pelf-ism is contagious

A lot of attention has been directed to this PayPerPost thingy lately. I mean, everywhere I looked, bloggers are blogging about the ReviewMe website or the PayPerPost website. Or both. Or is it just me?!

Anyway, I visited PayPerPost for the first time a couple of minutes ago - no, no, I’m not writing paid posts anytime soon - and I found myself giggling after reading this:

… We don’t pay in gold, baseball cards, experience points or foodstamps, so please don’t ask. If you don’t have a PayPal account, please get one or don’t sign up.

I am sure they can be as sarcastic (or funny, depending on which angle you are looking at it from) as they would like to because, hey, THEY are giving YOU money to blog! And it does NOT require you to toil under the scorching hot sun! What else can you ask for? *runs away*

Lorelle has a way of making people like me get all addicted to her challenges, though I’m not sure how. Maybe it’s because she ACTUALLY drops by to read what you’ve written, that’s why. Maybe

I’m picking up the challenges NOT because I have nothing better to do, but you know what? I really don’t know why I am doing this Maybe because it feels good to have something to blog about without having to crack the brain. Yea, maybe that’s why

Anyway, there are 2 parts in this “Top 10 keywords for your blog” challenge. The first part is to recall the top 10 keywords that you think describe your blog, and the second part is to “clean up the list so that it realistically lists the top ten keywords found on your blog”. I haven’t done this yet but I have a feeling MY top 10 keywords will not appear as frequently as I would love them to in my blog.

So yea, the keywords that I can recall off the top of my head are (in no particular order):

1. turtle
2. terrapin
3. turtle egg
4. Kuala Terengganu
5. hatchling
6. KUSTEM
7. Redang
8. research
9. volunteer
10. postcard

*phew* It wasn’t easy and to be frank, I got stuck at the fourth point!

Now, to check how frequent the keywords actually appear in my blog, I count the number of times they appear in my blog posts. Figures in parentheses indicate the percentage of posts which contain that particular keyword.

1. turtle (26%)
2. terrapin (13%)
3. turtle egg (9%)
4. Kuala Terengganu (6%)
5. hatchling (10%)
6. KUSTEM (8%)
7. Redang (9%)
8. research (5%)
9. volunteer (6%)
10. postcard (21%) < -- this is biased because it appears in the titles

One word. Pathetic. Muahahah.. I don’t seem to be blogging about a certain niche topic although it was one of my initial intentions to do so.

Now let’s move on to the second (and more difficult) part of the challenge - to clean up the top 10 list so that it reflects the top 10 keywords in my blog. This sounds sooo impossible. Idealistically, the top 10 5 keywords to be found in my blog should be:

1. turtle
2. terrapin
3. hatchling
4. turtle egg
5. research

But let’s see what are the search terms that direct people to my blog:

I remember mentioning, sometime ago, that I wasn’t very comfortable finding out that people actually googled for MY BLOG. I mean, I think it is perfectly fine for people to look for information in the internet, and to do so, they will need to search for certain keywords BUT I never thought that my name was one of the keywords. And these people obviously knew that I had a blog..

Which begs the next question: Who are these people?

Addendum:
I just realized that this post is one of my badly-written ones. It’s very rigid. And incoherent. Bleh.

Addendum:

Will this information change the way you blog or write? Will you know think more about the keywords you use when you write?

- Lorelle

Oh well.. This “discovery” sure will change the way I write in the future. For one, I would love to write more about turtles and charity and volunteerism because these are what I am truly into

I hope that future posts about turtles will serve as a “knowledge platform” for those of you who come to look for them - maybe in the long run, this blog would be able to create, increase and promote awareness on turtle conservation (and any other species that require human intervention to survive), who knows? Any turtle lovers out there?

I will also do my part in making this world a better place to live in. But this, I cannot do alone So I will do whatever I can in my capacity to promote charity and volunteerism among the general public <– I know this sounds like a far-fetched idea, but that is really what I have in mind :)) I always feel that we should do whatever we can to help the less fortunate. Remember the saying, “Berat mata memandang, berat lagi bahu yang memikul”??

One of Lorelle’s earlier blogging challenges was for her readers to “blog about what you know” - what you really know.

“Look deep into your heart and soul and think about all the things you know. You know a lot about a lot of things. But what are you really confident that you know the most about?” … “Think about all that you know and choose the one thing you would arrogantly assume you were the master of. Then write about it.”

Fact is, I am really a master of none. Sad, I know, but that’s the truth Or maybe I shall rephrase that and say that I know a lot of things, but most of the things that I know at a particular point of time depends largely on the person I am with. It isn’t very confusing if you were able to digest it part by part, you know.

So for example, when I was with my sister, I used to know a lot of things. But that was because elder sisters were supposed to know everything - from how babies were made to where Donald Duck lived. OK, I may not know where Donald Duck lived, but you get the flow.. Questions that my sister challenged me with were almost always answered, but I guess it wasn’t because I was a very smart sister, but because I was older than her and that “younger sisters always asked st*pid questions.”

But things do change. And roles reversed. Now that we’ve grown up a little, I have turned into the st*pid sister my sister once was. She has grown into a fine lady and she knows how babies are made and that Donald Duck does not exist in real life. As time passes by, I have turned from a know-it-all sister to a know-nothing sister.

Likewise, whenever I am with my friends who all of a sudden seem very concerned about what my research is all about and how it is going, I morph into a “turtle expert” - a “river terrapin expert” in this case as I am still not very comfortable bragging about being the expert *winks* Because surprisingly, little facts like how the river terrapins have four front claws and five hind claws compared to five front and hind claws in most other terrapins amuse my friends. And little explainations on how turtles, terrapins and tortoises are classified somehow rendered me a master in my own field of study.

But whenever I am with my Supervisor or other REAL turtle experts, I am more often than not tongue-tied. Like what happened during the one-week river terrapin workshop that we hosted last year. Scientists, researchers as well as foreign post-graduate students participated in the workshop and for once ever since I started working on the river terrapins, that I felt I was the st*pid one. I felt I was the one who needed a h*ll lot of studying and reading up to do. There were times I felt that I wasn’t fit to be in that group. I felt I knew nothing.

I digress.

Anyway, if I had to “blog about what I know”, it would be about turtles, about conservation, about volunteerism, and about charity. Because these are what I truly care about.