Archive for the ‘updates’ Category
Away from blog
Comments (4)You’d probably not see new entries for the next week or so – I’d be away on a business trip to China, and if that’s not enough, my hard disk is also refusing to work – looks like it has crashed and died.
In the meantime, look out for interesting tidbits yourself – or shout out how you missed me in the comments below (wahahah)!
Short Talk: Support Gems Sty for PSP!
There’s just two days left for you to shower Gems Sty with undying support – by supporting me in this blogging contest in Singapore that’s offering a PSP for the best entry that blogged about their portal. It’s the New Year – SHOW SOME LOVE!
Gems Sty on 9rules
On 21 Dec 2006 (which coincidentally, happened to be yours truly’s birthday), a email from 9Rules came in, informing me that Gems Sty is now part of the 9Rules web community. For those of you who might not have heard of it before:
9rules is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. We started 9rules to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their favorite subjects. It’s difficult to find sites worth returning to, so 9rules brings together the very best of the independent web all under one roof.
Well and wow then! I’m not quite sure if this is “the very best” stuff online just yet – but it’s pretty cool to have it recognised by a community where its editors do actually go through some sort of curation – selecting and sifting among blog submissions – traditionally about 8-15% of the submissions are accepted.
And it is this very thing about human selection that draws me too – many blog aggregation sites are either incarnations of the “Blogring” concept – whereby a central place links to any website that was submitted, or the “Digg” mode, where popular posts are voted and moved to a prominent front page.
“Blogring” style aggregators can quickly get boring as quality and appeal varies – how many of you really do click on the “Next Blog” button on top of Blogger pages? The “Digg” style requires popular topics with wide audiences, sometimes those that appeals to the common denominators of a broad audience. Human-intervened selection process, on the other hand, has the gift of judgement, and it can pick up stuff that may have been left behind because of its quirkiness, niche content, etc. And that’s where 9Rules come in – picking the best content on the web, regardless of a blog’s popularity or links.
So there! Another little milestone for Gems Sty! 
Merry Christmas!
Hi all! I’d be away back home the next few days – I’d probably return to Internet somewhere next Tuesday or so – in the mean time, have a Merry Merry Christmas! Screw “Season’s Greeting” or “Happy Holidays” – have a good ol’ Christmas of giving, sharing and joy!
Gemssty.com goes Live!
Three months ago, I started this blog to document the interesting tidbits I stumble across – the gems of the Internet. I wondered whether it’d quickly fizzle into disuse and abandoned as the interest and momentum weaned. 3 months and more than 100 posts later, the opposite has happened – it is gathering momentum, more people are reading it, and I’m still getting a kick out of posting.
Thank you, readers! 3 months may not be much – but in the online world, 1 man-year is probably equivalent to 7.35 blog years or something. So thank you for your support, and hope that you’d continue to find these stuff interesting. And if there’s anything that you’d like to suggest or improve, do voice up! Not only do I get tremendous encouragement from comments and suggestions, it’d also affirm that there are actually other real people writing what I write.
The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed this for the past few days – this site now has its own domain – www.gemssty.com!
Well for now it’s just cosmetic ego-massaging, but I see it as the first step onto bigger things. Apologies to people from mainland China who still cannot access this site directly – this site is still hosted by WordPress. The RSS feed is now at http://gemssty.com/feed. Do update your bookmarks!
Once again, thank you!
[11 Nov update: I'm having troubles with RSS feed for http://gemssty.com, and I have reverted back to sunboar.wordpress.com as the primary domain. Gemssty.com would still work though - it'd redirect you here.
Jumping on the bandwagon
The web is full of interesting stuff: I spend a big chunk of my time awake surfing many websites, trolling for the latest interesting chunks to amuse and inspire myself. So I thought it may be a waste if so many others couldn’t get to see what I saw (and appreciate the ingenuity and idiocy of the Internet).
Voila, I am attempting to blog. Hopefully this would be good, and it’d last (both are very difficult conditions).
