.

Okay, the stuffs I am going to say next might send hordes of Sabrina fans calling for my demise (or even Sabrina herself) but oh well, it’s just my view.

In both episodes, both the guest bloggers totally outshone Sabrina in terms of presentation, speech fluency, presence, enthusiasm and personality. If I didn’t know beforehand and if Sabrina didn’t introduce herself at the start of the show as the host, I would have easily thought that either Daphne or Hillary were the hosts.

In episode 1, Daphne showed good diction, poise and was very believable as a person introducing a food she really liked. There were moments of awkwardness when Sabrina was introducing the chef and also when making small talk with Daphne. The saving grace of the episode is when the chef performed his ‘la mien’ skills which was very entertaining.

In episode 2, Hillary was much more aggressive compared to Daphne in the 1st episode and it resulted in Sabrina taking a backseat almost throughout the whole episode. I thought Sabrina did pretty well in the 1st 20 seconds of the 1st episode but throughout this one, she appeared nervous and uncomfortable when speaking and disinterested when not. Before tucking in, her reactions to the food were not of interest but of “Ah…. So much food ah. I don’t wanna eat leh.. I scared I will grow fat”. Not that it implies that the food sucks, but it still makes the viewer reduce his/her interest in the food.

I am not asking the bloggers on the show to act till they point where they put food in the mouth and then flip over screaming, “OH MYYYYYYYYYYYY GOD!!!!!!” while having orgasms, but it’s good to show enthusiasm and interest in the food that you are presenting and eat it with gusto.

With that much negatives said about Sabrina, I do have to say that it’s only two episodes so far and she is definitely still nervous on camera. She is very presentable looking and definitely performing way below her potential in terms of hosting.

Evidence of how Sabrina can be more believable is from the video below.

It isn’t the most interesting of videos, but if you watched it till the end, you will mostly likely see the same thing as I did. Sabrina spoke with much more comfort and confidence and thus showed a more believable person that we would want to see on Blogger’s Treat.

Good luck to Sabrina and kudos again to Aaron for producing such an interesting local show. I will look forward to future episodes with anticipation.