It’s the fourth one come June 14th, 2007. I remember blogging about it last year and placing a button on my sidebar. My, how time flies. It’s less than one month to International Weblogger’s Day and as a dutiful blogging, I’m helping to spread the word by blogging about it and telling my friends, family and monkeys about it.

Rio, the founder, will be holding a meet and greet session in New York City on June 14th, 2007 with the theme “Solidarity”. Paul, I wanna come to NYC!!!!!

Bloggers are required to ponder on how we can come together to overcome problems that have plagued the world. Can bloggers do something by just blogging responsibly?

So Malaysian bloggers may be required to register themselves and be monitored sometime in the future. It may not be now but who knows, since some smart minister mooted the idea.

If you would like to be a part of the 4th Annual Weblogger’s Day, head over to http://inweday.org/ to register even if you already did it last year. You will have to register yearly.

After waiting for a few months since the ban feature was implemented on PayPerPost, the reasons for the bans were finally revealed yesterday. While I, along with all posties waited with baited breath, when it was finally revealed, it was an anti-climax.

It is kind of funny to receive bans for mundane things like too many links or disclosing that the post was sponsored. These could be resolved if the advertiser just dropped the blogger a note. And one advertiser even said that my blog was MFP which made me go, “WTF!” The blog in question was set up in March 2006 where I published a post a day from the very first day. I believe the company only went live in June, 2006 and I only joined them in October later that year. Tell me, how would it be possible for me to set up a blog three months ahead in anticipation of something like paid blogging?

Really, when it was said that advertisers can ban us for just about anything, we did not know how true this would be until all was revealed yesterday. Some even received bans without a reason. Ermm maybe the advertiser was too pissed off to even type a few words mlm

Ahh anyway, now that everything is out in the open and the ban has now changed to bench, life goes on. At least I have stopped accumulating bans since early February. Maybe that was then when bans were finally explained to advertisers.

It’s all STILL good in the end.

If I had thought that the Bling Bling program was the fastest payment I ever received, well, how WRONG could I be. No doubt, my account was credited with the payment that I was promised. However, I would have to accumulate another MYR50 through my blog traffic before I could cash out. UGH! How long will that take???

Early this morning, I wrote up a review post and got it published at 5.51am. I actually received the offer at 2.09am but I was so sleepy and went to bed instead. My friend called in the middle of the night and after a 30-minute chat, I was wide awake enough to put my thoughts into text.

Five minutes after submitting my post for review, I received the payment in my PayPal. That was the FASTEST payment received EVER! I wondered if my post was reviewed at all but my traffic tracker showed that it was. So, PPP Direct posts do get priority over regular ones, I guess.

My computer time is a little off. Five minutes or two minutes, I am not sure. The important thing is that payment is (almost) INSTANT!

I went to bed at 5am in this morning and woke up at 7.30am. This is the kind of sacrifice paid to blog bloggers have to go through no thanks to our time difference. Naturally, I look like sh|t but who cares?

I was so stressed out having to go to work and thinking of what posts to write at the same time. During lunch time, I called up my friend and told him that I have to write ELEVEN original blog posts today.

He told me to go to bed because I haven’t got enough rest every night! I was at work, how to go to bed??? Duh!

I asked him if he has any ideas that I could blog on. I told him that I would pay him MYR1 per post but he said that I bully him. By the way, he is one of the most popular bloggers in Malaysia and I am not sure if I could get him to guest blog at my blog even if I pay him MYR1000! Cheh!

He gave me a couple of ideas through the phone and I told him to SMS me the other ideas when he has them. Calling long distance is not cheap, you know!?! But it has been seven hours already and he still did not even SMS me ONE idea and I have already finished my eleven original posts without using any of his ideas that he suggested over the phone.

Tell me, what sort of post can one write on “mlm”? Cheh, friend also tak boleh harap wan

As you may notice from the badges on my sidebar, I am a proud member of PayPerPost. Did you see my new badge that says I am for hire at $15 per post? This is the most exciting feature that PayPerPost rolled out earlier today.

If you are a blogger who writes blog ads you will know that PayPerPost is not the only marketplace that allows advertisers to approach a blogger directly BUT it is THE only company that allows bloggers to earn the most out of their blogging.

I have joined quite a number of marketplaces but they all take a huge cut off my earnings, from 30% right up to a 100%. No doubt, they facilitate the service that I offer, but I would definitely love to get a large chunk of my share.

On the other hand, PayPerPost is only taking a 10% cut off my asking price of which half of what they get goes to PayPal and credit card processing. We ALL know those service charges are high!

Also, with PayPerPost in the middle providing escrow-like service where they will hold the payment made by the advertiser and only releases it to the blogger once an assignment is completed to the advertiser’s satisfaction, the interests of both parties are protected and there will be no doubts as to the honesty of the blogger or advertiser’s offer.

Do I need any more reason to only place PayPerPost’s badge on my blog? Definitely not. Blogging may be a hobby to most of us but who said that we can’t make money out of hobbies?

If you aren’t yet a member of PayPerPost, do sign up now by clicking on my blue and green “PayPerPost: Get Paid To Blog About The Things You Love!” badge and then you too can place a PPP Direct badge on your blog at a price that YOU set.

I am sure that most Malaysian bloggers would have heard of this tag line. Like it? It would have sounded better if it’s “Putting the Bling BACK in Blogging”. The BLING was there, and then it was lost but now that Advertlets is here, the Bling is BACK. Get it?

Anyway, although this company has been set up for quite some time now, I just joined them yesterday. Am I slow or what? Duh!

To be frank, why I joined was because they are currently running this review campaign where Advertlets members with the ad code successfully installed on their blogs will be able to review Advertlets and then stand a chance to earn MYR50. This sum may be small to some people but it’s good enough for me.

Their review campaign ends on 31st May, 2007 and since I only got to know about it yesterday, I did not waste time and registered pronto. After getting the ad code running on my blog, I wrote and published a post on Advertlets on my blog and submitted my permalink via email to them.

Ten hours later, I received an email from them thanking me for my post and I was told that my Advertlets account has been credited with MYR50. w00t! This has got to be the FASTEST payment I ever received from monetizing my blogs!

While I am only able to cash out when my earnings reached MYR100, it feels good to have MYR50 sitting pretty in my account. It’s better than starting from a big fat zero!

If you haven’t joined Advertlets, quickly join now and grab that MYR50. They are giving away a total of MYR15,000 to three hundred Malaysian bloggers. Why not grab a share? For more information on how the review should be like, read THIS PAGE.

I logged into my Blogger account this morning and had a pleasant surprise. Blogger now automatically saves our drafts as we type them out, just like Gmail! Yay!

As you know, I blog A LOT daily and I do not blog from my blogs but rather from Gmail! Can you believe it? I use Gmail because of its auto save feature and there were many times it saved me from retyping, especially when the power went off suddenly or the browser crashed. Even if I had to retype, it was only for a sentence or two.

And when I write sponsored posts, time is of the essence!

Now, with Blogger’s auto save (what took them so long, they are from the same company now!), I can blog directly from Blogger itself without logging in to Gmail which by the way shares the same log in ID and password, hence I have to make sure that I am logged into the SAME account. The workaround is to have one Gmail account logged in from Firefox, the other from Internet Explorer. It works!

For further information, read How Blogger Autosaves Your Posts.