I promise I’ll update properly soon, busy busy busy!
Sweaty afternoon at Sepang. Was super humid, saw some sweet cars (next pit to us had a lambo, a ferrari and a porsche!), got bitten to death by mozzies during dusk and rushed home for dinner after skipping lunch and having 3 redbulls I was buzzing.
Too many things on my todo list, oh well time to get slogging.
Can’t beat a big pile of meat, unlimited kimchi and some soju – yum yum! This place is not too pricey either, good for recession time 🙂
More here:
Woo Ga Chon – Korean BBQ Restaurant – Ampang
BTW please leave your comments over at We Ate This and not here – Thanks!
Ok so last week my article about PR and bloggers together with David’s article was published in the Malay Mail without permission.
I wrote a fairly strongly worded e-mail to the Malay Mail to question their behavior and asked what they planned to do about the copyright infringement. Surprisingly they replied quickly, politely and professionally (unlike some other Malaysian publications). An excerpt of the e-mail recieved.
My sincere apologies and thank you for bringing this matter to our attention.
No excuses — the publication of both your blog posts without prior permission is definitely not condoned and neither is it a practise of Malay Mail to use articles without necessary permission.
I have investigated the matter and yes, absolutely — no matter how taken up the reporter responsible for the article was with your writings — we should not have used them without your prior consent.
She has been severely reprimanded for the unethical use of your postings and for the lack of professionalism displayed.
We take this infringement very seriously and I am offering to publish an apology in the Cyberspot page soonest to acknowledge the pieces were used without permission
And today the apology was published.
I’d like to commend the Malay Mail on their professional response and their respect for intellectual property. More publications and generally more people in Malaysia need to be aware of intellectual property and how important it is.
I still see many bloggers using copyrighted pictures without permission and without credit (some quite ‘popular‘ bloggers too), they think if they can find it on Google images it’s fair game. In fact what they should do if they really want to illustrate their posts with others work is search Flickr for images licensed under Creative Commons. Then all they have to do is credit the photographer and it’s all legal and good.
Anyway it’s good to see some people taking this seriously, I hope more follow suit! Thanks to Sheila Rahman.
The first Nuffnang Party of the year, the Nuffnang Music Bash ’09 and I was the official photographer again (Thanks Nuffnang!).
The venue this time was downtown in KL near the Nuffnang office in Heritage Row at the club called Maison.
The crowds started to gather around 6pm.
Including the media, who interviewed some of the bloggers including Kel Li.
So this weekend was a busy one, Saturday was Nuffnang Music Bash ’09 (pictures for that coming soon) and then back to sleep and up at 10am next day for a road trip down to Singapore.
We stopped at Malacca on the way for some lunch – awesome chicken rice balls at Hoe Kee (far far far better than the other two commercialised joints further up, their Asam fish head was nice too).
Excuse the camera phone quality pics 😛 (I have no compact camera now, and I sure as hell wasn’t lugging the SLR to a concert.)
After that it was off to Jonker 88 for the Baba Cendol – one of the best things in the world!
Well today David Lian and I were published in the Malay Mail (without permission).
Battling for the Internet mind
The article is about PR and bloggers of course and they published both of our articles side-by-side (and made David look like a Simpsons character).
They did infringe our copyright by taking these articles (and even editing them) without our permission, I wouldn’t have actually minded if they asked as the final piece looks pretty good. And for once I wrote the article fairly well (and seriously) so it doesn’t look out of place in a newspaper. It’s ironic though what they did considering the subject matter of the articles.
I’ve had this problem with picture credits in Malaysian publications many times before, and even once with an article.
Of course David’s counter piece is also very well written so they sit well on a page together. And at least the picture of me is decent and I learnt of a new site – https://www.bloggersandpr.com/
Plus it demonstrates the power of blogs, two articles are worthy to take up a whole page in their publication (that tells me something about the general quality of their output).
You can download the full article here if you want to check it out:
Can you believe it, I was away in Sandakan for 2.5 days and someone ripped my spoiler off!
What is the world coming to? The top of the boot is all bent out of shape too, I’m just wondering how much it’s going to cost me to fix it.
There goes my Xbox 360. Not sure if it’s worth claiming insurance, will have to see how much it costs to replace first + labour + paint.
ARGH!
UPDATE:
Total damage..
Spoiler – RM270
Paint – RM180
Labour – RM40
Total RM590
Ouch.
PR companies in general are so far behind the curve in when it comes to dealing with blogs and bloggers I think some of them haven’t even seen the foothills yet.
I whined about them before in 2006 – “Yue May Not Mail Me Anymore”
And I got pissed again in 2007 – Sometimes I HATE PR and Events People
And now I’m wondering why 2 YEARS later things still haven’t improved much.
Granted there is a couple of agencies that handle blog related stuff very well (Yay to Text100, even then they aren’t 100% on everything – but I’d attribute that to retarded client ideas/requests rather than their lack of tact/skill) and some others that are willing to listen, learn and take action.
I’ve had good experience so far with Edelman and Fleishman-Hillard who are willing to put in the effort to make sure everyone in the relationship feels fairly treated.
After all the main problem is most PR agencies treat us like traditional media, the difference is we don’t get a salary, we don’t get paid to go to events or paid to write stories.
We generally blog because we want to, if you want us to go to some event and write about it you better pay! Especially if it’s not even particularly relevant to what we generally write about.
If you do want us to go and you aren’t compensating us for our time and effort, don’t expect us to write about it. If it was a good event/product/etc you might get a Tweet dedicated to it – but that’s about it.
The problem is compounded by PR agencies telling their clients they don’t need to pay people like Nuffnang to run campaigns on blogs because they can get blog coverage for free by inviting the bloggers to ‘cool’ and ‘fun’ events and giving them some skanky goodie bag (honestly I don’t need another notepad/pen/keychain/laptop case).
You know what is more sickening? Most of the time it works, some bloggers are a desperate bunch and will write about every event they get invited to. Even when it was boring, irrelevant and no one profited from it.
This dilutes the earning capability bloggers have if companies realise they can get PR companies to engage bloggers without paying.
I’m getting sick of it again, more and more agencies are realising blogs are important but are too stupid, ignorant and incompetent to deal with bloggers properly.
If you want to treat my blog as a means of advertising, then I am the media owner – respect that. Remember you don’t spend huge amounts advertising on my blog (like you do with traditional media) so you have no rights to use it for any kind of leverage.
I don’t particularly mean you have to pay me, but if you are offering goods or services at least pay me in kind (at least the value of my advertorial rate, and if it involves working hours – more).
If you want bloggers to attend, don’t have events too early especially if the venue is KL (7pm is too early, 9-10pm is better).
Don’t have events in weekday afternoons/mornings – we have jobs.
PR agencies seem to automatically assume every reasonably popular blogger is a ‘pro-blogger’ or something and we don’t need to work – we just sit around at home waiting eagerly for their shitty press releases and event invites.
It’s not like that, and the sooner YOU poorly informed PR hacks educate yourselves the sooner you will reap real benefits from engaging bloggers and forming relationships with them.
Blogs are a powerful platform, but give the blogger some freedom. If you want them to review your product then let them criticise it (even if you paid them to write) – be mature in your approach. Blog readers are a savvy bunch and the net is full of information – ultimately you can’t hide the truth.
At the end of the day bloggers are people, generally intelligent people, people who can write, form opinions and elucidate them.
So treat them like that, treat them like someone who is giving you their precious time to listen to what you have to say, treat them with respect and treat their blog with respect.
You wouldn’t give your PR services for free, don’t expect us to blog for free ok?
EDIT:
Read David Lian’s follow up from a PR perspective here: PR people and bloggers: why engage in the first place?
So after our Walk Around Georgetown Heritage Trail – Penang, we walked on down to Weld Quay where the clan jetties are in Penang.
Just before we left the foodcourt for the jetty I spotted this jolly old fella who made me think of a Chinese Popeye!
After that we visited the Chew Jetty, they even have a Homestay program!
Recently I’ve received quite a few Phishing scam e-mails pretending to be from Maybank, of course I’m not even a Maybank customer.
For those that don’t know, Phishing is:
In the field of computer security, phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live Messenger), auction sites (eBay), online banks (Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase), online payment processors (PayPal), or IT Administrators (Yahoo, ISPs, corporate) are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting.
It looks like one of my e-mail addresses has gotten onto some local Malaysian scam/spam e-mail list. Thankfully it’s not my normal mail, it’s one I use for signing up to sites and for places likely to generate junk.
The e-mail which supposedly sent the phishing mail was “Maybank (maybank@security.com.my)” with the mail looking as follows:
The text is as follows:
We are hereby notifying you that we’ve recently suffered a DDos-Attack on one of our’s Online Banking server. For security reasons you must complete the next steps to verify the integrity of your Maybank account. If you fail to complete the verification in the next 24 hours your account will be suspended.
Here’s how to get started:
1. Log in to Maybank online account (click here).
2. You must request for TAC via Maybank online banking – your TAC will be sent via SMS to the mobile phone number you registered. (you can find the “Request a TAC” button in the Utilities menu of your account)
3. Logout from your account and close the browser.
4. When you have received the TAC (Transaction Authorization Code) on your mobile phone, go to our secured verification server and submit the requested information (Username, password and TAC). (click here) to go on our secured server.
5. Please allow 48 hours for processing.
Please comply and thanks for understanding.
***This is an automated message, please do not reply***
The actual link in the e-mail is https://mail1.irs-usa.com/ – which was a fairly legitimate looking Maybank login page. It appears the site has been taken offline now, it seems like it’s some kind of Chinese business and the email server was hacked.
The terrible grammar should give you a warning bell in your head that this probably isn’t a legitimate e-mail.
When you visit the site (Using Firefox, IE gives no such prompt) you will get the Phishing warning:
Another good reason to use Firefox right?
Maybank users will be particularly prone to falling for this, and they even ask for the TAC code – so the access they will have will be dangerous.
Do warn people about these kind of e-mails, they weren’t an issue when we were receiving Phishing scam mails from Chase America and Capital One – but now they are being localised they are a real threat.
There is some info from Maybank here and a way to report Phishing e-mails on the same page.
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