Being interesting and other great characteristics of a popular Blogger

ProBlogger.com, a blog about blogging tells us the “12 Traits of Successful Bloggers” or what I call, relatively intuitive concepts to anybody who is interesting enough to be read by the masses. Well, they most know something since they have 286,292 unique visitors per month (as of April 2008, Compete.com) and rank as the #6,628th most popular site on the web:

1. Creative & Playful
2. Innovative
3. Connectors
4. Community Enablers
5. Information Mavens

Clam Chowder, Fish & Chips and Knife Noodles

Food.

It’s why we live.

Lately, it’s been one of the bigger inspirations for me traveling. Yes, it’s very good to see friends and family, but when you’re savoring every spoonful of hat $11 a bowl Duke’s clam chowder, you’re thinking “DAMN, that was expensive…but I’d do it again!” I miss Seattle. I miss the chowder: Duke’s, Ivar’s and plenty of others. Campbell’s Chunky Clam Chowder just doesn’t do it here in Korea.

Radio outside the U.S.

Being in Korea and “outside the U.S.”, you’re prohibited from listening to radio stations when you go to their websites and click on links like “download live now” or “stream the live broadcast now.” The basic fact of it is that these greedy bastards — i.e., clearchannel communications for example — are not getting your advertising dollar ears assuming the listener is just placing extra bandwidth pressure on the website’s server, but not purchasing the products that the radio station is advertising.

Do Radio executives not understand branding or the fact that many of us abroad are transient and probably not staying here for a long term?!? Plus, the limited number of us place VERY LITTLE bandwidth strain on their servers. Sometimes it just floors me how greedy these executives are or rather how stupid they can be. Fortunately, smarter websites like this one http://www.live-radio.net/us.shtml realize this.

Saying or writing “hello” in Korean

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In response to the one of the higher referrals to my site via the search phrase: “thank you in Korean”, I thought I’d write a post about how to say another simple phrase “hello.” It appears lots of travelers want to know how to at least start a conversation with a Korean.

Spelled out in an English friendly manner, you say hello in a casual way by saying “Ahn-young”. This version of Hello in Korean is used between friends and family. It’s definitely not something you want to say to someone you just met.

A warning to the large Internet companies: it’s a consumer driven world now

The Customer is the Company.  Inc. magazine (a small business focused publication) this month profiles a small business producing T-shirts.  Why a T-shirt company?  Well, it would seem it’s not the most innovative product line vs. the million and a half Silicon valley concoctions, but the way the company succeeds is due to what the techies have built up over the years: consumer opinion directly driving production.

Free long distance phone minutes…

No, this isn’t a scam, but I just have a few bucks for the first lucky person to use them.

About $7-8 bucks are remaining on this phone card I only used a little in Seattle.  It will expire by November of this year & I probably won’t be able to use it.  So, here are the details:  The phone number to call is 1-800-440-0383 and the pin # is 165 114 1390.

This site gets about 200+ people a day and another website of mine I posted it to gets several hundred as well.  So, the minutes might not be there, but you never know…

Inventing the craze behind Social Networks was hard work…

I predicted this — yes, it’s like Ross on the sitcom Friends saying he invented the phrase “Who got milk?”  However, I really did.  I was visualizing how the whole Social Network space was going to explode and still have some ideas that haven’t been exploited.  Look at the following list of the plethora of Social Websites/Media that exists now…

Sometimes I wonder if I had more time on my hands… 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

More support for Older Korean women (ajumas) being TOUGH

On my recent visit back home, I had the pleasure of eating with my 72 year old aunt – my mom’s older sister.  We ate at a soon-doo-boo restaurant in Tacoma and talked about some of the issues she’s dealing with at work and at home.  It was sort of sad…

7 days in 7 hours…

Wow, the past week felt literally like several hours vs. several days.  I’m a bit sad that it couldn’t be longer.  I barely saw my friends and family.  It was great literally hanging out for a long lunch at Duke’s yesterday with Sun, Stacy and Tony.  Mom, Dad and I got to share our typical updates and “advice for the future.”  They look older and older every time I see them.  I’m hoping tonight, it’s good hanging out with a few more friends.  I do miss home…

By the way, I only spent 2 of the days actually in Seattle & the other days in Las Vegas with Paulie and co.  Actually, it was literally a day or so in Seattle…so my apologies to anyone I didn’t get to see, but I literally had no time…

Tele-rape: when local telecom companies conspire with phone card companies

I’ll be editing this when I have more time back in Korea, but I just had to write something about this when fresh in my mind…

I just flew into Seattle yesterday to visit family.  I’ll be leaving soon, but what’s critical on short trips back home is being able to call and connect.  Unfortunately, I don’t have a cell phone because mine from back home doesn’t roam here in the states.

Out of the office: and out of the country…

Spending time with some friends in the states now…

Sometimes you realize friends you’ve been with since childhood are your best relationships in your life.  Good seeing you guys,

 

B

I helped Facebook drop 10% last month

So, the following Mashable Social Networking News story says Facebook is down 10% in April.

http://mashable.com/2008/05/20/facebook-traffic-decline/

I have to admit that I’m part of the problem.  I haven’t been visiting Facebook as often as I was at the beginning of our romantic affair.  At first, it was a pain getting to know her and making friends with her friends.   After I got to know all her social network, i was in love.  She had everything I wanted.  However, just like my first affair with Friendster, I’ve sort of fell out of love.  I did call Friendster up the other day, but I found that all of her friends have been peaking at pictures of me since January — when I supposedly last really visited.  I may have snuck a glance in between then and now to see her and her friends, but there’s definitely no more than just curiosity with her.  Like Friendster, I’m growing tired and bored with Facebook.  I’m sorry Facebook.  I know your Daddy Mark liked me a lot, but it’s not just about your family.   

Top 25 Pages in Facebook: Obama, Victoria Secret’s PINK, and Nutella to name a few

Top three are:
1. Barack Obama http://www.facebook.com/barackobama?ref=pdb
2. The Chris Moyles Show http://www.facebook.com/thechrismoylesshow?ref=pdb
3. Apple Students http://www.facebook.com/pages/Apple-Students/11147074409?ref=pdb

Others include: Victoria’s Secret PINK, Daft Punk, Jabbawockeez, and the Foo Fighters‘s Facebook pages.

Thwarted by something interesting…

Do you ever find yourself on a website or webpage wondering “How in the heck did I get here?”  I just had one of those moments when I was on a Journalist organization promoting it’s business/industry website. 

What was I thinking?  Well, I traced my steps back to several websites before where the first site had a mention of a new search engine called Techmeme.**  I didn’t find the purpose behind the search engine initially (not finding the about button quick enough).  So, the crazy in me (yes, I’m pretty crazy like that) told me to do a search for the fun of it.   After giving it a try on a couple search engine marketing related topics and clicking through several sites, I find myself at a PBS site identifying more tips on how to enhance your SEO*.  I click to one of the sources of information for the article/post which turns out to be a discussion list about online news and other media called Poynter online.  I’m curious about who Poynter is and I find it’s a school for journalists supporting the field of journalism education in more ways than one. 

Was looking for something humorous, but found this best man’s speech instead…

Lots of views and it claims to be one of the best best men’s speeches on Youtube.

I don’t know about it being the funniest, but this reminded me a lot of my speech last year for my buddy Sun.