It’s 5:13 in the afternoon right now. I’m in the library with Tim Hortons and arguably I’m simultaneously surrounded, engulfed and swimming in an orgy of media: Music through my earphones, a textbook on mass communications, and the internet running.

My attention consistently switching between an amazing line of lyrics (”Why are there so many songs about rainbows? And what’s on the other side?”), or a particularly fascinating piece of information (Once-top magazines “Life” and “Look” tried to decrease circulation to cut postage costs, but ended up loosing attractiveness to advertisers because they didn’t have as much circulation – how stupid), or bits and pieces of interaction and engagement on Plurk, Twitter and Facebook.

It’s days like this where you wonder how come you’ve heard a song tens or hundreds of times, but never picked out that one line that jumps out at you.

It’s days like this that I’m thankful to be from a country like Singapore and a school like SMU and a family like mine and have the opportunity to experience living pretty much alone overseas. To really be exposed to a starkly different lifestyle and culture.

It’s days like this where I wonder what the hell I’m doing studying business and marketing, because reading a media textbook doesn’t even feel like studying. Then wonder if I had chosen to study media, if I would wonder why the hell I didn’t choose to study business and marketing.

And it’s days like this where I simultaneously feel achieved by what I do in the online social media space, and challenged that there is yet so much I do not know, questions I’ve never asked, questions I don’t even know exist.

In other words, it’s a brilliant day to be fully alive.

Yesterday was the HP TouchSmart PC Blogger’s Nite at Brotzeit and I have to say I had a blast. Hands down it was the best blogger event I’ve attended (yes, even over my own Social Media Breakfast: Singapore). And I’m not saying that because I organised it, but there was just something about a killer product, great people, great venue and alcohol that makes for an awesome event. And there is no charge for awesomeness!!

So I’m going to launch straight into the pictures and not talk about what the HP TouchSmart PC can do because there are write-ups and videos up already at Sheylara and Claudia’s blogs. Claudia has a great video, check that out!

Brian, Mark and me

Me and Hisham

Me and Krisandro

Jacelyn and I

Me and the Geek Goddess herself, Estee

Me and Daphne

Myself and Yin

A table full of Pingsters!

Me and Nicole

Jerrick, Sheylara, me and Darryl

Sheylara, myself and Nadnut

My competition on Plurk, Jerrick with his new “harem” consisting of Darryl

Rinaz, Jacelyn and Coleman

Drinking on the job

Claudia taking a picture of me taking a picture of her through the glass with Matt taking a picture of us taking each other.

Jerrick jumping into my shot of the crowd

Early arrivals

Beeeeeer.

99 bottles of beer on the wall… 99 bottles of beeeeerrrr

mugs!

Brotzeit

The note scribbled by the bloggers says it all.

I’m wasn’t going to blog about this because it’s seriously bigger than it should be, but I think we need to realise what we’re doing. (I’m going to echo Estee a little bit here)

When are we going to stop realising that this is not about “us“? It’s not about who is the core group of this and who is the core group of that, but how do we build/grow the community together, and look outwards for more people to join us.

It’s exactly this “arrowing”, self-destructive behavior (not by any one person, but a community) that again deters people from engaging in this space and affects the community’s credibility as a whole.

I think we need to acknowledge that we write blog posts quickly. There’s no reason to pick out the exact phrasing of every line and take issue with it. People are going to have homophobic comments on blogs, let’s discuss them like adults. I really don’t see the need to be defensive and overreact to a couple of text in the forms of bytes on the internet.

Please guys, I read a fair amount of your blogs and I think many of us have so much value to bring to this space. Let’s not demolish the branding (of yourself, of ping.sg, of Singaporean blogs) over little items that, frankly, in the grand scheme of things, don’t matter. Let’s not cheapen the value that we have to bring to the blogosphere.