Being in the almost forefront of the digital space here in Singapore, and thanks to the many good friends whom I’d met throughout the journey, I’ve got a few opportunities to share about my thoughts and experiences in the social media community with traditional mainstream media journalists. Usually there will either be an email interview or a phone interview. Sometimes there may be a meetup at a cafe where the interview is conducted. Being who I am, I will share whatever I know openly with those who really are keen to learn and write a well prepared article.

But when the journalist tell me that she’d failed to search the web for information or find blog posts about the topic in discussion, it irritates me. If I can use a single keyword, e.g. the name of an even to find an entire page of blogs posts discussing about it in Google, I don’t see why you can’t. Now that I think about it, I regretted sending links and information over to them. It’s their job to search and investigate, not mine.

Blogging has helped me record my life, happenings and memories in a way that’s openly searched, read and used by anyone that chances upon my blogs. Some of these posts come in very useful for future referencing or if there’s a need to provide a set of comment with regards to that particular event that happened months ago, blog posts surely serve a better memory refresher than trying to squeeze your braincell dry trying to remember what happened or who were there etc. Especially if you keep your posts organised and accompany it with related photos, videos or links, referencing back your past is made easy and possible through blogging.

Every journalists, in the digital space or not, need to get into the talks and walks first, before trying to make sense of something totally new to them and try to draft an article on it based on interviews and hear-say from others. Why not take the plunge and dive into it yourself and experience it? That’s one thing bloggers love. Experiencing things first hand. We would rather spend time attending an event and trying out the product in real life, then just reading off a press release. We take action first and blog later.

Are you picking up social media tools and learning to be human in the digital space already? I hope you do!

If you’d read yesterday’s chinese papers, you would not have missed this huge photo of three black humans with two macbooks and an iPhone on the cover of zbNOW (Zaobao Now).

That’s @claudia10 (me), @howiec and @patlaw with our twitter page.

This interview happened when the journalist from Zao Bao contacted TDM to see if anyone of us are able to share more about Twitter with him. And after a few emails, Howie confirmed the interview with Fong Wei and we met at Geek Terminal one evening for the interview. Coincidentally, I’d met Fong Wei and his photographer previously at the Volvo Ocean Race with Puma.

When I saw the article on my desk yesterday (thanks to molemole), my jaws dropped. I had no idea it would be a cover story for zbNOW and such a long one too! To be honest, I had lots of problem trying to read past the first paragraph. Too many of the characters know me more than I know them. So thanks to @melvinkee and @shenheng, we had an english translated version, which was rather hilarious reading through it. You can also find the online copy of this article in mandarin here.

In brief, the part where I contributed is on how locals whom I’m following are using Twitter. Based on my researched while I try to find all Singapore Tweeters via @sgtweet.