I am officially, The Blogger

I sort of hinted at this earlier, but I've now started blogging for Tha' Man. That's right, I'm now a semi-quasi-paid blogger, but IMHO the biggest plus is the knowledge that you have your own cartoon headshot. Having your own, slightly unnatural cartoon is a sign in my mind that that you have well and truly made it, unless you get a whole piece written about you like Isabella and Dan did recently. I thought that any flitter at public life in China was going to be as the random white guy in some kind of Chinese television commercial. For now, this will remain as one of my goals for my life in China. What is really amazing about this is that I'm being paid to do something I consider a hobby. Another plus is that it also means I can justify the growing amount of time I spend looking for interesting stuff on the net, as it is for professional purposes.

I'm on a short-term contract that says I produce copy each fortnight (Americans, that's bi-weekly), and so far I've had two articles published.

First of all, this all started when I was asked to contribute arguably to Shanghai's most popular English language website - Shanghaiist. Since late January, I've been submitting entries here and there, and I have been given the official title of a Shanghaiist contributor. Another sign that I have made the big time is that I am also in possession of my own Shanghaiist business cards. Mum and Dad should be proud.

I found this a lot of fun. I haven't really had a lot of positives come out of my seemingly endless rounds of Shanghai job searching, and this was something of a new opportunity for me to try something a little new. Through writing, I have now had the opportunity to attend a few events (like Kylie's H&M shindig at the SSTM) and meet a lot of new people in Shanghai. One good thing about this is that it appears that some of the articles I have written have driven traffic to Shanghaiist, as evidenced by certain Digg numbers on posts I wrote. It does pay to write about off-beat stories on Digg!

Through channels, I was then offered the chance to get paid for my blogging habit by City Weekend, by writing content for their column known as 'The Blogger'. I was a little hesitant at first, as unlike other bloggers that have written for this column in CW, I don't have great Chinese skills. My hesitancy was also reinforced by these comments on the site, which made me feel a touch more uncomfortable at the time as my bosses wanted me to chat about the entire China-based blogosphere. Of course, there is the massive language barrier that I am trying to contend with, but I haven't really incorporate much Chinese content at this time which has made this task a little easier to date.

Another hurdle, albeit minor, is that this column required a step-up for my writing. Essentially a life-style magazine, CW employs a upbeat content with word constraints that Shanghaiist doesn't need to conform to. Overall, my scientific report and technical-influenced writing style isn't naturally catchy, so I have had to work on this.

As CW is an officially sanctioned publication from China, there's the tiny matter of content to consider as well. This article was rejected due to censorship concerns. Given the cut-and-paste summary nature of the article, I'm expecting that any juicier stuff that may pop up in the future probably won't make it past the censor, so I'm wondering if I should really bother or not.

Probably the biggest plus out of this experience is that writing is now covering my rent, which is a good thing for this currently self-employed fella (who's on the look-out for scientific/technical-based work by the way).

The other problem I have faced is that a natural blog entry citing links doesn't necessarily work when it comes to the printed page. The column's word constraints seriously impinge on quoting relevant blocks of text from other blog sites, and make identifying the concise and entertaining 20 word grab out of a sea of blog entries quite tough. China bloggers, please write with me in mind for the future. On top of looking for a needle in a haystack, I've found that this constraint can really dulls my ability to lead the reader through a balanced, well-rounded report. Hence, I've taken on a little more of a sole-focus when approaching topical writing for CW. This is good for my writing skills and will force me to move out of my comfort zone when writing.

Another reason I mention this is that I'm now starting to post less on this blog as I seem to be covering a lot of what interests me elsewhere. So, I'm going to start to have sole entries linking out to these published articles on Shanghaiist and City Weekend. For my own records, I've begun a new blog on this domain that just archives the entirety of the articles that I've written for more 'serious' publications (whether they've been published or not), along with websites I've built, and other substantial things I have and will contribute to over the years. You can find this other blog here, or through my sidebar.

I'm still going to post more regularly on scRambler, but will start linking out to sites like YouTube for the odd funny moment, and also side-blogging using Twitter. I'm working on ways to incorporate this into my Feedburner feeds, but no luck as of yet.

There are also some other things I've been cooking up with my flexible time lately that I want to share, but more of this in my next entry.

For a preview on what I am hinting about, check out this link.