I believe it’s “practice”. ;D Sorry, just had to point that out.

I went in yesterday to take a closer look at Xiaxue’s blog. (I’m not a regular reader of her blog!)

It seems that while she has indeed managed to engage her readers into reading her profanity filled posts, the comments on her blog are also spread between “worship” and “total condemnation”.

It is obvious that many of these readers are just out to put her down, but from this we also can learn that it is impossible to please everybody. The profanities and “shallow personality” appeals to a group of people who are very expressive (especially when they work under perceived anonymity). These expressions could have attracted more people of the same nature, creating a very viral effect.

With regard to the thought on “the world is not so keen on things that are good, decent and helpful.” – I personally feel that wanting to be good, decent and helpful is human nature. The world (at least, in my perception ) is helpful and decent. Unfortunately, the competition to be popular in the good category, is a lot tougher than to be notorious. In the Technorati top 100 (if we just use that as a gauge) we see more decent blogs than indecent ones.

Maybe people are keen on the good things, but it unfair to measure success in terms of popularity because the playing field is different.

That said, we need to identify our niche “playing field”, and be popular in that field. That is enough (for me).

Thanks Ganchau, for sharing your thoughts.

Good blogs like yours, others and mine are not as popular even though the articles in our blogs could be thought-provoking, humorous and inspiring!

Thought Provoker – I think you have a point too, by the fact that she is a lady and she dares to publicly publish the 4 letter words and the 3 letter words makes the blog posts entertaining.

In fact, readers who get to her blog must appreciate satirical humor, if not they WILL find the contents offensive. When you do appreciate that tone of humor, the profanities are more entertaining then offensive.

I believe Wendy Cheng aka xiaxue managed to establish relationship with her visitors. They like her speak and her style of writing despite of her obvious shallow personality and thought.

xiaxue.blogspot.com is not the type of blog I will subscribe with my feed reader.

Some time ago, way before she was on the newspaper, radio and tv, I did a small research on her blog to find out how she became so popular and stood out of the many thousands of blogs before her.

One thing that I discovered… it was not exactly her sex appeal but her mention of the words sex and singapore in her earlier posts that got her found by others. The combination of singapore, sex and other related words are some of the top search terms in search engines.

Oops, now Kian Ann’s blog has there search terms.

As for Ganchau’s question, that girl is (was) popular because of the sex factor – simple as that. If Kian Ann were to adopt that approach, he’d be shut down faster than you can say ‘sedition’.

No matter how hard she tries, she can never be as respected as mrbrown, for example. In any case, if I’m not wrong, her site is predominantly visited by Ah Bengs and Ah Lians – all of whom wouldn’t know intellect if it hit them square in the face.

Moreover, her transition to mass media (TNP & TV) has made it so obvious that she’s a gimmick and exposes her shallow personality and thought.

What I’d really like to see is how popular she’ll be in 20 to 30 years’ time. No more sex appeal to sell and nothing is as scary as an over-the-hill Ah Lian (I shudder at that thought). Conversely, it is not unrealistic to imagine a very old mrbrown still coming up with engaging points of discussion.

This is a good post Mr Tan, thanks…

Can you tell me why?

Actually now that you say it, I doubt I really read them anyway. I should get them off “the others” in the first place!