“The Fracking Road” – A breather and some light updates

I remember making this comic three years ago and posting it on July 28 2005. Back then I was blogging severely on Multiply and my 20six.co.uk account (sad, I have forgotten the password to access these old entries).

With the weekend in, I can, at the very least breathe a little from all the work that’s been thrown here and there. I’ve always been an out and about kind of guy. Dare you to confine me to a desk – I learned this the hard way by thinking this is what I wanted working in the real estate industry 3 years ago. Some updates to my readers about what’s been going on:

## When we established Blog and Soul last year, the goal was to help make blogging a meaningful arm of mainstream media. We (Blog and Soul never really had official membership) established ourselves as a volunteer group that is now leaning towards organizing enrichment seminars for bloggers. No money involved. Very little sponsorship. It’s really a community thing. This second half of 2008, at least from my knowledge (I just helped put this up – it’s a community endeavor and the wisdom of the crowd dictates what direction we take) is to help with a healthy blogger experience (Yoga Jane held a blogger yoga event). We’re looking for more venues to do “outdoor” activities (i.e. Lazertag!!!)

## The BlogBank. Ah, we’re almost at 5 months since our official launch. We’re currently doing more than 100k pages in daily views with over 300+ blogs in the network. We’ve presented (and evangelized) across more than a dozen agencies, SME’s, BPO’s, publishers and big corporations. Our learning is that it takes time for people to internalize new media – and now we’re reaping the benefits with corporations wanting to get a piece of Internet advertising. The BlogBank is being talked about in the advertising industry with our success stories with Delifrance, Collezione C2, the eLBC group to name a few (note that the first two are not Internet savvy advertisers but have produced successes which I’ll post up the BlogBank blog soon along with a detailed FAQ on the organization). Couldn’t have done it without our publishers – we’re preparing a big treat for ya in the next few 🙂

## Interestingly enough, my post-graduate degree (Education) has caught up with me and I’ll be most likely teaching this September 2008. I’ve been helping a renowned educational institution come up with a 10 session elective which I loosely call “Marketing 2.0.” What makes this even more interesting is that the professors I am working with were the former classmates of my dad in his graduate school.

A funny realization — As Donald Lim of Yehey! once put it, the Internet medium is usually the place where companies have the least budget for – but have the highest expectations! So true. So very true! And this is because we have the metrics to calculate everything.

I think the best learning in an emerging industry that I try to internalize is the notion that we can’t be dollar bills – we can’t please everybody. So there. Between events, my contributions to MANUAL and Playground, some traveling here and there and the above-mentioned items, I’m a chicken that’s glad to be on the road.

I’ll be speaking this week for the Institute of Transformative Marketing and Communications workshop on Viral Marketing together with Brad Geiser and Amor Maclang. More details over here. Oh, and there’s Wordcamp 2008 too! Eggciting! Hope to see you there!

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