Herzlich Will­kommen!

Well, here I am, blogging at last.

Never thought I'd do it, but now felt more compelled to than ever, with a growing number of "celebrity" bloggers clogging up the Internet bandwidth. Bloggers like, you know, Xiaxue, Sandralicious, SPG, and *gasp* even Steven Lim who have become somewhat famous from glamourising their vanity.

Most of them flaunt their lifestyles, tell the world how gorgeous they look, and bitch about everything and everyone; SPG even goes as far as posing nude of her blog.

You might call them smart, media-savvy. Maybe, but sometimes I wonder if it has more to do with their readers (especially their adoring fans) missing a few brain cells than them have a few more. But then again, this is the age of Reality TV. It's hip to watch guys and girls cheating on each other, contestants bitching about and backstabbing one another. Heck, it's even cool (never mind okay) to act like a complete moron while auditioning for a "talent" contest.

Tell people that your favourite programming includes BBC, CNN, and the National Geographic, and they look at you like you're from Mars; tell them you don't blog--that blogging (among young Singaporeans, at least) is for people with too much time and too big an ego, and they stare at you like they've just seen a cavewoman. Sheesh...

Normally, I wouldn't care less with these attention-seekers--nothing wrong with them having their own ego-trips--but unlike personal diaries, these blogs are public. Anyone can surf in and read their stuff, including youngsters who are easily influenced. It's hardly surprising that many of these "fans" are teenagers who aspire to be as famous and "glamourous" as their "idols".

To compound matters, while these blogs are public, the same can't be said of the comments readers post there. These bloggers have a nasty tendency to remove anything critical of them--from tasteless insults to well-argued points. Some even go as far as banning the person's IP. It's all about packaging, I guess, to make their blogs look good to potential advertisers.

Media interest in these bloggers hasn't helped matters either. Rather than highlighting what's so wrong with the blogging community here, they've only managed to sensationalise it. Worse still, how someone like Xiaxue managed to become an ambassador for the local Anti-Smoking campaign is a joke. Her website won her the 2005 Best Asian Weblog award, no doubt, but that was before her ego got too big, and too much air got to her head. She still has her fans (her critics are, sadly, deleted from her blog) but the sort of presumptious things she writes hardly makes her a role-model for your own kid sister, never mind a nation of youngsters!


I might not be updating this often (there are more important things in life than this), but rest assured that I'll still be keeping my crosshair on these bloggers. Someone has to.