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Happy new year!

Dear Cornerplay readers, happy new year! Here’s hoping your 2014 was great and that 2015 will be even better.

When I first started this blog in May last year, I just wanted an outlet from the daily grind of entrepreneurship — a chance to flex my fingers and create something that I can complete daily, as opposed to products that take months to build and launch.

I love writing this blog. There have been times when posting daily has been an incredible challenge — because life and work can take a toll sometimes — but on the whole, this blog has been a source of joy and positive energy.

Thank you for your readership, and thank you for contributing that bit of energy in my life.

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On TV to talk about clicktivism, social media and trolling

I was asked to be a guest on a TV show (to air yesterday I believe) to talk about social media, and thought I’d share some of the Q&A and my notes.

TOPIC 1: CLICKTIVISM

Social media has become an indispensable part of many people’s lives. The one trend that piqued our interest this year is social activism or “clicktivism”. The most recent being the #ill-ride-with-you movement. It emerged as a show of solidarity with Muslims in Australia after the deadly Sydney hostage crisis. Some people had voiced fears of repercussions as the hostage taker was an Iranian asylum seeker. How effective really are these hashtag movements?

They help create awareness if the underlying cause is viral worthy, and certainly, better than the alternative where there were no hashtags to lead to easy discovery.

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Slow and steady wins the race

Merry Christmas dear readers! You may have noticed that three stories got published in just a few minutes yesterday. My apologies.

As you might have guessed, I’ve started on my holiday — outside of weddings, my first and only holiday of 2014! — and Internet access has not been a given. The stories were written on planes and trains but I only had the chance to upload them yesterday. Hopefully, going forward I will have Internet access more often.

You might be asking why I’m even publishing at all given the holidays. I read an article somewhere — I want to say one of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, but I can’t be sure — it was about how, when trekking long and dangerous distances, the groups that did better were the ones that did it consistently.

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The Cornerplay is 200 days old! What we learned so far

When the Cornerplay turned 100, I highlighted my 22 favorite posts. It feels much too soon to do that again, so for this milestone, will instead share what I’ve learned.

Google is king. That’s been the biggest surprise for me so far. The Cornerplay is syndicated weekly on TechSpot and e27 — two fine publications — primarily because as a casual writer, my objective is to be read. Yet, the largest referrer of traffic by FAR is Google. Nearly 27% of all traffic came from Google search and the next largest is 6%.

For example, Googling “the credit card information is not valid. please check your entries carefully.” will get you my article about Sony’s epic failure to process payments on PSN as the top result (as of this writing). I guess I’m the only person who wrote about it outside of forums and the like. It suggests long tail topics — especially those about consumer pain points that aren’t addressed — can generate enduring traffic from Google.

It’s depressing if you think about it. For publishers, it’s no longer about building an audience who loves your content and checks in everyday, even if via RSS or Twitter. That path takes a lot of time and money. No, if you want to become a business, it’s about getting Google to like you and send you traffic. Or becoming click-bait central and relying on Facebook to go viral.

That’s if you’re in the game of building traffic. Fortunately, I’m in the game of writing about whatever is interesting, so I can speculate what winning might require and then proceed to ignore it. Nevertheless, here’s more about the Cornerplay, 200 days in:

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The Cornerplay is 100 days old

It’s been 100 days since we started the Cornerplay. Wow! Time flies. This blog started out as a hobby, a creative outlet away from work, and I hope to keep it that way.

It was hard sometimes to maintain the discipline to post everyday. On average, each post takes two hours to write and so my nights have been consumed by this blog. I don’t watch TV any more, but that’s probably a good thing.

The Cornerplay has reached over 10,000 readers, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you consider it’s the 10,000 best looking people on the planet. Every single one of them reading this awesome blog. And somewhere along the way you helped us pick a logo.

Today, The Cornerplay is syndicated via two weekly columns: every Thursday at TechSpot, a leading tech publication with 4 million readers; and every Monday on e27, Asia’s leading technopreneur website. I’m honored to be affiliated with these two fine publications.

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The Cornerplay does a mini-dance — we’re on Techmeme!

Like most entrepreneurs, I started off reading about the tech industry with TechCrunch, and shortly after discovered other big blogs like Engadget and small ones like Fred Wilson’s AVC.  Soon I needed Google Reader to manage all these websites, and my favorite reader was Flipboard.  Google retiring Google Reader was probably the first time I felt genuinely disappointed by tech — it’s not often change feels like a step backwards in this industry.

Its replacement, feedly, has reliability problems and doesn’t have as nice of an interface.  So I continued to use Flipboard but depended on its Technology section to get the bulk of my industry news; and then would go to individual websites Web 1.0 style to fill out the rest.  I was reading less — especially the smaller blogs — but this might have been OK as I had less time for reading.

Then I discovered Techmeme, a website that aggregates what it thinks are the best news and analyses for the tech industry that day into one page.

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