Apr

25

2008

(0) Comments

Say Hello to Andrew Lim, the Newest Ningin Blogger

09:57PM by Hoc

Mixr Media is excited to add Andrew Lim as the newest blogger to our Ningin - Asian Media - community. He’ll cover everything from Hong Kong stars to food and restaurant reviews. Why don’t you welcome him to the community by adding him as friend.

Visit his blog:http://ningin.com/andrewlim/
Subscribe to his RSS feed: http://ningin.com/andrewlim/rss_2.0/

Andrew Lim Biography:

Andrew Lim currently lives in New York City. He was born in Malaysia and came to the States to pursue his college education when he was 18. An avid fan of travelling, Andrew has been to over 30 countries. He flies frequently for work and fun. Andrew has so much inflight experience that he can perform the inflight safety demonstration much better than any of the flight attendants. Just don’t ask him to blow into the tube of the life jacket or you will regret it.

In his spare time, Andrew loves to eat. He has a strong knowledge of great restaurants across many cities, especially those servings Asian food. Friends of Andrew have always trusted him with giving them advice on where to dine. They have also trusted him with ordering for the table whenever he is present at the dining party. The only problem is, he tends to over order.

Andrew is also the go to person for all the latest and greatest Asian celebrity news and gossips. His friends often turn to him for a quick fix of juicy Asian celebrity gossip. Andrew loves to talk. If he’s not talking, he’s eating. He even talks in his sleep.

With all these going on, you probably expect Andrew not to hold a full time job. He does have one. Andrew is a food trends researcher and has worked with major food and beverage manufacturers like PepsiCo as well as retailers like Wal*Mart. His recent work project includes researching prepared meals/snacks purchase trends of the Mainland Chinese.

Andrew is severely allergic to tree pollens, cats and dogs (thank god not to any food items!). His last allergy test also indicated that he was allergic to dust, roaches and rats. Boy, did he pick a wrong city to live in!

Apr

19

2008

(0) Comments

Server Maintenance and Updates Wednesday 4/23

03:07AM by Hoc

Hey all, sorry for the lack of recent updates. Been doing a lot of traveling and speaking on various subjects related to social media.

We need to take down the server for about 1 hour on Wednesday morning around 6am for maintenances. We’re also be adding a pretty cool new feature currently in stealth beta testing!

Thanks in advance for your patience!

Apr

9

2008

(0) Comments

Milestone Moment: Forums Up!

01:53PM by Hoc

Today, we’re proud to add a new application to our Ningin community, discussion forums! It’s fully integrated with everything else on our website and each new posts or topic you write will show up in your recent activity feed.

We’re looking for a couple of moderators to add to the ones we already have. Send me a private message if you’re interested.

Thanks so much to all the beta testers for their time and thoroughness these past couple weeks!

Apr

7

2008

(0) Comments

Bloggers, We’re Not Really Competing With You

10:29PM by Hoc

Some people say that the blogs we run for our communities compete with other blogs with similar topics. I say these people don’t entirely get the concept of social media and how it can be of value to them.

I’m sure you all heard of the maxim, “the rising tide raises all boats.” For our purposes, and taking Ningin our Asian community as an example, the boats are Asian media related sites and the tide is the total amount of traffic in the entire Asian media space. What we’re trying to do is raise that tide. And we do this by centralizing and organizing all the content in the space through all the different applications we build (wiki, forums, social news). Then information becomes easier to find and quality and noteworthy content rises to the top. Many of you know about Wikipedia, Digg, and Flickr and their tremendous influence in shaping web traffic. Our idea is to take the best things about them and use it to help to our communities like how they did for the internet as a whole.

Also, blogs are inherently a social medium. It benefits from interacting with not just users, but other bloggers covering the same topic. When you make a blog posting, you don’t just create content, you initiate a conversation. The conversation can continue on your blog via users comments or it can continue on someone else’s blog via trackbacks.

Another thing to consider is that blogs are generally more personal commentary then news reporting. Often they are news reporting packaged with personal opinion. So having multiple bloggers give their commentary on a news item only adds to the conversation ultimately giving more value to the readers. Unless your blog consist entirely of paraphrased AP newswire articles, I can see how you feel competed against. However, the competition you’re facing is Yahoo News, CNN, and NYTimes to name a few, not other bloggers.

Lastly, I don’t subscribe to the theory that reader attention is a zero sum game. Sure it’s a finite number, but it’s also a dynamic number. Readers come and go base on the quality of the content more than any other consideration. 

Apr

4

2008

(0) Comments

Useful Tips #1

04:55PM by Hoc

#1 I’ve been noticing that some new users are having trouble receiving their activation email. I’m going to use an educated guess and say it’s because of extremely indiscriminate spam filters. I can’t really blame those filters, one of my gMail account catches nearly 6,000 spam emails a day for me. (It was just last month when I was getting 4,000 spam emails/day. Who did I piss off?) Our activation emails go out pretty much the second you hit register. Depending on the quality of your email provider, it should take anywhere from 2 seconds to 2 minutes. Any longer than that, and it’s a safe bet that our email was caught in your spam or bulk folder. Instead of signing up for a new account with a new email address, we have a handy ”Resend Activation Email” link that’s prominently displayed on the upper right side of the registration page.

#2 This isn’t a new feature, it was around when we launched our blogs, but you can quickly email your friends and acquaintances of an interesting blog post via our email post link on the lower left hand corner of each post. We also have a handy print version of all our blog postings for those of you who like to print out stuff. All our applications have these links, not just blogs.

#3 Last but not least, there’s a lot of new users without avatars. I think the world would be much happier if everyone had an avatar. We have a pretty spiffy upload-your-own-avatar-and-crop system. As the name implies, you can upload any non-copyrighted, non-nudity photo via the “Photo” tab in your member profile area. Then crop it by clicking on the “Set Avatar” link. (Other reasonable photo restrictions may apply.)