How a dignified blogger make big money without stepping down from his altar?

Recently a high profile food blogger (but on the other hand self-claimed low profile) is going to publish his book and busying on promoting his piece. In one of his interviews, he shared his life as a food blogger, complaining how hard his life is since restaurants were not willing to pay for him to write critics andcomment in the media about them. He did think being paid to write is no bigdeal, just like his counterparts in beauty and fashion field.

Every body thinks he is doing brilliantly and should beat all others working on similar things. However, a piece of personal opinion is not neccesarily from a fair point of view. Toanswer his doubt, we should stand on his supposedly potential clients’ feet.

As a businessman or a PR, what makes you decide to hire somebody to write for you? No one will concern how much thewrite have contributed into. Instead, they will ask for the value of this kindof food critics. They expect acclaims, priases, and all kinds of good thingswhich can boost their revenue. Of course it would be more than ideal if thewriter is a respected and convincing one. But as a respected and convincingwriter, you worked very hard to win all these from readers for long time.Surely you don’t want to give up his pride, becoming reluctant to accept theidea of giving positive comments for awful food. So, is there anyone damp hismoney for something dragging him back? Absolutely not.

As he said before, to be a successiful food critic, he should eat more to experience a variety of tastes so that he coulddistinguish good food from bad one. This is time consuimg and costing you a lotof money. Being paid to eat is one thing, but I am hesitated to trust arrangedtasting dinings. For a dinner intended to be discussed in the public forpromotional purpose, how dare you feed your guests with trash? Leave alone paid food articles. Some serious food critics overseas even try hard to avoid beingrecoginzed when they go tasting. Maybe the food blogger is more honest to whathe has tasted. But it is just another myth of “All PRs are pretty and nice”.Being accompanied by a pretty PR or chef who note that he is a food critic whois known for his honesty, I am sure he gets most delicate and attentive foodand service that is you and I can ever imagine. If PR arranged meals havepotential cheats, paid ones are even dangerous. That would possibily erode thelong time built trust from his readers. Do you think paid news is news? Idon’t. I will say it is an advertisement. We all can tell the difference.

The food blogger mentionedthat he would make 2 offers to restaurants for negative comments: post it orhold it, but anyway, he still responded and commented honestly for therestaurants for improvement. I don’t know how confident he is about his fame,ability and influencing power. But he doesn’t know his position for sure. Hemight be have some knowledge in cooking (as he claimed), but still uncomparableto a professional chef. For restuarants seeking improvement in recipe, whydon’t they turn to a professional who can provide details of how to cook betterbut now you a food critic who merely comment a few words for the food is goodor not? Unless you are an auditor, you hardly make money from your client likethis. The truth is, if you are not prepared to step down from the altar ofcredible bloggers, please accept that you can’t win them all,  and keep accusing beauty bloggers who areoften paid for writing as these bloggers agree to acclaim low quality productswhich you don’t give a damn. 

Stopmaking yourself feel good by showing off how you are devoted to food andcomplaining how people are unfair to you. Try make use of your fame onprofitable business. No one even Choi Lan or William Mark manage to makethemselves rich by merely offering articles to newspapers or appearing on TV.

Meet the "Technologically Trendy Kids"(科技潮童)

In Hong Kong,“潮童”, a popular term in cyber space whch can be literally translated as “Trendy Kids”, is not about kids who are very trendy and dress up fashionably. Instead, it is often regarded as a disapproving term describing a group of teens who urge to prove themselves trendy and smart, sometimes being very childish, ignorant and disturbing, causing trouble to others. Today, as the power of the internet is becoming more and more pervasive to our life, here we comes second wave of trendy kids booming. They are similarly very childish, ignorant and disturbing, which always cause trouble to us. The only difference is this time they shows no interest in dressing up or going shopping in Mongkok. What they care is how they are able to be online.

Although the senior citizens in your family never stop complaining their children are too additive to the internet, finally the parents cannot resist the pleasure of digging up treasures there and join them. The problem is that they are not the generation growing up with digital device who can work it just liking breathing. We are ocaasionally stuck up with the deivce, but we manage to fix it like go googling, posting questions in a forum or send a MSN message. We all know how to take care of our cyber life. Compared to experienced users like us, they are curious and innocent juniors in front of a computer. They ask questions like, “The pop up window said I have won a big prize. Do they mean it?” “It asks me to install a software. Should I click “Yes”?” What’s the differnce between being a registered and a non-registered one?” “It ask me to agree the terms and condition before going into the site. What’s that?” These scenes repeat over and over. Yesterday you showed them how to edit bookmarks in the browser. Today they might ask for a demonstraton again. With a such passionate user but knowing nothing, it turns you to a 24 –hour technical support of the family.

But sometimes their stubbornness really makes you cry. My dad, a senior citizen who finds himself uncomfortable if he has not enjoyed enough his Chinese Opera videos in Youtube and other video sites. One day, he discovered a treasure providing some rare oldies, only with a little technical problem that the videos played audio tracks, with no motions and pictures. Luckily he found his way out to switch from IE to Chrome. But as a big fan of IE, he did not want to simply accustom himself to a new browser. He kept asking me why the web site was not compatible to IE and how I could fix it. As a an amateor IT support in a usual household, the only meaningful piece of advice was ask him to give up IE, which was the last thing he would agree to do. After hours of trying over and over, the reality he faced forced him to stop.

From the experience of dealing with my dad, the “Technologically Trendy Kids” drives you crazy because everything is new to them arising their curiosity. When you give a new device to them or install a new software in the PC, there will be another tons of questions. They are not quite as us who feel comfortable to dynamic changes in digital world. So I think they welcome devices highly comprehensive and very intuitive. And if you are patient enough, with good tolerance to repeatedly raised questions, it may be a new blue sea out there for you.

The brain outsourcing our memories

Brian is the most mysterious part of human body. It is said that we are now using only 5% of brain function, which implies potential exploration is possible. This 5% has already been enough contributing to learning new knowledge, memorizing what we experience every day, inventing anything never existing before, and even conquering rest of the creatures in the world to become lord of this planet.

Ability to memorize is one of the most significant functions of our brain. With memories, we can learn from the past, judging how to make a proper response while encountering a similar situation, or improving based on previous failures. Dating back to prehistoric era, while paper, writing tools, or anything used for record and documentation had not yet created, the only database was human brains. Knowledge and information are transmitted orally. No doubt the elderly in any given tribe was highly respected since she was a living information centre. However, information is easily distorted or even lost during the process. As later paper and pens were invented, information being documented accurately became possible. However, no. of copies created was still limited as could not be replicated in mass scale. Although improved, the age of knowledge booming had not came until the widespread of printing technology, which finally ignited the fire of the Renaissance. By this time, our important memories could be easily reproduced by printing, portable for convenient reading, which are no more luxuries for modern people. Education, in terms of both quality and quantity has been tremendously raised.

But human technology never stops here. Thanks to the inventions of computers, optic fibres and the internet, when you need to check up something, there is no need to ask anybody or turn pages of reference books. All you need to do is to google. With a click or two on your mouse, you will have countless results for you only to select from. Some studies claimed that the generation who live on the digital planet relying it to help them to store and acquire information. They have poorer memory because they just don’t need it. The essential skill has now been replaced by the techniques to pick the right information you are exactly looking for and eliminate noise information. That’s too convenient that we just cannot resist the temptation to use the internet first before we allow ourselves to search and develop ideas in our brain.

The appearing of the internet has reshaped our brain to think and memorize. Given that it provides a massive pool of information, will it further stimulate our creativity because, or just make us lazier and worsen our memories? I think time will tell.