Content | Manila Blogs

18Jul/1020

Blogger Nights – How to Cover Blogger Events

Blogger Nights | Manila Blogs.com

The media in the Philippines is starting to see the internet as an untapped resource. Lately, there have been many "Blogger Nights" where products are launched, restaurant dishes are tasted, and celebrity endorsers are introduced. To maximize these events, you need to know how to effectively cover these blogger events.

Know your purpose. It's important for you to know what you're covering in the first place. Are you publicizing a new hotel bar or the hotel itself? Are you introducing a brand's whole product line, some specific new models, or maybe just the fact that they have a new celebrity endorser? Are you reviewing a new dish or the whole restaurant? It is important to know your purpose so that you know what to look for. Instead of spending your time and attention on taking pictures of everything during the blogger event, you take time to understand what it is you're supposed to understand. When it comes time to write your post, you'll have all the data you need for a comprehensive post that works for you, your readers, AND the sponsors.

Take note of what stands out. Most of the time, people who regularly read your blogs do so because they share the same sensibilities as you; therefore, whatever makes sense to you, also makes sense to them. So if a particular feature of the product stands out to you, that's what you'll focus on when you write later. For example, we recently attended a blogger event for Cherry Mobile and the Cherry Mobile X90 Blush has a menstrual calendar - this fact stood out for my wife. Most probably her readers on ManilaFitness.com (which is geared more towards women's fitness) will also find that fact important. She's effectively catering to her audience's expectations.

Tie it back to your blog's central theme. If you're a kikay blog (ManilaShopaholic.com for example), you don't just write about all the brand's products -- you write about the more kikay models/items. If you're a fitness blog, you write about restaurant dishes that also have a health benefit. If you're a review blog, you write down the specs and give your verdict - you don't focus on the new celebrity endorser (unless that's what you're reviewing). If you're a personal blog, you make sure you share your own personal opinion on what you're sharing. It is important to keep your blog's integrity. Your readers know what they can expect from your blog and by tying it back to the theme, you're making sure that you're delivering on their expectations.

Disclose. You need a disclosure policy. If you're getting paid to review products/restaurants/events (nothing wrong with that), you have to tell your readers. It is better if you are upfront about the possible biases you may have so that readers know how much to trust -- they need to know when you are spouting bible truth or "sponsored truth." This is an important way to keep both your blog's integrity and its daily view count. You can make your own disclosure policy at disclosurepolicy.org.

When you're invited to a blogger event, treat it with the same professionalism and respect a "traditional media" representative would give. Remember that even though you might be having fun, you are there to work. If we, as a blogging community, mature into a viable media alternative, then blogging can transform into a dependable income source and brands can reach markets more effectively on the internet. Win-win.

Filed under: content 20 Comments

16Jun/108

Be Creative!

When people are "being creative," it normally involves a lot of pondering, waking around, and waiting for inspiration to strike. It seems that you just have to wait for your muse to arrive, there is no way to trigger creativity. Or is there? (ooh ominous)

In a study conducted in 1998 by Ap Dijksterhuis & Ad van Knippenberg, they showed that you can actually precondition the human mind to act a certain way.

In a study in 1998 those volunteers who were primed with a professor schema by asking volunteers to spend 5 minutes writing down a few sentences about the behaviour, appearance and lifestyle of a professor, whilst the other group did exactly the same for a football hooligan .

Everyone was then asked about 40 trivial pursuit questions. The results showed that those primed with the professor schema had a 60% success rate vs. 46% primed with the hooligan!

- Mark Hogan from The Magic Cafe Forums

In another earlier study in 1996, Bargh & Chen also got similar results:

In 1996 Bargh and Chen primed a group by asking volunteers to unscramble several sentences in which the words were in the wrong order. Half the participants were shown mixed up sentences containing words relating to the elderly, such as “man’s was skin the wrinkled”. The other half of participants were shown the same mixed up sentence but the one word relating to the elderly was replaced with a word not associated with old age, such as “man’s was skin the smooth”.

Once participant had carefully worked their way through the sentences and had been thanked for taking part the experimenter gave directions to the nearest set of elevators and secretly recorded how long it would take for the volunteers who were primed with the ‘old’ schema versus those who had been primed with the ‘young’ schema.

Those who had been primed with the old schema took significantly longer than those who had been primed with the non-elderly sentences.

- Mark Hogan from The Magic Cafe Forums

If you can prime the mind to become smarter, more violent, slower, or quicker, certainly you can prime it to become more creative, right? Yes you can!

In another study by Jens Forster from the International University Bremen, Germany, he found that certain pictures can indeed boost creativity!

A guy called Jens Forster and his colleagues were interested in the effect of looking at various images on people’s ability to think more creatively. They had a hunch that objects or pictures that relate to the concept of deviance in some way, such as a photograph of punk, would be likely to increase creative thinking.

This hypothesis was tested in a study in which participants were allocated into one of two groups. Participants in Group 1 were seated in front of a poster that had 16 ‘X’s of the same colour arranged in a 4 x 4 matrix. Those in Group 2 were seated in front of a similar poster, with the sole difference being one of the Xs was a different colour to the rest. All participants were then asked to come up with as many uses for a brick as possible.

Those who were seated in front of the ‘Deviancy’ poster came up with ideas that were independently judged as being around 25 percent more creative than the ‘Conformity’ group. In addition, the Deviance group came up with significantly more ideas than the Conformity group.

They conducted a few other experiments in which a picture of a punk was used, among other deviant images. The results were the same – deviant images boost creativity.

Forster explained that the reason for this effect occurring is because the anomalous X activates unconscious thoughts in people that relate to deviance and originality. And it is the activation of these thoughts that fosters a greater quality and quantity of ideas.

- Amantha Imber from Anthill Online

(On a side note, now you know why the website is named "DeviantArt")

To get you started, I looked for some images that can help boost your creativity:

Now you need to be careful. You have to make sure that you don't set your sights too high. A picture of Leonardo Da Vinci actually does the opposite of making you more creative -- seemingly making you realize how uncreative you are compared to ol' Leo. You also have to make sure you're relaxed as any anxiety removes any potential positive gain from the picture.

So once you have your generic punk picture and that relaxing spa scent going, you're all set! Go be creative!

Filed under: content 8 Comments

12Jun/1014

Plagiarism and Copy Protection

we wish plagiarists are this hot

Our main site, ManilaReviews.com, was recently a victim of plagiarism. Someone was copy-pasting whole articles from our blog onto OpenRice.com. The feeling was a mixture of annoyance and slight amusement. Annoyance because our hard work is just copy-pasted on someone else's self serving page. Amusement because someone thought our articles would give him actual "blogosphere" cred (and because it really was just copy pasted, my wife usually calls me by name on those posts and I was surprised to read "EJ" on many of "his" posts).

My initial thought was to disable copying & right-clicking completely. There are numerous plug-ins and scripts available with the most popular being WP-CopyProtect. It disables right-clicking on your blog and text selection altogether. Pretty powerful.

Now, after some thinking, we decided not to take such drastic a measure. Being a review site, most people probably copy phone numbers, directions, what to order from our site. Also, a surprising number of people (mostly productivity geeks) navigate through the web using the mouse's right-click. Yes, this would stop most plagiarists, but we would also negatively impact even more readers.

Other options include using Tynt which adds a copyright acknowledgement to the copied text. Of course this assumes that plagiarists choose to leave the credit on the pasted text. As a further service, Tynt does offer a service called Tynt insight that tracks the copying being done from your site.

Another option is placing a whos.amung.us banner. This is pretty nifty, not only do you see how many people are online at any point in time on your page, you also see what they copy. Of course you need to pay up to see more options, otherwise you just see previews of what was copied.

Yet another option, and I think the most popular is using Copyscape. All you need to do is go to their website, enter your URL, and it'll show you possible occurences of plagiarism. This is actually how we found the guy lifting our content. Unfortunately, Copyscape only shows you around 3 plagiarism incidents, after that, you have to pay.

We finally decided on using whos.amung.us and periodically checking Copyscape. This would be the least intrusive to our readers and would provide us the with the greatest flexibility.

We also decided to just stop worrying about this whole mess. We still have the golden goose, after all -- no matter how much this person tries -- he won't be able to generate the content that we generate.

How about you? How do you deal with plagiarism?

(picture from ARTS)

Filed under: content 14 Comments

27Mar/108

Getting copyright-free stuff for your blog

photo by Klearchos Kapoutsis

The web is a vast archive of material both free and copyright protected. A lot of these materials are posted everywhere so it's easy to assume that you can just reuse them on the blog. Well, you shouldn't assume that. The last thing you want is someone chasing you (for money) because you used their material.

The best way to do this, aside from making your own materials, is to search for material that has a creative commons license.

It's basically a way for people to define how they want their material to be used if they allow it to be used at all. The different licenses are consistent with current Copyright law.

The different licenses are:

Attribution

Share Alike

Non-Commercial

No Derivative Works

A more detailed explanation can be found here.

In searching, look for the appropriate copyright license. If you're going to use it in a blog you make money off of, best to use material that has the Attribution license and does not have the Non-Commercial license.

To make things easier, you can go to http://search.creativecommons.org/

Remember, the blogging community is a very open, very sharing community. This makes respect an even more vital component of our online activities. Creative Commons ensures we give it where it's due.

(photo by Klearchos Kapoutsis) -- see?