Blog GilaChess

Chess Scholarships are a rare thing in Malaysian Chess. So, it warms my heart when I see chess scholarships like these offered to the public:-

Chessmate Academy Scholarship

We are seeking 2 (two) enthusiastic junior chess players to be coached by our dedicated coaches.

Our experienced coaches are passionate in teaching enthusiastic juniors.

The objective of the scholarship is to support the chess industry train enthusiastic chess players to excel and be competitive internationally. 

Panel of Coaches consist of:

• International Master (IM) elect Lim Yee Weng

He was one of the youngest national men’s champion at the age of 14 and went on to obtain his IM title after becoming the first Malaysian to achieve a 2600 GM rating performance in the Malaysian Open 2008. Currently practicing law after obtaining his law degree from Australia in 2004 and is presently coaching chess players professionally and passionately.

• Schools and National Team Coaches

Closing Date  : 31^st December 2008

• Sponsored by management and a group of passionate chess coaches.

• 18 and below only

Please, submit your application to:

Magic Tree Child Development Sdn Bhd

20A, Persiaran Zaaba, Taman Tun Dr Ismail, 60000 Kuala Lumpur.

Tel: 03 – 7727 0817, 012 – 210 5620 (Grace Leong) Fax: 03 – 7727 3672,

Email: magictreekl@gmail.com

• The Seattle Times cuts 10% of workforce

• US Newspaper circulation down 4.7%

• Two Connecticut papers to be shut without a new owner

• Tribune Co. reports $124 million loss for 3rd quarter

• NY Times in trouble: advertising down 16%, may struggle to service debt

• New York Sun to close

• The perfect storm: Newspapers take a huge hit, print advertising dying

Those are just the dreary headlines that are out the past few days. I think new media is slowly taking over. Blogging to replace newspapers? It's not as absurd as it sounds because there are already many blogs and new media on the web that are taking over the role of informing the public of news and events.

Sad if you are a full time reporter affected by this but I'm sure people who are in the "new media" saw this coming much earlier. I for one have stopped buying newspapers a long time ago. I only get TheStar occasionally (like once a month) or The Sun because it's free from some 7-11 outlets.

After so much hard work I put into the latest chess website I was involved in, I got rewarded with a PR 4.

My visits to Vietnam and Philippines were not in vain. Each one of the visit was for reporting on the chess tournament that was being held in both the countries. Both were high profile chess tournament so the eyes of the world (chess enthusiasts anyway) was on my website.

ChessASIA.net is now PR 4!! I'm just documenting it here in this relatively unknown blog for my own reference :)

Another chess related website, DATMO.net, for the Malaysian Open 2008 chess championship also surprisingly reached PR 3.

Now in Vung Tau, Vietnam helping out in the World Youth Chess Championship 2008. One of the banes of a programmer is not having a camera when in an important event. I wish I had time to replace my faulty one before I came.

At least there are other bloggers whom I can 'steal' some photos from.

This is how the playing hall looks like:-

It's a Gmnastic stadium and will house a total of 885 young players from Under 8 to Under 18 age groups. Of course this does not include the parents and coaches accompanying the children to the tournament.

The opening ceremony was pretty grand for a mere "Chess tournament".

The opening event was even broadcasted live on Vietnamese television - something that I don't think will ever happen if this was in Malaysia.

It's truly an International event with over 70 countries taking part.

Vung Tau is a small town shaped like a peninsula surrounded by beach so it's a natural tourist attraction. For me I like the fresh sea food that they have.

At the opening reception I took lots of fish and prawns !! :)

The selection for the chess team members who will represent Malaysia to Dresden Germany will start tomorrow (31st May 2008). I will be there to blog about the event and you can follow the news via http://blog.gilachess.com and http://tcn.sourceforge.net.

Once in a while I bump into a website that is wacky and weird. Bush League, http://www.bushleague.tv is one such site. Thought weird, it is funny with it's humorous pictures and videos.  It's a little sexist but hey, what the heck, I don't care :)

Basically the pictures and videos are focused on sports and women. In short it's targeted at men’s lifestyle. They use the digg style of voting a story up or down. However for them they use the monkey icon "sweet" or "bush" to indicate "dig" or "bury" respectively. Sweet!

The content is definitely unique and I guess I'll be visiting this site daily to check out on any new goodies this site has to offer. It certainly beats YouTube surfing to find something entertaining to watch.

This one is worth bookmarking. There! I've bookmarked it as a blog post here :)

Here's a sample video I took from the site.

I keep getting this popup from AVG these couple of days and I thought the upgrade was free, I've been clicking Upgrade later but only today I decided to make the upgrade. The cost cited at the AVG website was USD 59!! Man, now I have to find another free alternative to AVG, Anybody know of a good one?

There will be a crazy number of chess events and competitions organised this coming months. The National Closed which will be used to choose representatives to Germany for the Chess Olympiad at the end of the year is one of the biggest. After that there will be many one day tournaments as well. Check out GilaChess.com for more information and details.

If you serious to earn some cash from Internet with your blogs let me suggest you to join paid to write program. One of the best paid to write program is Bloggerwave. There is easy to sign up and with simple website make Bloggerwave more reliable. One of the easiest way to make money online is to join programs that pay you to write reviews about certain products.

There are many out there today but let me just highlight one well known one here first. It's Bloggerwave and it works by using blogs as advertising media. The company is based in Europe. What they do is help advertiser publicise their product(s) using blogs as a medium. The good news is that you get paid for this program. You get to choose only related topics you want to write about. Go ahead, try out Bloggerwave today.

NZCF Olympiad Funds Appeal
In November 2008 the prestigious FIDE (World Chess Federation) Olympiad will take place in Dresden, Germany. The massive chess Olympiads are staged at two year intervals. For this coming event, New Zealand has an historic opportunity to send what may well be our strongest ever men's and women's teams. The New Zealand Chess Federation is now launching an Olympiad Appeal fund, to raise essential travel funds to assist the 10 team members and accompanying managers.

from http://www.newzealandchess.co.nz/

Looks like New Zealand is similiar to Australia where their Chess Olympic team have to go out to the public to ask for donations. Sad to see both Australian and New Zealand government is like Malaysia. They get ZERO support!

I know from some friends who have stayed in New Zealand for some time that it is a place of beauty. If you have watched Lords of the Rings trilogy you'll know what I mean as all three films were made there.

However, the biggest attraction for me to go to New Zealand is their New Zealand Chess Open. I got to know about this event thru Hilton Bennet a New Zealander who plays in the Malaysian Chess Open every year. So the attraction of New Zealand is two fold. I can visit their beautiful nature surroundings as a tourist and I can play competitive chess there too. Match made in heaven for a chess addict like me.:

Of course as a preliminary step, I've already checked on the many online offers for Auckland accomodations,  Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown. A cheap but nice place to stay is essential. Also, the location must be near the tournament halls knowing how prone I can get being late all the time for a game.

I'll also try to find time and add to my stay there (perhaps one week extra?) to view New Zealand's culture, arts and entertainment.

This is the kid I lost to.

I was winning of course. But in my mind I was already thinking that the game was won and got overconfident. One mistake was all it took to erase all my hard work and advantage.

Still won 4th place despite the loss but it certainly taught me a good lesson. Never be overconfident and think that you already have success when success LOOKS near. The final mile is just as important as the 99 miles of effort.

Ok, it's not really a splog site. It's a "aggregator". Splog is such a nasty word :)

Anyway, my chess aggregator site is not as bad as a splog as:

1. I have the permission of owners to aggregate their site
2. Unlike Planet Malaysia, I do not post FULL article post from their RSS feeds. Only excerpts are shown. Planet Malaysia also claims to be an aggregator but they publish the full article from RSS they read.

Autoblog roll out !

 
(oops Autoblog not autobot :) )
It's a good result for an "autoblog" and I've even made some money on Adsense from it. What's more, I didn't even promote the site except to announce it once on my chess blog and once here on this blog. Also, it's a win-win situation as the not so established chess blogs get their posts highlighted and publicised on the aggregator. Sort of like Petaling Street dot org idea.

Toosuperheroes blog post on curry puffs from Ikea reminded me of the 99 cents breakfast I had at Ikea. I told them about it and I'm surprise they don't know about it.

For their benefit and also those who may not know, I'll repost it here again. It's the cheapest breakfast you can have.

For RM 0.99 you can have some Mee and sambal. The tea is free too before 10.30 am. The cost for the above 2 plates of Mee with 2 cups of refillable tea is  RM 2.08 plus tax.

Of course if you are late then you have to pay RM 3.00 per empty tea/coffee cup. (refillable of course).

What I like most about having breakfast there is that they also have Airzed Wifi. Also make sure you go there between 9-11 am. Earlier the better la...

I created another new blogspot blog at:

http://two-superheroes.blogspot.com

It's just a parody of the original http://toosuperheroes.blogspot.com. Of couse the original is long established and is now PR3.

I'm having fun now because clearly I have the better URL name and I even got to reserve http://twosuperheroes.blogspot.com. Granted all this is free so there is no cost involved except for the cost of time.

Anyway, fun rivalry/ competitions like this is always good for mutual traffic. Also I'm not hurting their content as they are writing about food and I'm writing about blogging/monetization.

This kid just made USD 18,000 in a week. His name is Wesley So. He is a Phillipino. I had the opportunity to bump into he and his father when they were in Malaysia. His father speaks Hokkien by the way..

Anyway, this kid is only 14 years old and he already made that amount of money a few days ago.

How? I hear you ask. Yeah getting to that..

He is a professional chess player you see. He played in the Dubai Chess Open 2008 last week and tied for first place. He got USD 18,000 for his one week effort. All in all, he only had to play 9 games of chess.

Comparatively speaking, I think being a pro-chess player like this kid is more profitable then being a pro-blogger. His is a story of pure hard work and a little talent. Of course, not everybody can be as good has this kid.

Anyway, just wanted to highlight this to bloggers out there. If you have the talent, monetizing comes automatically. Even talent in playing a board game.

I made a new year resolution this year in general to be more organised. One of the things I've done religously was to document all the new blogs that I've created. In the past there I created so many new blogs that I've forgotten their URLs.

Each one had Google Adsense on it so sometimes I received a spike but since no channel information was attached to those Adsense codes, I could not tell which blogs were generating those clicks. That was damn frustrating. I couldn't go back to those blogs and develope them further.

What a waste!

Anyway, I keep my new blogs created using a spreadsheet. Details such as Google PR, URL, Alexa rank, email used to create those blogs are recorded.

To date, I already have over 50 blogs created. It's all experimental though. Many were created because I liked the name.

Perhaps I should change my tag to "Andrew the GilaBlogger" :)

Yes I rank no.1 on Google for a single keyword. It's not an easy thing to do. What's the word?

"Zerofied"

Yeah I'm proud of that. The articles are about what to do with blogs that have been punished by Google with PR0 for various reasons like writing paid post and selling text links. Do you rank no.1 on Google for any keyword? :)

Online advertising has taken off in a big way last year when several companies began to leverage blog advertising. Traditional media is being replaced by electronic advertisement which is becoming more and more effective as the newer generation practically spending a whole lot of time online.

If you are a blogger with an established blog, you can really monetize it by going into blog reviews and advertisement. However finding and advertiser yourself is usually daunting. Luckily there are companies that offer services that can help. One of this advertising company, Smorty, offers a service to connect advertisers and bloggers.

Here's how it works.  Smorty matches you with an advertiser to write opinion posts about a current advertiser. You can get paid to blog with sums that are quite substantial if you can consistently write good quality reviews.

I have more chess blogs than I can count on my fingers. But currently the one that is most active is http://blog.gilachess.com

It's strange that I got into being a full time blogger because of chess too. The income that I made in the beginning from ads was pretty small and laughable. But as the years went, it really grew slowly. It reached the point that I quit my job last year just to concentrate on blogging full time.

Life is not as easy as it sounds. There is so much to do. In fact, I think I work even harder now compared to my day job. I have to if I want to survive...

But overall, I like this lifestyle compared to the 9 to 5 grind.

I just hate it when I see bloggers steal my pictures without giving me credit. Sure they want to promote a chess event or something and they do a Google search and find pictures that I took. They then just insert it to their blogs without even mentioning the source - which is me. I don't mind people using my pictures - even if they don't ask. But for heaven's sake just mention where you got it from!

Not a bomb in the bad sense that is. You can make a bomb of money now writing sponsored reviews what with so many paid posts programs out there. Snapbomb.com is yet another company that deals with blog marketing and pays bloggers to write reviews. Advertisers get to use Snapbomb for buzz marketing and making their products known.

What makes Snapbomb stand out from the rest of the paid post pack is that it immediately accepts your blog and gives it a monetary rating. For example your blog may be set in the USD 5-10 range meaning your mininum pay out per post is USD 5 and more based on your blog category matching. This is the new blog advertising medium.

It's a good feeling now that I'm making some headway in my plan to kick Professor Andrew Ooi out of Google search results on page one for our namesake. After almost a year, the prof is now down to no. 3 for the Google search term "Andrew Ooi".

The professor enjoyed the no1 and no2 position for about a year. Now I've replaced him in those two spots.

Of course I'm still aiming to erase the professor completely from the first page (evil laugh)

1. It is so addictive
I find chess more addictive than any computer game or online game.

2. It is a violent game
You practically kill your opponent's ego when he or she loses. No computer game can compare to the violence in killing your opponent mentally. Yeah I do have a sadistic streak to me. There was one time when I lost and wanted to jump across the table and put my hands and strangle my opponent. Thankfully all that happened in my head only. Future opponents who think of beating me - be warned !!!  :)

3. It puts me to sleep
Picking up a chess book always puts me to sleep at night. (ha ha.. reading about chess is the direct opposite as playing it)

4. All my friends are also 'gila chess'
Yeah that's the power of attraction. You are crazy for chess, there is a natural tendency to be drawn to other people who are crazy about chess.

5. It makes me money
No I don't win any cash in competition. The most I ever won was RM 60 (about USD 18). I make money on my chess blogs thru ads and sponsors.

6. It saved my sanity
I broke my leg once and I lost my job after that. It was a difficult time as my leg failed to heal and got worse for about 6 months. Chess saved me by keeping me sane and also making me forget the physical pain. Much better than the pain killers.

7. Help me check my IQ
I knocked my head so hard (same accident that broke my leg) that I lost conciousness for 5-10 minutes. Playing in chess competition helped me gauge whether I suffered any deterioration (in case of brain damage). Thankfully my results were just as bad before and after the accident. The main thing is it didn't get WORSE :)

8. GilaChess is not just my nickname, it represents a community!
With so many readers/friends that are at my level, I regard them as GilaChess members. It's a good feeling to be with people who share the same love for the game.

9. When I blog about how much I suck, many people read about it
For the same reason that there are many people who are not good at chess and trying to improve, there is interest in reading about someone like me struggling to improve.

10. It made me famous
Among the Malaysian Chess community, almost everybody knows GilaChess :)

I've been battling for top spot on Google for my name "Andrew Ooi" on AndrewOoi.com and have finally achieved it after 11 months of blogging. Pretty satisfying.

Now I'm concentrating on my Chinese name "Ooi Boon Seng" and I'm starting by using the blogspot account OoiBoonSeng.blogspot.com. Currently my name is only in 10th position on Google's first page.