Writer's Block

Writer's block. Or should I say, blogger's block?!

Nothing to write, LOL!!!

Donald Trump's Blog is Failing, Supposedly

I’m fairly sure you’ve read my May 06, 2021 post “Donald Trump, The Blogger” – well, here’s an update on the ex-president’s blog. 

NBC News reported that engagement with the new blog is drawing a considerably smaller audience than his now-banned social media accounts ever did. 

Citing data compiled with BuzzSumo, a social media analytics company, the broadcaster says the platform has only raked in 212,000 engagements. In comparison, a single post on the former president’s Twitter account to his 88 million followers could receive more than a million likes in one go, mainlining his every musing to the front of national (read, US) attention. 

The data offers a hint that while Trump remains a political force, his online footprint is still dependent on returning to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. 

And "From The Desk of Donald J Trump" tends to be far more long-winded and meandering than his tight tweets, constrained by Twitter character counts. There’s also no way to respond with support or criticism – other than to click on a heart, or share to Twitter or Facebook. The one-way conversation is likely a turnoff for social media mavens. 

The Washington Post reported that the blog's first day garnered only 159,000 social media interactions. The following day, interactions dropped to 30,000, and they haven’t passed 15,000 a day since, according to the newspaper's review of data from online analytics firms. 

Online chatter about him has hit a five-year low without the bully pulpit of the White House – and access to traditional social media. 

In fact, the US publication on Friday labeled it a "slide toward online irrelevance". Or "whistling in the wind", as North Carolina's Elon University professor Megan Squire put it.  

By Trump’s standards, the interaction numbers are terribly insulting. (Methinks, it’s okay wad – my blog’s numbers are even more pitiful, LOL). 

I guess for him, he won’t be happy because the numbers are badly bruising his ego. 

The blog is failing, supposedly – but I disagree. So, until Trump gives it up altogether, it's not the end as far as I'm concerned!

Donald Trump, The Blogger

Donald Trump (yes, the former President of the United States), banned from major social media sites, has launched a personal blog, From The Desk of Donald J Trump. 

Though touted by his servile followers as a "communications platform" – the dream was that he was going to launch something more web 2.0, like a Twitter clone or whatever – a personal blog is what it is. 

Anyway, good for Trump (left)! It's never too late to start a blog. I only hope for the sake of all Trumpsters out there, he keeps blogging regularly. It’s the only way to connect with his support base. 

Here is a statistic that hopefully, won’t scare him. I read that over 80% of bloggers will quit in the next 18 months. That's over 50 million blogs. A humongous percentage of blogs will fail. 

But according to WP Virtuoso (a WordPress blogging mag), a new blog is created every half a second, and we all agree that there are 86,400 seconds in a day! So how many blogs are there in the world? I would say hundreds of millions. 

FYI, I started my blogging journey back in 2008 – and I’m still at it! As long as you yourself know why you’re blogging and you can keep the interest alive, you’ll keep on blogging. 

[Note: I’m not interested to monetize my blog; I'm not even treating it like a business. Yet I'm still a thriving blogger!]

In case you’re wondering, blogging is still very much relevant in 2021. And it’s going to be relevant for a very long time because people like to communicate. People like to read and engage and to learn about things that are interesting to them. After all, blog posts are among the most shared content online.

In fact, people read blogs today in record numbers – and will almost certainly continue reading blogs for many more years to come. Already it is claimed that about 409 million Internet users read about 20 billion blog pages monthly. 

Besides, I'm informed there’s over 600 million blogs on the Internet. And an overwhelming 77% of Internet users report regularly reading blog posts according to the latest blogging statistics. This surely tells you that blogs are still very much popular. 

Happy blogging, Trump!

UMNO Cybertroopers Are Looking for Jobs

On May 09, 2018, the UMNO gravy train finally came to a stop. 

The cybertroopers knew they had to disembark. They had reached the end of the line. 

Given that the funding has dried up, these keyboard warriors who were under UMNO’s payroll either fade away or switch sides, if they manage to, that is.  And those that remain, do so on their own volition.

According to The Malaysian Insight (June 11, 2018), they used to be on a roll. They were paid tens of thousands a month, with some allegedly netting a couple of million ringgit – merely to slander Pakatan Harapan and trumpet the virtues of Barisan Nasional. 

One of their prominent members would be Malaysia Today's Raja Petra Kamarudin (right) and I have no doubt, he would be one of those highly-paid ones. After all, he switched camps. From pro-Anwar Ibrahim to pro-BN. 

In fact, in one interview with Malaysia Outlook, he had alluded to being paid. And I’m sure, paid handsomely. 

It is also said that these online activists were paid by the Special Affairs Department (JASA) under the Prime Minister’s Office while there were others who were paid by businesspersons connected to Najib Razak or other UMNO leaders. 

Ever since social media became a powerful medium of information, UMNO have aggressively gone out to mobilize an army of cybertroopers. 

Their mission is to put a positive spin to BN’s policies and achievements, counter PH's criticisms and wage psychological warfare through the Internet. 

In 2012, the party formally organized these online activists under the Information Technology Bureau led by former UMNO Information Chief and Pontian MP Ahmad Maslan (right). 

Even the BN Strategic Communications deputy director loudmouth Eric See-To helped oversee the social media operatives. 

On November 04 last year, this UMNO unit held its biggest assembly at the Putra World Trade Centre in KL, bringing together more than 3,500 cybertroopers. 

Although the party have never acknowledged paying them – it is an open secret that they were amply compensated. 

One cybertrooper explained they were grouped into informal teams with coordinators who determined the issues or trends they were to write about, which were decided by the senior UMNO leadership. 

“UMNO cybertroopers have gotten tens, and even hundreds, of thousands”, said former party blogger Syarul Ema Rena Abu Samah (right), also known as Ratu Naga, in an interview with Sinar Harian. 

“And some who received millions. One received RM3 million for a project related to the elections”, maintained this blogger who gave up on UMNO and switched to PH in 2014. 

The payment depended on each activist’s specialty, with bloggers and website owners paid a different amount than a social media provocateur. 

I had read that Syarul Ema went from being a blogger in 2008 – I too started blogging in 2008! – to building a network of 80 cybertroopers in 2013 to assist BN as they geared up for GE13. She had one goal in mind, and that was to amplify false news to undermine all government opposition. 

According to The Coverage (June 04, 2018), her Black Ops team ran thousands of fake social media accounts to degrade BN’s political opponents by making outrageous racist remarks that would contrive anger and produce backlash from the rakyat towards opposition parties. 

“We would take names and pictures from social media accounts in Indonesia or Philippines and make a fake account, acting like an opposition supporter. We’d come up with racist statements… then we’d print screen and spread it everywhere”, she explained her modus operandi. 

She added that they would create distractions whenever negative stories about the government surfaced. 

“If an issue like a major corruption scandal comes up, people get angry. But you throw out an issue like: ‘this Chinese fella mocks our people’, they will focus on that”, she added. 

Also from The Coverage (June 11, 2018), another pro-UMNO blogger and well-known cybertrooper “Budak Sri Kinta” (left) informs that his job, and that of the thousands of other cybertroopers, is to trawl online news sites and social media postings for any bit of information that could be used to counter opposition criticisms, or to attack the opposition in return.  

He did not deny claims that these social media activists are paid anything from RM500 to RM3000 monthly via the Prime Minister’s Office. 

I should have signed up too! Sigh, a missed income opportunity!

Deadly Violence in Dhaka

Protestors rallied in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka on Sunday over the latest attacks against secular writers and publishers and accusing the government of failing to halt rising deadly violence blamed on hardline Islamists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit: https://www.informationng.com/2015/11/publisher-of-slain-blogger-hacked-to-death-in-bangladesh-photos.html

 

On Saturday, Faisal Arefin Dipon, 43, was savagely hacked to death in his third-floor office at the Jagriti Prokashoni publishing house in the city center, hours after another publisher Ahmedur Rashid Tutul and two writers were badly injured in a similar and separate attack.

 

Ansar al-Islam. the local affiliate of al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attacks, along with the four earlier ones (read my post dated May 15, 2015 titled "Bloggers Die in Bangladesh"), branding the victims “blasphemers” and warning anybody who writes and/or promotes secularism will be marked for death.

 

Moderate Islam is suffering a slow and painful death.

 

Yesterday, I was in KL’s Jalan Hose for the NAWEM Toastmasters meeting. I evaluated two project speakers – one did an Ice Breaker and the other an Advanced speech from the Storytelling manual. And I was voted Best Speech Evaluator. But then again, I had two evaluation opportunities; the others (Sandra Ghouse, Andal Krishnan and Meyyappa Manikam) only one.

 

 

Bloggers Die in Bangladesh

It’s been open season on bloggers in Bangladesh. Particularly those who are critical of Islam.

 

Ananta Bijoy Das (left), 32, was killed Tuesday morning as he left his home on his way to work at a bank in the northeastern Bangladeshi city of Sylhet. Four masked men attacked him, hacking him to death with cleavers and machetes, said Sylhet Metropolitan Police Commissioner Kamrul Ahsan. Das wrote blogs for Mukto-Mona [Free Mind] – a website once moderated by Avijit Roy – to champion secular and humanist writing in Muslim-majority Bangladesh.

On March 30, 2015, Washiqur Rahman (left), 27, was hacked to death by two men close to his home in Dhaka's Begunbari area. He was so maimed – with wounds to his head, face and neck – that police identified him through the voter identification card he was carrying. Rahman blogged under a pen-name, Kucchit Hasher Channa, or Ugly Duckling. According to the Dhaka Tribune newspaper, he had criticized irrational religious beliefs.

 

On February 26, 2015, a Bangladesh-born American blogger, Avijit Roy (left), 43, was similarly killed with machetes and knives – in full view of horrified onlookers – while he was visiting Dhaka. His widow suffered head injuries and lost a thumb.

 

The above deaths have sparked concerns for freedom of speech in Bangladesh.

 

In 2014, Reporters Without Borders reported that a group calling themselves Defenders of Islam in Bangladesh had published a "hit list" of writers they saw as opposing Islam. A few years back, hard-line Islamists had demanded a blasphemy law to stop bloggers they perceive to be anti-Islamic from writing about Islam.

 

Attacks against bloggers are not a new phenomenon in Bangladesh.

 

On the night of March 07, 2013, Sunnyur Rahaman, 26, was attacked by two men who ambushed him with machetes in the Mirpur area of Dhaka. On February 15, 2013, Ahmed Rajib Haider, 30, was hacked to death as he was leaving his house, also in Mirpur. And on January 14, 2013, Asif Mohiuddin, 29, was wounded by three unidentified machete-wielding attackers near his office in Dhaka's upscale Uttara district.

 

Also prominent writer Taslima Nasreen had to leave Bangladesh after she received death threats from so-called Islamists. In fact, on September 23, 1993, a fatwa was issued for her death.

It looks like bloggers and writers are not safe in Bangladesh.

I was in Segambut in KL on Wednesday to deliver a CC speech #2 titled “The Storyteller” – this was at the Tan Chong Segambut Toastmasters meeting – and I talked about how imagination can help us create content for speeches. As an illustration, I used my Hulk speeches to illustrate how I did it.

Image credit: http://www.comicartfans.com/Images/Category_3370/subcat_5321/jXkMlTED_0307141200451.jpg. CC#5: The Hulk delivered on January 21, 2015 @ Kijang Toastmasters Club

The Entertaining Speaker manual – speech #2 Make Them Laugh: The Hulk Meets Shrek delivered on February 24, 2015 @ Taman Indrahana Toastmasters Club

CC#6: The Hulk Meets Green Goblin delivered on February 26, 2015 @ E&Y Toastmasters Club.

CC#4: The Hulk Meets Dracula delivered on March 14, 2015 @ SMK Subang Utama’s YLP

CC#5: The Hulk Meets Snow White delivered on March 19, 2015 @ Sunway University Toastmasters Club

CC#3: The Hulk Meets Rapunzel delivered on April 08. 2015 @ MIA Toastmasters Club

The meeting was pretty decent even if there were only ten of us (including four guests). At least we started on time and also finished on time. I would score this meeting a 4 over 10.

 

 

As I See It

I didn’t know that I am amongst illustrious company.

 

Chin Yeow Honn shared with me that a distinguished gentleman had once penned a weekly newspaper column under the title "As I See It". He is none other than Tunku Abdul Rahman (1903-1990) – the first prime minister of the Federation of Malaya, and later of Malaysia. His articles were then compiled into a book, also titled “As I See It”.

 

And another famous personality had a book titled “The World as I See It”. The author is Albert Einstein and it is composed of assorted articles, addresses, letters, interviews and pronouncements published before 1935. It includes Einstein's opinions on the meaning of life, ethics, science, society, religion, and politics and it was published in 1949.

 

As you already know, my blog which saw life on October 06, 2008 is titled “As I See It”. Almost six years and four months on, I am still actively blogging. Keep it up, Victor Ong!

 

ITC Bintang Toastmasters Club president Benny Chia extended an invitation to me to attend their meeting and I, of course, accepted it without hesitation. And so I was there at Federal Hotel in KL’s Jalan Bukit Bintang on a traffic-bloated Wednesday evening. I was an evaluator for Chia's HPL speech – and Chia being Chia, he did it differently. He partnered with Isabelle Zhen to present his “Sharing Moment” and he did it with panache and genuine excitement. The latter too was impressive and gave a polished performance that showed stylish shimmers of scintillating sophistication.

 

The other speeches were decent but the evaluations were much better. In any case, the meeting started late – by five minutes – but I am still giving it a pass score of a 5.5 over 10. BTW, I was voted Best Table Topics speaker.

 

 

In a FA Cup match yesterday, Bolton Wanderers scored first through Eidur Gudjohnsen's contentious penalty (59) but Liverpool staged a stirring late comeback to strike twice to give the Reds a fifth-round tie at Crystal Palace.

 

Raheem Sterling broke Bolton's resistance with a cool finish in the 86th minute and then Philippe Coutinho curled a magnificent winner into the top corner in the 90th minute. The goals came at a really opportune time.