East Eats West

Outstanding pictures and all sorts of questions

For simply outstanding pictures, visit: www.designklicks.spiegel.de

Do you have a question, any question? Drop it at: www.droppingknowledge.org

No WiFi at home...

I am currently offline at home. Please be patient and I shall post some more entries soon...

My updated blog design

How do you like my new blog design? Let me know and drop me a comment.

Some new blogs I like

Here are three blogs I like:

• All about the Italian taste for fashionable clothing and immaculate tailoring in New York: http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/

• My friend Bill Liao’s blog about The Hunger Project charity he is supporting:

  http://liaonet.typepad.com/

• A guy from Zurich writing about Hanoi while setting up a Ipa-Nima Boutique:

  http://tayho.blogspot.com/

PS: This is for you, my bunny-lover!

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The positive effects of my blog

When I started my blog the initial idea was to share pictures and reports from my trip with my friends. I looked for an easy tool and came across the www.typepad.com tool with a simple interface and high stability for a modest price. In the process of time I started to realize that my blog is not only a tool to share stories and pictures with friends but also to stay in contact with friends around the world. In handing out cards with the address of my blog I slowly built reach and with my weekly updates on my blog my friends from near and far now what I am up to and where I am. One positive outcome of my blog is that more and more people start to ask me for advice about Asia, which I am happy to give. Another effect is that for example an American friend read about the Sprüngli-chocolates and I sent him some. The third positive effect is that people I met during my travels come and visit me. Last week Tim, an American working in Hong Kong, came to visit me in Zurich with his colleagues Anthony. I showed them around Zurich and I introduced them to the wonderful Sprüngli Luxemburgerli and Grand Cru truffles. So I hope I can welcome more of my friends from around the world in Zurich as my guests, it is my pleasure!

The first anniversary of my blog EastEatsWest and thoughts about its future

A weblog (or blog) is a very new invention going back to the end of the 90ies. Therefore it is rather hard to define what it exactly is with definitions ranging from a personal online journal to an online conversation (read more about blogs and other challenges of mass media today on The Economist). What is clear that weblogs are a social phenomena: instead of a one-way sermon as with mass-media blogs are interactive, about net-citizen raising their voices. Blogs are about individuals expressing his or her unedited voice to a very small audience of a few to many thousands a day.

I started my blog EastEatsWest in May 2005 with regard to my travels through my beloved and so adored Asia. The basic idea was to express my passion and love for Asia,clearly underlying the fact that our little planet earth is a wonderful place to discover and we should not look down on other nations, customs and traditions. Different does not mean worse. My blog is now one year old and has grown in many ways: First and foremost, my blog has inspired me to push further and learn more during my travels, to take the extra step for a picture and always and everywhere listen to people and their stories. With almost 600 pageviews in the last 7 days my blog attracts more and more traffic and with traffic comes the realization that someone actually is interested in my content and so the responsibility increases. Secondly, I added more functionality with a search function and the function of a newsletter via email. Thirdly with the Google Ads I try to at least recuperate a fraction of the costs of my blog and therefore learn about the possibilities of online advertisement. It is a stony path though.

With my journey slowly nearing its end I wonder more and more what to do with my blog in the future without the traveling: shall I stop it, shall I continue writing about my life, and about my career and thoughts about life? Shall I continue pursuing topics relating to the raise of Asia or articles I come across? Anyhow, I would like to learn from my readers, improve my blog and the quality of the entries. But for that I need to know what you, my reader, think and like about my blog. As blogs should be conversations I would like to ask you therefore a few simple questions:

1. What do you want from my blog in the future (continue, more stories, more pictures…)?

2. What do you want to read about it (travel, the raise of Asia, thoughts about life…)?

3. What kind of pictures do you want to see?

4. Which entries do you like the most (travel stories, reviews, photos, thoughts about life, links…)?

Please answer the question in posting comments. Posting a comment is very simple: just click at the bottom of this entry on the “comment” link and enter your thoughts. I am eager to hear what you, my online readers, think about my blog and how you see its future. In the end, it is also our blog.

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EastEatsWest goes professional!

I started my EastEatsWest-Blog almost a year ago and ever since it has attracted more and more traffic with about 100 page-views a day so far. So far so good and I am very pleased to see that you my readers appreciate my stories and pictures. A few months ago I learned in Laos from the professional bloggers Cindie and Tim from www.downtheroad.org that one can make money while blogging with Google Ads. In contrast to my website theirs is huge and I never thought Google would be interested in my modest website. But last week I thought I give it a try and I registered. And to my surprise, tatatata, Google is interested! How the Google ads work? The story is simple: one ads automatically generated banners and images that are provided by Google via HTML to the blog and displays the ads on the blog. If now someone clicks on the ads, Google and the blogger (that would be me) get paid by the advertiser depending on an online auction process. Google uses a high-tech algorythm to determine which ads to place on the site and believe or not we are talking here a worldwide multi-billion dollar business of online advertisment. Google also provides a traffic analytics tool that shows in detail what pages are click and by how many users. And since today EastEatsWest is proudly a part of it! If in the future you see picture of me in full bling-bling, you know why!