So sad! I submitted my post My New Blogging Efforts in a Blog Carnival a couple of days ago but it was not selected. I know I submitted past the deadline but I thought I wrote a pretty good post so I did not want to wait for the next round.

I know that my post was read by the host of the blog carnival but I am not sure if I was excluded because I was late or if my post was not up to standard. Or perhaps I was out of point.

So what now? Do I have to write another post for the upcoming Blog Carnival by the same host or do I wait and see if my post would appear in the Blog Carnival and then if it is not, write a fresh post and submit to a new carnival? Or do I just forget about this particular carnival and look for another one with another topic?

I really do want to participate in Carnivals but it is not easy to find Carnivals with topics that interest me. Oft times, I even did not know of a Carnival until it was over. I guess I need to keep better track of the dates but time flies!

Also, I would not be taking up the free SEO tutorial because I am unable to commit to a 650-word article everyday! I guess I will have to do it my own way *sigh*

Did you notice that Yahoo! has upgraded our email accounts with unlimited storage? I don’t know when it actually happened but I noticed it last week. I first got wind of this new development from Cyberpartygal‘s blog post, Unlimited Yahoo! Mail Storage in May but it isn’t something that I looked forward to.

My Yahoo! Mail account has been hijacked by spammers and there is nothing I could do but close it down, except that I have signed up with some websites with my Yahoo! email address. I don’t get it why some sites need us to sign in with an email address. Isn’t a user ID enough anymore? Don’t they know that email accounts could be closed? A couple of years ago, three of my email providers closed without prior notice and left me with a sticky situation of writing in to the various websites to have my log in ID changed because the email was no longer valid.

Anyway, back to Yahoo!’s unlimited storage, I don’t think that it is anymore more useful to me than it was last month. I have been using Google’s suite of services primarily for ages now and this new development won’t change a thing.

The only feature that I am looking forward with an unlimited email account is an unlimited attachment size. What is the use of an unlimited mail storage account when we could not even send a decent sized file?

Like I mentioned earlier, I have so many friends who set up a forum thinking they can be the next LowYat, thinking that they could optimize monetize it with Google Adsense and other forms of advertisements.

So there was this young friend of mine who is very talented and he was my first friend to have his very own forum. He Googlized it even before most of us here ever heard of Adsense.

What he did to keep our interest in being active in his forum was to offer incentives to us like accumulate points for each post that we made with more points for the thread or poll starter, points for each person that we referred, sweepstakes where we get to win points but not cash. You could say that these points are like legal tender in the forum.

We were all very excited of course, well, at least I was, and there was healthy competition because the top prize that is on offer where you can use your points accumulated from all the action was a mobile phone worth almost MYR2000 during that time.

By the time the first person had enough points to redeem the top prize for months later, the value of the mobile phone dropped but it still worth more than MYR1500.

Having this experience, I still think that it is of utmost importance that before setting up a forum, you need to identify first your core group of supporters, those who will post in your forum even without getting anything back in return.