Asia Based (Digg Style)

I only heard of Fark through my Akira buddy Joe Peacock, but after writing about how to get Dugg I thought of other sites which can be used in the same way and came up with this list of sites which are similar in Asia or have an Asian theme:

• @News – Japanese digg-style for news.
• 5dig.net –  Chinese.
• Blog Memes – Japanese
• Buzzcn – Chinese Digg.
• Choix – Japanese digg-style, for any links.
• cndigg.com – Chinese digg, same style interface has trackback.
• CoRich Newsclip – Japanese digg style, is an extension to corich social bookmark service.
• CSSlook – Korean, Public bookmarking, nice design for nice designs.
• dingr – Chinese digg-style.
• Douban – Chinese, for books, music and videos.
• Fortune.ccw.com.cn – Chinese digg-style.
• i170.com – Chinese, for the i170.com community.
• Kilasan – Indonesian, for any news.
• Krtica – Croatian digg-style.
• livedoor Clip – Japanese digg-style, for any link.
• MarkeZine – Japanese digg-style, for any links.
• newsing – Japanese, for news with different style voting buttons.
• Oui-News.com – Chinese digg-style.
• Qooqle Video Clippers – Japanese for Videos.
• Yuying.jp – Japanese, general.
• vottie – Chinese digg-style aggregator for videos.
• Uniorb – news, current events in Asian Trend, exotic and fascinating sites in World Travel and pertinent controversial issues involving science, politics, and environment in Reality Check.

Pligg, Méneame or Other Languages:

• Astigg! –  Philippine related news.
• Hao Hao Report – For Chinese news.
• MyThailandHotel – Pligg for travel articles about Thailand.
• SpyMy – for the South East Asia region.
• diggba – Chinese.
• livedigg – Chinese diggstyle for news.
• Open Source – OpenSource, Japanese
• SlashIndia An other kind of social news website.
• humdigg – news for/by the Indian community.

Best Blogs Asia.

Spikes in Traffic from Mentions

Bestblogs.asia is a site which is still in development. Traffic is slow and steady, it ranks well on the major search engines, dominates Asian searches and has high rankings for certain keywords. It’s one of those sites which has high potential and only when the likes of popular bloggers and social media mentions are on the site, is when traffic is noticed.

Impact of Mentions

Getting “famous bloggers” to write on your site is difficult. Bestblogs.asia has seen the likes of the following internet celebrities/companies who have all directly or indirectly mentioned this site:

• Luke Moulton from Flippa
• Adtoll
• DGM Asia
• Vladimir Prelovac
• Patrick Altoft
• John Chow
• Kieron Donoghue

Guy Kawasaki Comment and Traffic

Guy’s comment relating to my recent Alltop post was just:

Thanks for the review.

Thanks, Guy

He then mentioned my article by way of a short post on his Twitter account, he also mentioned the site again a few hours later (thanks!).

I can’t access Twitter in China, but can see the tweets via backtype.

See the screenshots below:

Chain of Events from the Tweet

• Got hits from Twitter.com,
• Got pinged by Topsy.com, which linked to his comment directly.
• Got picked up by robots/Twitter aggregators – http://twitoaster.com and Socialwhale.com
• Url shortners came next – http://om.ly, bit.ly and longurl.org,
• Got hits coming to the site from people clicking on the url shortners on Twitter.
• Mashable got involved by being placed on their twitterlist location.
• A few hours later RT’s or Retweets still mention the article on Twitter.

Conclusion

The conclusion is that even a small comment made in a few seconds, by someone with many followers is that it will cause traffic ripples. I can understand the impact of the importance of social media now and the instant effects it has. It could take me weeks to get links to a certain article using SEO methods but a quick tweet from a popular internet celebrity and links came to the site in minutes.

The question is whether these Tweets will lead to more visitors coming back, tweeting articles from the site on their own…or perhaps it was a one off. Maybe tweets are like getting Dugg (via Digg), the hits are great but may not bring much value.

Also sort of on topic, I’m reminded of this old 2007 post by emonitized which reminds users to post comments on high ranking blogs in order to get traffic. Enjoy!

Best Blogs Asia.

Alltop in Detail

I remember when I was working in my Government Web job, the Directors were telling us “content is key, is the most important thing”. Well this site has alot of content! Think of Alltop as RSS feed shower but made available to the public. Google Reader is a popular alternative but it’s too personal and doesn’t reflect popular sites or stories the public want to read.

The site is split up into seperate sub-domains each with a different topic. Topics range from regional sites, sports to health.

In each topic the most popular sites are displayed at the top, whilst least popular sites are at the bottom. Positions can change over time, due to the “complex Alltop algorythm”.

I’ve seen similar sites to Alltop, but none so complex and automated. I like the way they’ve included Geo countries, the idea and layout is simple and doesn’t focus so much on adverts.

The site now has visible RSS which is great, although I just checked it a moment ago and I can’t view it since they use Google’s Feedproxy service which is blocked here in China..oh well!

Bestblogs.asia on Alltop

I submitted my site to the Web Design section, which includes popular sites like Dzine, A List Apart and Smashing Magazine, sites that I read and look up to for inspiration.

Best Blogs Asia.

Setting up Twitter

Setting up Twitter is easy, but my belief is that you need to know beforehand what function this account will have. Will it be like a mini diary, promote your articles or as a network tool.

It’s pretty simple:

• Go to http://www.twitter.com/ click “Join the Convervastion”.
• Create your username and register – I’d recommend using your full name or business/website name.
• Start connecting by adding friends from your Yahoo, Hotmail etc., address books.

Impact of Tweets

It’s well known that in China, Twitter is blocked but it doesn’t mean the impact of the site doesn’t affect blogs like this one which is based in Asia.

As well as seeing conversations in Google like in the screenshot to the right, in my stats I can see how a user used url shorteners like bit.ly to promote a particular page. I also use Backtype, which is great for seeing where the actual tweets came from:

Best Blogs Asia Tweets

At this point I need to give a hat tip to Yongfook who’s a guy in Japan/Singapore who I’ve looked up to for a while, he’s produced an amazing campaign manager for measuring tweets, a bit like Analytics. Check it out at:

• http://peashootapp.com

Earn Money from Twitter

Making money from tweets makes sense. If you’re popular you could always turn your followers into $$$, where you can:

• Sell products directly (and for twitter)
• Look for leads

I’ve read about Twitter’s involvement in paid advertising (they are abandoning the old API’s basic authentication methods in favour of oAuth) but doesn’t seem to impact the main advertisers who promote paid tweets which are RevTwt, Izea’s Sponsored Tweets and Ad.Ly. I’ve also seen how low paid tweets are aimed at spammers and high paid tweets are aimed at high celebrities.

RevTwt

RevTwt is not so popular as Sponsored Tweets or Ad.ly but give you options to search for advertisers and look at publishers. It was the easiest to setup too. Join RevTwt.

Sponsored Tweets

Sponsored Tweets is huge popular service. I’ve read how Shoemoney makes $6000+ dollars a month from Sponsored Tweets referrals, so I was attracted to the service. Popular with celebrities too, you can join Sponsored Tweets.

Ad.Ly

Ad.ly is very popular and has celebrities twitterers like Newsweek and Mandy Moore. Signing up as a publisher was quite complex since you need either an account or Myspace account. Join Ad.ly.

Conclusion

I think it’s still early days to judge making money from Twitter. If you’ve got a popular site already, then you could make money other ways with newsletters or paid advertising, Twitter is just another outlet I guess.

As a website owner I’ve seen the benefits of getting tweets. Even though I can’t access twitter, I’m still able to get my new content “out there” which is all thanks to the big blue bird!

Best Blogs Asia.

Digg List

How it works is that registered users submit content based on news stories, blog entries, videos, pictures and anything else. You write about the post and Digg links back to you. Users can then rank your post by digging or Dugg it, likewise if they don’t like your post they can bury it. The most popular stories get promoted to the homepage.

I’ve learnt that to get into Digg you need to:

• Write great content
• Have a catchy title
• Promote your digg listing within your online circles
• Keep trying
• Make sure the content contains no broken links and the hosting can cope with traffic
• Comment and Digg on other people’s listings – get established.

One way would be to multiple accounts, digging your article but if the content isn’t written well or interesting, then it’ll get buried quickly.

So what should I write about

Have a target audience in mind, who reads digg and what are there ages. I’d predict I’ll be from teenagers to 30+ year olds so writing the following may appeal to them:

• Write something “old school” but with a twist
• Infotainment content (education, information and entertainment) works best
• Solve a problem
• Promote up-to-date information
• Look for trends
• Write lists, how to guides or Top 10 things
• Make it entertaining, funny pictures work well
• Be interesting

I’ve also heard that stories submitted early in the morning PST usually do better then stories submitted at night.

Remember your titles

Titles are the most important thing on Digg, look at how others structured their words, making them short, interesting and to the point.

What happens when you get Dugg

Unfortunately I don’t have first hand experience, but I’ve read that don’t expect to be rich from more users clicking ads as it seems Digg users know how to ignore them. However, do expect your server to down, perhaps more subscribers to increase as well as social bookmarks to improve i.e. Delicious.

Best Blogs Asia.

Bookmarks for SEO

A free backlink is great, also the possibility that a user could search and find the link to your page is great, so submitting pages to bookmark sites is very useful.

Tips

Make the title interesting, the description to the point and fill out relevant keywords/tags. By doing so, this will help exposure of your page.

Sites I use

Backflip – organises personal bookmarks into a searchable directory.

delicious – a social bookmarking website and is my favourite one to use.

Furl – Save, share and recall anything you find online.

SiteJot – Save bookmarks online.

Yahoo Bookmarks – Unknown but useful took.

What Next….

What you then do is find your url in the bookmark site, example site.com/username/ and then submit that site to each of the other bookmark sites. This way, any updates will be visible instantly and shared around. Do the same thing with each bookmarking site and then use Delicious as the main place to obtain an RSS feed. Ping the RSS feed and wait for the hits!

Best Blogs Asia.

Facebook Plans to Enter China Market

Facebook has huge impact around the world, everyone knows that…except in China. Sina reports Facebook is looking to enter the China market and looking at the stats below you can see why.

Recent stats from CNNIC (Dec 2009) show that:

• GDP – $4.3 trillion
• Population – 1.33 billion
• Internet Population – 338M
• Online Shoppers – 87.88M
• Online Spending – $1.25 trillion

However, here in China we’ve survived without Facebook by using similar sites like Xiaonei and Kaixin001 etc and new comers operated by the portals such as BaiShehui by Sohu, Pengyou by Sina, Taojianghui by Taobao.

On a personal level, I think all the marketing in the world won’t help Facebook due the censorship over here, the failed startups like Myspace China and that the China market doesn’t know about the site in the first place. Could be an expensive marketing disaster for them if they decide to enter the market. BTW: Their site is still blocked over here.

Chinese Social Media Landscape

The diagram below shows the link up of all the China based social media companies.

2010 Internet Growth in China

Tencent is growing (home of the QQ Penguin), I can see them developing further and further in China. Living in China isn’t just about browsing the web at home, but it’s about using social tools like QQ and Instant Message Sevrices. Tencent just invested $300m into DST, which is a Russian based Internet company which owns stakes in Facebook and Zynga.

Jack Ma from Alibaba is developing into a China Internet Superstar! He’s runs Taobao as his e-commerce setup, Alipay as his payment processor, Koubei as his online community and Aliwangwang as his Instant Messenger service. He is also involved with Yahoo in China too.

According to iResearch, internet advertising spend in China reached a value of 6.4bn yuan ($936.9m) in the first quarter of 2010 which is a huge level of growth whilst the number of phone users in China has to 1.094 billion.

Baidu is continuing to be a monopoly in the search market, where it’s forecast to be worth $4.9 billion in advertising revenue by 2015. By China exiting the market, they managed to extend its market share from 58.4% at the end of last year to an impressive 64% by the end of Q1 2010.

Best Blogs Asia.

Flipping the same Sites

Sites on Flippa are being bought and resold quickly for nearly over double the price, just by tweaking the titles only.

I’ve seen that by just including the following you can get a higher price:

• Including the PR value
• ADDING CAPITAL LETTERS
• Mentioning Clickbank
• Showcase how much money is made
• Showing Uniques

Example

321answers.com the questions and answers community!
19,000 uniques / 85,000 views, 2,800 questions, facebook application
Sold: $650

321answers.com – Established Questions/Answers Community FOR SALE
Over 3,000 questions. PageRank 4. Also includes Facebook application
Sold: $1600

6 Year Old Domain. Video Product
Includes An Email List Of Over 20,0000 Emails
Sold: $750

Clickbank Product w/ SALES – Top Google Rankings – List Of 19k – NO RESERVE
Established Product Listed On Clickbank, Has Traffic, Income, and A Huge List.
Sold: $3200

$88 profit/month and growing, 69k hits/month and growing, zero maintenance
One page, stupidly simple site, rapidly growing, tonnes of room for optimisation
Sold: $4999
$168 profit/month and growing, 89k hits/month and growing.
Adsense Revenue Only – Organic Traffic
Sold: $5100

LinkSite.net Web Directory / $140 per month
PR3 Alexa 20K Respected Website
Sold:$1150
LinkSite.net Web Directory / $140 per month
PR3 Alexa 18K Respected Website
Sold: 1350

Online Poker Profit System
Selling The Most Advanced Poker Robot Available
Sold: $1000
Great In Poker Site – with 7000 Uniques and $300/month
24hr Auction – Act fast
Sold: $3,150

TweeCate New Exciting twitter application
Locate how far people you follow live from you
Sold: $105

Hot Viral Twitter Locator makes over 1k per month
PR 2, 800k Alexa, viral traffic, exponential growth
Sold: $1700

Conclusion

It’s all about showcasing the benefits of your site. Rather than wasting time displaying what the URL is, explain the values of the site and how much it makes.

Best Blogs Asia.

Coupon Details

When signing up, use this MyAds coupon code to receive the first $50 of clicks for free!:

• March 10

If that doesn’t work I’d recommend bookmarking the following sites which update their pages with Myspace coupon codes.

• Deal News
• Deal Sea

Claim your free $50 worth of advertising now!

Examples of MySpace Ads

Just did a quick search online and seems the TOS are quite broad, if they’re able to show ads like this!:

Best Blogs Asia.

Previous Pagerank Updates

• 06/06/2007 (Wednesday)
• 20/10/2007 (Saturday)
• 01/11/2008 (Thursday)
• 29/02/2008 (Friday)
• 29/04/2008 (Tuesday)
• 24/07/2008 (Thursday)
• 27/09/2008 (Saturday)
• 31/12/2008 (Wednesday)
• 1/4/2009 (Wednesday)
• 28/5/2009 (Thursday)
• 29/10/2009 (Thursday)
• 31/12/2009 (Thursday)

Predicted Pagerank for 2010

• First Page Rank Update: 31st March 2010 – 30th April 2010
• Second Page Rank Update: 30th June 2010 – 31st July 2010
• Third Page Rank Update: 30th September 2010 – 31st October 2010
• Fourth Page Rank Update: 31st December 2010

Best Blogs Asia.

Setting Up Self Branding

By using your full name and job role as keyphrases, you can be highly ranked.

Think of your personal profile as an online CV using descriptive (and searchable) titles. Add your current job, previous work and qualifications. In the website section you should enter your company and personal urls.

LinkedIn is all about Networking, so setup and join relevant groups and link to your working associates. Feel free to join discussion groups and Q&A topics to promote yourself on the site.

There is also a function on LinkedIn where you can get recommended by managers, colleagues and clients. Having positive feedback written about you can only help towards gaining trust from potential employers.

Other Tips

LinkedIn recently announced that it now works with Twitter via a Tweets App. By making your twitter account visible on your profile, you can use “#in” or “#li” to share posts from Twitter to your LinkedIn status.

Remember to switch your profile to “Full View for Public” to get spidered and ranked on SE’s.

Upload your photo to improve credibility.

Best Blogs Asia.

About Naver

Naver is run by NHNCorp an Internet content service and online games operator headquartered in South Korea.

Naver functions similarly to Google and Yahoo with information search and book search services, desktop search, multimedia search services, music and video search, Internet phone service and mobile search.

Stats and Earnings

NHN announced earnings of the 2008 year with increased sales and income of 30% compared with 2007. Total sales in 2008 reached $8.6 million and net income reached $2.6 hundred million.

Naver owns more than 77 percent of all Web searches originating in South Korea, according to Internet market research company KoreanClick. Each day, on average, 16 million people visit, keying 110 million queries into its standard Google-like search function. “Knowledge iN” a real-time question-and-answer platform, which gets “an average of 44,000 questions a day”. Questions asked range from why North Korea is building a nuclear bomb to which digital music player is best.

Other Sites linked to Naver

There was a launch of its Japanese service in 2009, their first international expansion site.

Junior Naver is a place where children can have fun with various activities, such as games, comics, virtual farms, and making their own avatars. Kids learn many things from that site.

Hangame, South Korea’s first online game portal.

Conclusion

As Comscore states “Seeing Asian search engines like China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo! underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon. The continued development of search in international markets will undoubtedly present compelling opportunities for savvy marketers on a global scale.”

There are other sites gaining ground such as Daum which is the 2nd largest Internet portal in Korea gaining a 20% share in the Korean search market.

There are thoughts that it’s successful user driver content Knowledge search was copied by Yahoo Answers three years earlier and that Google’s Universal Search was based on Naver too.

Best Blogs Asia.

About NetEase

Founded by Ding Lei, NetEase operates a leading interactive online and wireless community in China, using the site 163.com. NetEase also own the popular Yodao/Youdao search engine which lets users search for web pages, images, news, music, blogs, Chinese-to-English dictionary entries, and more. It’s also the second-largest gaming developer after Shanda Interactive.

Services

The site provides Internet users with Chinese language online services centred around three core service categories: content, community and communication, and commerce.

Content
Provides news, information and online entertainment to the Chinese public. The Web sites consolidate and distribute content from more than one hundred international and domestic content providers.

Community and Communication
The NetEase Web sites also provide a broad array of free and fee-based community and communication services

Commerce
They offer an online shopping mall, providing Internet users in China a single online location at which they can shop from the convenience of their homes and offices.

Revenues

Revenues are generated from fees charged to users of online games and wireless value-added and other fee-based premium services, as well as from selling online advertisements on the NetEase Web sites.

According to its financial report 2009, NetEase made US$117.5 million in total fourth-quarter revenues and gaming revenue increased more than 32 per cent year-on-year.

About Youdao

Youdao is a search service developed by Netease and it provides three kinds of service: web search, blog search and dictionary. Netease’s Youdao also represents China’s portal site attempts to explore the search market.

The most recent feature is a product search called Youdao Gouwu. You search for some product, it shows you available products from online shops, you can compare price and link to the shop’s website.

Best Blogs Asia.

QQ Facts

This information came from their website and is fascinating in terms of numbers and potential!

• QQ has 342 million active user accounts.
• QQ has 42 million peak concurrent users.
• QQ has 26.1 million paying internet subscribers & 13.4 million paying mobile subscribers.

The interesting figure is the large number of paying subscribers to the service, MSN and Yahoo must be dreaming of these figures!

Revenue Streams

QQ already does more than $1 billion in revenue (+ 40% net margin). That’s 2x Facebook estimates. Tencent market cap on public market is $21 billion, Facebook’s a theoretical $3-15bn.

Aside from the chat program, QQ has also developed many paid sub-features including games, pets, Q coins, ringtone downloads, etc. Also they sell merchandise based on the toy penguin figure associated with QQ!

QQ Services

• I’m QQ is Tencent’s first real English website to introduce QQ to English speakers.
• Qzone is a blog, where users can customise their blog.
• 3G QQ is a free WAP site that can be visited by users at any time.
• WebQQ allows you to chat with your friends via a pure Web-based IM client.
• QQLive offers both live online video and on-demand video.
• QQMail is Tencent’s free email service in the style of Gmail.
• Shuqian or QQBookmark is a social bookmaring site similar to Del.icio.us.
• Taotao could be described as a micro-blogging site, just like Twitter.
• QQVideo is a video sharing site, similar to Youtube.

Join QQ

Signup with your email address, a password and then afterwards download the application.

• Signup with QQ
• Download for PC Tencent Messenger 2008 or QQ 2009 English (Recommended)
• Download for MAC QQ for Mac
• Access the ImQQ site for any problems.

Conclusion

If QQ decide in the future to let advertisers publish adverts through the software, then I believe it would be very profitable for the advertiser. They are developing in places in India and Vietnam as potentially in the US with mobile games.

The huge number of additional applications (which look to be “borrowed” from popular Western sites) will make QQ a continual force to be reckoned with and with huge potential for advertisers.

Best Blogs Asia.

About Taobao

Taobao is the largest online shopping marketplace for consumers in China and is controlled by Alibaba. With a registered user base of more than 80 million as of September 2008, Taobao reaches an overwhelming majority of online shoppers in China.

There are 200 million items in selection, such as clothing, accessories, cosmetics, home appliances, mobile phones, computers and digital cameras.

Investment in Taobao

Alibaba Group aims to make Taobao.com, its C2C (customer-to-customer) online trading platform, the world’s biggest retailer and will invest RMB 2 billion ($291.64 million) in the Web site over the next five years where it has already invested a total of RMB 3.45 billion ($503.13 million).

The hope is that it will beat eBay and Amazon in terms of global revenue within 5 years and surpass Walmart within 10 years!

Taobao Affiliate Programme

There is an affiliate programme which consists of emailing certain inviduals but I’m looking into this and will post results further.

Conclusion

Taobao is only going to get bigger and by Westerner’s thinking, it can be largely ignored since it’s not publicized in Western media. However, with a Taobao has a 78 percent share of China’s domestic online consumer market, quoting statistics from iResearch it is a potential eBay beater and combined with pages in English language in the future, there is a way for Internet Marketers to make huge amounts of money from new signups and commissions.

Best Blogs Asia.

Internet is a huge, huge business over here and a lot of money has been made so I’ve listed the most valuable web companies by market capitalisation.

List of Rich China Web Companies

Top 10 list of internet based companies.

• Tencent Holdings – US$ 26.8 Billion – Internet & Mobile Phone Value Added Service
• Alibaba – US$ 11.95 Billion – B2B Trade & Online Retail
• Baidu – US$ 11.75 Billion – Search Engine
• Netease – US$ 5.34 Billion – Web Portal & Online Gaming
• Ctrip – US$ 3.41 Billion – Travel Site
• Shanda – US$ 3.13 Billion – Online Gaming
• Sohu – US$ 2.93 Billion – Web Portal
• Changyou – US$ 1.91 Billion – Online Gaming
• Perfect World – US$ 1.89 Billion – Online Gaming
• Sina – US$ 1.60 Billion – Web Portal

Best Blogs Asia.

Yahoo Offices in Asia

Yahoo, like Google are based all over the world, by using Yahoo Image search I found the following:

Hong Kong

Normal looking office entrance, a bit grey though.

Normal looking office entrance, a bit grey though.

Singapore

This Yahoo office looks like fun!

Desks with bits of paper on them.

Google Offices in Asia

Beijing

Located in Beijing.

What’s that on the ceiling?

Taiwan

Taipei 101 building, which was the tallest building in the world for several years.

Mario in the Office?

Baidu Office in Asia

Japan

Big Baidu logo with the cat print.

Having a rest during a conference.

Best Blogs Asia.

Blocked Websites

There’s a big uproar at the moment in China (it’s where I’m based too) since now Hotmail and the Popular Twitter have been added to the long list of blocked sites.

Other sites currently blocked include:

• Flickr
• Youtube
• Livejournal
• Blogspot
• Geocities

Impact on Site Owners

The impact on site owners is huge. If you currently use a free hosted site service to contain your site, then there is a great chance of it been blocked by China at some point in time. The same goes for politically charged content, certain anniversaries and explicit content.

In fact it’s been said there are over 1 million “Net Police” headquartered in Beijing who monitor what the locals can and can’t view…it’s a figure worth taking into account!

Other Alternatives

I guess you will only know if your site has been blocked by contact from your China based readership or if your stats package doesn’t show any hits from the Chinese region.

There is no way to contact the Net Police for a review, only the hope that you will be unblocked at some point in time. Another way could be changing hosts, perhaps Hong Kong based if there’s a ban on certain hosts?

People use Proxy sites to bypass restrictions on sites, but it’s illegal and doesn’t offer a long term solution anyway.

Conclusion

Messaging sites like QQ and Yahoo Messenger are still up and running, which is surprising since they account for a bigger audience in countries like China!

China along with Korea and the States account for the biggest online population, so it’s important to take steps and be careful.

Best Blogs Asia.

What is Pinging

I’ve made a long list of Ping Sites previously, but a “ping” is a snippet of information telling the site what your latest posting is about. You can setup automatic pings to these types of sites, so your latest content is always added. Sites like Movabletype and Wordpress have auto-pinging already enabled.

Petaling Street

Aka PPS, Project Petaling Street is an aggregator of Malaysian blogging content. The site gives exposure to Malaysian bloggers who talk about everyday life, but I also found non-Malaysian’s can also plug their posts.

Blogged.my

The types of posts on Blogged.my seem more “everyday life” focused, rather than techy or exploring a certain niche. You can add your own blogs, then setup an automatic ping on new posts via: http://rpc.blogged.my and that’s it!

Ping.sg

Not sure about this one, seems to relate to Singapore only but accepts posts and topics from all over the world which kind of defeats the object of a country specific Ping site. Same setup (and software?) as Blogged.my, enter a Blog Feed address and then ping an “Update” on the site.

Conclusion

PlanetMy is another site that’s been recommended to me, but since I’m based in China it doesn’t load for me. Ping services are useful and easy to setup. You are telling the thousands of visitors about your content without actually having to trawl through the blogosphere or promote your posts on social media bookmarking type sites.

The amounts of traffic I had for my individual posts I had made on each of these sites wasn’t great. However, I feel if I was a profolific poster and kept posts on topic (i.e. Asian focused) then I would of benefited more from the targetted users.

Best Blogs Asia.

Chinese

Fanfou

Fanfou is shown in Chinese language and looks like an exact copy of Twitter.

“饭否是一个 140 字的迷你博客。在这里，你可以告诉大家你在做什么，可以随便看看大家都在做什么，也可以加几个有趣的人为好友。目前，饭否支持 饭否网页、手机上网、手机短信、手机彩信（发照片）、QQ、MSN、GTalk机器人 和 API 等方式来发布消息以及同步个人签名，发布一句话博客。简单地说，饭否就是可以随时记录自己的心情、简洁发表自己的观点的东东~。”

Komoo

Komoo could be Twitter’s twin, has exactly the same look and feel.

“因为每条极其普通的信息对您的家人、朋友、同学或同事都非常有意义——尤其在适当的时候。”

Zuosa

Zuosa is more interactive with MSN and QQ integration, feels more like a community than the other sites.

“这里是一个全球互动分享社区. 其网友们都在回答一个简单的问题: 你在做啥? 回答可以通过手机, 聊天软件或本网站发送.”

Korean

Play Talk

PlayTalk supports MSN, Windows Based Applications and Mobiles. It’s also in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean languages.

“Launched in February 2007, PlayTalk is a social network service based microblog that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. People use PlayTalk to write brief text updates and publish them, meet friends and keep up on what they are doing by enabling them to share their life.”

Japanese

Feecle

Feecle looks very simple and clean to use. It shows the latest “tweets” on the homepage and is in Japanese language only.

“Feecleのサービスは、より便利にご利用いただけるよう会員登録をしていただいております。会員登録時には本サービスログイン時にご利用するIDとパスワード、Eメールアドレスを入力してください。”

Conclusion

These types of sites are useful and very easy to use. Using Microblogging people get to the point quickly and it’s great for networking and market research.

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Finding Social Media Websites

The main custom opensource sites available are:

• Pligg
• Scuttle/ScuttlePlus
• PHPDug

Searching Pligg

You can make the following search to find relevant Pligg sites, also add your relevant keywords for more exact results:

"Powered by pligg"

inurl:/shakeit.php

Searching Scuttle/ScuttlePlus

You can make the following search to find relevant Scuttle/ScuttlePlus sites, also add your relevant keywords for more exact results:

"Powered by scuttle"
"Powered by scuttlePlus"

inurl:/populartags/

Searching PHPDug

You can make the following search to find relevant PHPDug sites, also add your relevant keywords for more exact results:

"Powered by PHPDug"

inurl:/upcoming/0/viewall/1.html

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Using Twitter on your Blogs

The easiest way to embed Twitter in a website is to use any of the official Twitter Badges and Plugins:

• Twitter Badges
• The most useful Plugins for wordpress
• Feed List Plugins

What to Write about?

Twitter can be used as a great tool for self-promotion, which in the case of blogs/sites can be used to showcase new sites, products and posts. Be warned, don’t over promote yourself on Twitter or post too regularly..this is frowned upon.

My Twitter Feed

My Twitter Feed is http://twitter.com/misohoni, I don’t use it for Web Design talk (it’ll be too boring) or talk about everyday life, but I use it to give short movie reviews. I watch a lot of films, so thought I’d review them and mark them out of 5…it’s perfect for me since I don’t like to write much!

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About Sketchplanet

The site was constructed with PHP and Flash. The small sized drawing canvas allows for more detailed work as a bigger sized canvas may mean users feel obligated to fill up all the space.

Example of Outstanding Sketchplanet Drawings

Here’s some examples of sketches on Sketchplanet, which deserve to be showcased:

Adding your Sketches via RSS

After registering on the site, you are free to draw anything. After you’ve logged in, your RSS feed will be:

• http://www.sketchplanet.com/feed/USERNAME/
• This can be confirmed by clicking on the RSS feed next to your username.
• You can then provide the RSS for users to subscribe to or display them on your site.

Adding your Sketches via Javascript

Adding your drawings by using Javascript is the easiest way to showcase your individual work of art and it can be showcased on individual posts or shown off in the sidebar/footer.

To show your individual drawings, locate your image on the Sketchplanet site and click “add to your site” on the top right corner.

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