A current project is called Rouviere. This is purely an electronic music project at the moment. Mostly dance genres, ranging from dubstep to electro house. However, Rouviere, is an umbrella project for music Simon (my twin brother) and I create. Sometimes, I do a whole song on my own. Other times we collab together. It’s mainly just a release for electronic music that doesn’t have a place for its own.

I just finished a song a few weeks ago. Have a listen!

The Souncloud Page has more tunes. Happy listening!

The response to it was just crazy. I thought some people might get a kick out of it, but not to the extent that it got the top link on reddit for 13 Feb with over 1900 net upvotes. The video now has about 430,000 views. I made this contraption, because I was bored with beating Quake on the hardest difficulty and wanted something different. I only uploaded it now, because I discovered my old phone’s memory card at that time.

That night when it hit the top spot on reddit’s frontpage I was blown away. This is what redditors and web loving geek dreams of. We celebrated at my flat with my flatmates with a few shots just for kicks. I had to go to sleep though. The next morning I was hit with a truckload of emails from Youtube comments. The video truly went viral. It got almost 200, 000 views in two days. It got posted on Crunchgear and a host of other sites as well.

I always wanted to see how it feels to be on the other end of going viral. And now I experienced it first hand. It is interesting. The Youtube comments as always are a blast to read. A few suggested ad deals for my video, but I declined. I was not in the position to make money of the vid for a bit of ad views/clicks. I got my few minutes of Internet fame and it was interesting. Maybe in the future some might re-post this and it will get a few more views again, but the height of the viral spread has almost completely halted.

The strangest thing was trying to explain to friends that I went viral by taping my mouse to my keyboard with masking tape. I remember my girlfriend trying to do the same, trying to explain to her friends what I had done. In the end, linking to the video was the best thing to do. Another odd thing was a realization that two different worlds were aware of my brief Internet fame. I would walk to class and it hit me that hundreds of people were probably watching my video as I walked.

Now it has over 400, 000 views and that is an immense number to comprehend. Yet, here I still sit, no-one really knows me. No-one actually really cares. Yet I was seen playing Quake by thousands of people.

I have been on Sina Weibo for a short while now. Here is my account. Sometimes it gets a but much on my Chinese senses, but I have found Weibo to be a very interesting experience. I found an article which explains the data structures really nicely. It makes for an appealing user experience.

On Sina Weibo’s official interfaces (Web and mobile), the equivalent of a Twitter retweet is instead shown as two amalgamated entries: the original entry and the current user’s actual entry — which is a commentary on the original entry, often with a mention of his sources, if the original entry was obtained from an intermediary.

At first it was daunting, but later it made more sense to me. Furthermore, Sina Weibo actually feels like how a proper microblog should be, with the addition of comments on updates. This makes it feel much more relevant when you are discussing an update. For instance, when communicating via Twitter, your stream is filled with @ replies, when these could easily have been contained within a comment system. It just makes it feel much more cleaner.

The communication shouldn’t be on the channel itself, but rather separated into it’s own system. It’s like the equivalent of sitting at a bar where people shout at each other. Eventually you’ll be so battered with cross-talk that it becomes too much and irrelevant.

However, it must be added that cross-talk allows for interesting eavesdropping.

Sina Weibo is like an interesting mix of Tumblr, meets Facebook updates, meets Twitter. It works for me. Besides being filled with requests by people to help them with their English, Weibo has been interesting experience. It feels as if people comment a lot more on updates. This is probably as opposed to Twitter, where sending @replies would later start to feel like clogging the system.

I’m interested to see how Weibo develops. It also hosts it’s own pictures. Which is nice too.

In other news, Simon and I also reached a milestone in Google Adsense. Our first cheque will be on its way very soon.

Apart from Social Mandarin, I’ve got another Chinese project called Confused Laowai. Laowai is a term for a foreigner in China. I started this personal blog in January 2010 as a way to post about my progress as I go through my studies in Mandarin and my Mandarin journey. Confused Laowai has been a very interesting project experience.

Response

To me, Confused Laowai, is the closest I’ve come to a proper blog/reader relationship. Yes, Twindie.net has more readers and more hits, but Confused Laowai has more engagement. I feel like I have a proper community that follows my blog. This has been really good.

Growth

The blog has grown slowly in the start. I posted comments on numerous similar blogs by Mandarin learners and created a Twitter account that focuses on my Mandarin learning missions. I have also posted most of my blog posts on Social Mandarin and have posted one or two posts on Hao Hao Report which got me nice hits and readers in the process.

The Future

As long as I study Mandarin, this blog will be alive. Which will probably be quite a long time. It will only grow and I feel that I can create an even better blog/reader relationship, learning a lot in the process. I intend to do a bit more video blog posts too. It has gained PR2 in a very short while and is getting hits from Google from a wide range of search terms, probably the most of all my web projects. It doesn’t get the most search hits, but definitely the widest!

So, if you are interested in reading more on my Mandarin learning expeditions head on over or grab the RSS feed.

I’m finishing my Mandarin studies this year as one of my majors. When I started learning Chinese I primarily got formal instruction from University, however after class I would get back and still be interested in the language. I started following blogs and other learners, where up to this point my Google Reader is almost entirely made up of Chinese blogs and China interest websites. Thus the idea came for Social Mandarin.

The Idea

I felt that there was a disconnect between Mandarin learners on the web. I thus created Social Mandarin as a social bookmarking site where people can share online Mandarin resources with each other, find the resources that I took almost two years to amass. Eventually Social Mandarin should be the first site you visit when you are looking online Mandarin learners and online resources.

Development

I haven’t got much web development knowledge, but I’ve always been a tinkerer: using existing platforms and scripts and reverse engineering and adjusting them to suit my needs. Thus, I used Drupal with the Drigg module, that turns Drupal into a Digg-style site. It took me quite some time get everything up and working. I made some minimal changes to the design as well.

I had some problems with spam early on, but I’ve managed to get two moderators to help me and I’ve also since then installed captcha forms and various other protection systems. I’m however still sitting with a trackback problem, which needs to send a trackback/pingback to blogs if a story is posted. Alas, Drigg support has been dropped and most of the solutions I tried have not been working. Will have to look into it later.

Progress and Lurkers

Social Mandarin has been received quite well since its inception in March 2010. It has grown steadily since then. However, although there seems to be interest in the site, most of them are lurkers, only utilizing the content and not posting their own or other links. This, has lead me to post the majority of the almost 200 stories/links currently on the site. There are some other active users, but they are only a handful. I need to figure out how to provide a better incentive for users to post links, besides self-promotion. Alas, I don’t mind posting most of the content for now.

Marketing and Monetization

I have experimented a lot with social media marketing via Social Mandarin. I currently have a Twitter account for it, posting the latest articles. I got most of the followers via blogs posting my service and me following users who tweet about Chinese and Mandarin. I set up a search stream in my preferred Twitter app, Hootsuite to track people talking about it, and if someone says something relevant as I go through it I follow them. This is not an auto-follow script.

I have also put up two Facebook ad runs for the Facebook page. In the end I got about 130 new fans/likes within two weeks altogether. I opted for social media ads, because this gives me recurring traffic due to the users seeing new articles being posted to the page every time. Also, like the site suggests, this gives me the ability to interact with the users.

I’ve also experimented a lot with ad positions on the site. Currently, Social Mandarin has the highest CTR of all my web projects. It unfortunately is still a small amount of money and still needs to gain a pagerank, but once it does, it will surely pick up a lot more traffic.

The Future

Currently, the site is gaining momentum and I’m waiting for it to pick up on some Google juice. I’m also looking into redesigning the site. I think this site, as long as people post links, me included, will grow no matter what happens as it works on sharing. I’ve also got some ideas to enhance the social aspects of the site, to get users to interact with each other. One of these were the blog features, where users can have their own blogs on the site. However, more incentive needs to be provided and that’s where my brainstorming needs to go.

The Site

Simon wrote the site from scratch. I designed the site, but did not end up coding the design. Since the start of the site, we were always trying to improve the design, but we never came round to it. At first the site was popular. It got a few mentions on forums. It was during the FML popularity last year. The site is basically a clone, however I think we got into it just a little bit too late.

Marketing the Site

We did almost no marketing for the site whatsoever. It basically got known via word-of-mouth from our Twitter accounts (@nieldlr & @shotbeak). I did experiment with some Adwords in January of this year to test it: never used it before. It got some hits and submissions from it. I think if Simon and I put some more effort into marketing the site, it can speed up again and gain some momentum.

What now?

The site is still there. It does get a few thousand pageviews a month, from Google and just general linkage. Submissions are however irregular. We need more submissions and quality ones to make it work. Thus, it gets sort of like a club, if the dancefloor is empty, no-one wants to dance. We need to reach a good level of readers and submitters. We have played with the idea of selling the site, so someone else can take over. However, I think we wan’t to hold onto it and try and juice it up in the future. The first thing on the agenda? A redesign!

So if you are a nerd and want to share your adventures in the real world. Submit one right now!

Twindie.net

Twindie.net is probably my longest running project to date. Still very young though. It is a blog that me and me twin brother Simon started in April 2009. We wanted to try our hands at group blogging our music interests and then some other random things. It didn’t work out as Simon is not as an avid blogger as I am. I’ve basically have written all 140 or so odd posts on the site. It has evolved from music to something I barely don’t know what it is.

Current State

I describe the blog now as post-modern/ironic super dry humour blog with a touch of cool music. Basically how my personality is. One post for example, when the iPhone 4 was leaked, I posted that I wouldn’t buy it, because it was merely a mirror, taking the literalness to the next extreme, due to the version that Gizmodo leaked was “broken” and couldn’t switch on.

Sometimes I think the blog blows over people’s heads due to the super dry literalness of it.

Absurdity of it all

Alas, Twindie.net serves as an escape for my wild imagination. One of the most popular posts on the site is 10 very obscure things to like on Facebook. At first I did it purely as a joke. You know, for the lulz, as they say. It however got picked up in Google and its getting hits like crazy. I still laugh to this day, at how silly people are to like those pages. And yet people do.

I tried entering the SA Blog Awards for a nomination for Best New Blog. I, however did not get any. This hasn’t bummed me out whatsoever. I guess it would’ve made me too famous (said Niel tongue-in-cheek).

I like to humiliate the art of blogging. It’s fun, but shouldn’t be taken too seriously. That what I guess what Twindie.net is for. Just nonense. Just utter nonsense.

Stats

It however is the site that pulls in the most pageviews from all my projects. About 20, 000 pageviews a month. This is due to some strong Google presence. It has PR2 and about 25% of the traffic comes from organic search. I recently tried monetizing it a bit. One can but dream. So I signed up for Project Wonderful. So let’s see how it goes.

If you like the absurd humour and just the general “whut?” of Twindie.net then subscribe to the RSS. I’ll probably be blogging there for some time to come.

Stay tuned for more info on my other web projects.

Good day!

This is my new personal site. Got the domain name a while back and thought it would be more suitable than Niel Default. I’ll be hosting a lot more personal blogging projects here, posting my ideas and keep tabs on my numerous projects.

So welcome and grab the RSS Feed