7th Blog Anniversary

Today, I have been blogging for 7 long years and this is my oldest blog. I started blogging on the ah ok lah blog on the 8th of September 2003 and it has been an amazing journey.

I started blogging anonymously and late went public. I opened up my heart, shared my happy and sad moments, my anxieties and hope, made fun off, ranted and made friends all around the World.

I have been with Blogger all this while and though I did consider moving to Wordpress, I am glad I didn't.

Looking at the statistics, I can see that my most popular post is 'Freemasons in Malaysia' with 4,143 Pageviews and 42 comments. Check out some of my more popular posts and I realise that I actually write about anything under the Sun.

A big Thank You to all my visitors.

6th Blogoversary

I totally forgot about it until I saw a comment by Teena today. My oldest blog turned 6 yesterday.

Can't believe that I have been blogging this long. Thanks to all my loyal readers and friends who have motivated me to continue this adventure in the Blogosphere.

BTW, my post 'Blogger and I' even received a mention on Blogger buzz sometime back.

Naomi Klein wins the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing

Attended the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing ceremony yesterday evening. It was a small affair compared to other award ceremonies I have attended but I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the panellists.

The setting for the ceremony was Mead hall in the Warwick Arts Centre surrounded by some wacky art.





Naomi Klien won the £50,000 award for her controversial book 'The Shock Doctrine'.


The Shock Doctrine


Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick's Professor Nigel Thrift addressing the audience

In this book, Naomi argues against the well accepted free market policies as given by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics. She also talks about a group of people who profit when disasters occurs around the World, whom she refers to as "the shock doctors".


Naomi accepting the prize


Naomi posing for the cameras

I am really proud to have been involved in the initial judging panels. It was really a tough process considering the theme this year was "complexity" and the fact that it was cross-disciplinary open to substantial pieces of writing in the English language and in any genre or form. This includes translations from other languages.

Selecting the winner for this year went through several rounds and the longlist of 20 titles came out in December last year. The list was finally whittled down to a short-list of six international titles.

Was slightly surprised because both the cover design and the title on the Amazon.com site is slightly different from the one I have. It costs £9.99 at the University book store but I got it at a special price of only £7.99 and I had it autographed by the author as well.

You can now get this International bestseller from Amazon.com

Five years blogging

Was reading Liew's post on how he has been blogging full-time for three years when I suddenly realised that my own blog is now five years old. My first post on this blog was on September 8, 2003 and as they say, the rest is history.

This is how my blog looked in 2003:

Don't count your chickens before they are hatched

This is the big lesson I learnt today. I know I told some of you that I was in the top 5 (at 12pm EST American time). However, I later found out that the voting had continued after that and I am sorry to announce that my post iByot - the multi-tasking next generation house robot didn't make it to the top 5 on the "Blog Battle Royale" competition.

I received a total of 229 votes (6th position), which is actually a lot. However, only those in the top 5 positions will get a iRobot Roomba robot vacuum.

Thanks to all you guys who were kind enough to spare some time from your busy schedule to vote for me.

Special thanks to:
- Ramina in India who had her whole office voting for me.
- Roby in Italy, who contacted all her friends all around the World to vote for me.
- Eju who had to go to a hotel with Wifi, because the connection in her office was too slow.
- My wife who had literally the whole University of Warwick voting for me (or so she claims).

And all my family and friends in India, Malaysia, UK and all around the World, including those in Orkut, Friendster, MySpace and Facebook.

Congrats to all the iRobot First-Round Winners.

Making money by carrying news

Learned that the highly awaited Apple's new iPhone will be launched on June 29.

I just got this news from an online news site, that provides access to hundreds of thousands of fully licensed quality news from major content providers such as Associated Press (AP), Reuters and lots more.

You might be amazed to learn that the news can be published, or 'mashed' by embedding them on your site totally FREE OF CHARGE. Best of all, you earn money at the same time. YES! That's right. You can make money via advertising share, the CPM start at $1. For those who were not aware, CPM is the measure of the Cost Per Impression in online advertising. TheNewsRoom has an innovative, viral payment model. I learned that their CRM is one of the highest in the industry.

Choosing the news of your choice (and relevant to your blog) and embedding it on my blog was so easy. Take a look at the "mash" below:

All I had to do after signing up, was to click the "mash button", accept the terms and conditions, choose the layout and finally copy and paste the code into my blog. It's amazing. I get great quality content and I get paid for carrying it on my blog. Almost forgot to mention that, I also earn money when someone mashes content from my site and it is viewed on their site/ blog.

And there's more. They also have a loyalty program in place whereby, new registrants can earn prizes such as digital cameras and even a new car. So what are you waiting for?

NOTE: The website is no longer active and I have removed the links. 

Grab cool audio and video equipment

Have a confession to make - I do make money from my blog. I am sure that regular visitors have noticed that some of my posts are sponsored reviews.

Since October last year, I have joined a few customer generated advertising companies, my favourite being PayPerPost.com. The company is a pioneer and it has led to a paradigm shift - from advertising by companies in the mass media to consumer generated advertising. Companies were initially reluctant to advertise in this new medium - many still are but more and more companies have joined in as they see the advantage of this new advertising medium.

Members which are known as Posties take up suitable opportunities (PPP Opps) and get paid after a period of time. You might be amazed to learn that Posties have won up to $1000 for a single opp. Unfortunately I am not one of them.

I was really excited to learn about the latest announcement. Not only do we stand a chance of making money from the oops but we might earn great products too. Every Tuesday this month PayPerPost is holding something they call the "HDTV Tuesday". We stand a chance of winning all sorts of cool audio and video equipment for specially marked opportunities. Some of the lucky guys have already won TVs and a PS3. However, the prize that everyone is looking out for is a new HDTV at the end of this month. All of this is due to Bid4Prizes who are sponsoring the prizes.

The prizes today are a Slingbox, Nintendo Wii, Yamaha Surround Sound System and a Logitech universal remote. Unfortunately, only U.S. residents can take the opps.

1k dollars tuesday

Today, there was an announcement by PayPerPost.com, one of the largest and most popular blog advertising companies, that left me (and I am sure - a lot of other posties) really excited. They call it the 1K Tuesday.

1K of course stand for $1000 and ppp will be releasing at least one $1000 opportunity every Tuesday between 12 am and 12pm with no segmentation guaranteed. For non-posties and other people who are not aware, the company rolled out segmentation some time back. According to this new system, advertisers can choose the type of blogs that can carry their ads. The higher paying opportunities would usually be reserved for blogs with higher Google page ranks (pr) or lower Alexa ranking (the lower the better). The $1000 opportunities are usually reserved for blogs with Google page rank 7 and above. Those of us with lower Google PRs could only watch with envy as these blogs remained out of our reach.

So you can now understand why I am really really excited about this announcement. If I am lucky, I shall be richer by $1000 tomorrow and all I would have to do is write a post here on my blog.

This promotion start tomorrow and will run till the end of April.

Note: Posties refer to member of PayPerPost.com.

T-shirt contest update

I have a contest running on my auto lah blog, which ends on the 25th of this month. However, I am really disappointed with the response. Only 1 entry so far.

On discussing with my wife about the poor response, we came up with some possible reasons why the contest has not attracted that many entries.

1. Number of visitors to my auto blog is quite low.
2. The prizes (2 T-shirts) are not attractive enough.
3. Very few people have actually driven the Dodge Nitro.
4. Asking people to link back to my blog with keywords may have turned off some people.

As a result, I am putting the link back to my blog as optional.
You also don't need to have driven the Dodge Nitro to write about it. Just tell us what you like about the design or the specs.

There are 8 more days to go, so feel free to join in.

Buying a domain name

Just bought myself a brand new domain name. It's registered to me for 2 years and I will definitely do something useful with it.

I couldn't get the .com and had to settle for the next best - .net.

My head is bursting with ideas and no, I am not going to use the domain name for this blog. The ah ok lah blog will remain with Blogger as long as Blogger remains (and keeps it free).

Earnings on Payperpost

As most of my regulars know, I have been blogging for more than 3 years now on my ah ok lah blog. Autolah was my second blog, which specifically focuses on the auto industry and everything and anything related to cars.

However, I didn't earn a single cent from my blogs even though I did receive some projects from people who got to know me through them. That was until I joined Payperpost.

Anyway, I joined as a "postie" with Payperpost.com, the leader in blog advertising, only in December last year. My wife has stopped complaining about my blogging habit after she saw that I was making money from it. So far I have been paid US $149.30 and am yet to be paid a few hunred dollars more (plus $10 if this post is accepted). That's pretty good considering that I am a newbie.

SO what am I going to do with the money that I have already earned?

Well I am going to transfer a bit to my wife's account, use some to buy household stuff and I am also planning to buy a few domain names.

Harry Potter out in July

J. K. Rowling has announced on her official site that “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7),” the last and 7th installment in the Harry Potter series will be released on the 21st of July this year.

Rowling "admitted she felt an 'incredible sense of achievement' upon completion of the series, but couldn't help feeling despair at the same time." Source - andPOP.

The book is already on the best-seller lists at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.

Related posts:
- Harry Potter news

Tags: Books Harry Potter Rowling

Please revert to my old url

Some time back I had signed up for a free domain name ahoklah.co.nr, which redirected to my blog.

At that time it seemed like a very good idea. I had wanted this blog to be different and not just another blogspot blog but didn't want to move to a paid hosting with a domain name and all the hassle associated with it. I even signed comments with the new url. Some of my friends changed the url of links to my blog, to the new one.

A very bad idea, as I later found out. It simply diluted my link rankings.

I would like to request everyone who links to me using the url (http://ahoklah.co.nr) to revert back to the old one (http://ok-lah.blogspot.com).

Thanks.