Yes, I'm back. Back into the blogosphere.

It's been a while, and I gotta say, I miss it. But after my brief Autoblog tenure, I felt really burnt out about blogging.

It all started off being something really exciting...as somehwhat of an early adopter to the whole blogging thing, I started my first entries as mass emails to my friends during my first trip back to China in 2002 since I left the motherland 10 years prior -- basically, I just didn't want to have to re-tell my story like 10 times :) upon returning, I discovered Blogger, and it made sense to transfer my travelouges there so I don't accidently loose them to my email trash bin some day...and they sorta just sat there...until, when I decided to move down to SoCal, I started blogging again...this time, just more or less a journal of my new SoCal life.

Then one day, it occured to me since I'm such a car buff and I spend all this time online everyday reading about cars, I should just blog about them -- in comes AutoWonder. It was really a labor of love, I would spend hours researching on a story, find the best picture to post, discover the hidden angles, writing and re-writing each paragraph to get to that perfect delivery. The site got an early traffic boost when one day a friend sent me a photo he snapped while he was in NY, it shows Donald Trump presenting a brand new silver SLR McLaren to his supermodel wife Melania -- I did some research and put together a lil story on it, the story got picked up by a bunch of big blogs such as Jalopnik and Luxist, and next thing you know, I got over 10K page views that day and the story even made it onto radio. Yep, my 15sec of fame, sorta.

After that, I figured out that if I submit unique stories to the bigger car blogs, I can drive traffic to my site, and the one advantage I had was the fact that I can read Chinese -- so I started scouring Chinese auto sites for car news, translating them into English and then tipping it to Autoblog/Jalopnik.  Yep, I found a niche, and I was able to sustain a pretty health following of readers. When I think back, those were the funnest days of my blogging career (if you can call it a career).

Then one day, I read a post on Autoblog that they are looking for new bloggers -- I thought, what the hell, I'll give it a shot. So I submitted what I thought were some of my best pieces, and sent it in. About a week later, I got a call from Randal, whom asked me to start blogging for Autoblog. WOW!!! this is Awesome! (yes, Awesome with a captial A) I felt like I just got discovered or something. Riding on my excitement, I started blogging feverishly -- something you might not know about blogging for Autoblog (and the rest of blogs on WIN, likely) is that you have to meet monthly post quotas, 120 was the target I was given, and yes, that would mean you'd have to pump out 4 posts per day, EVERY day of the month. And oh by the way, you get paid $4 per post -- do I sound a little bitter? I suppose I am. Here's why: while it's like extra gravy that you actually get paid to blog about your passion that you would normally just do for free (or a lil bit of Google AdSense $$), at WIN, quantity was far more important than quality. The focus is on making sure there are enough posts to go live every hour, rather than the writing is good and stories are well-researched, or a topic you are really passionate about for that matter -- in a matter of weeks, I found myself dreading the chore of having to check through Google alerts, bloglines etc for the stories that I can turn into a post the quickest, ideally something I can churn out in about 30min, thus making $8/hr. LOL. I found it to be insulting to be honest. Why do that when I can do some consulting work on the side which I enjoy almost as much for like $50/hr? (actually, that's what I ended up doing later ;) Oh, ya, and there were the commentors...that is the one thing I definitely did not miss, those nasty comments from losers just have nothing better to do. To make a long story short (and I just realized, this has turned into a long post, I only meant to say, "hello world, I'm back", but look what I ended up with...), I stopped blogging for Autoblog after a few month. I've had enough. It just wasn't fun anymore.

Since then, I've been pretty jaded about the whole blogging thing...Slicksta has on various occassions tried to convince me to jump on the blog on blog idea, but I just didn't feel motivated. Recently, I wrote a few pieces on a new domain I purchased -- Roboa, but that's pretty much where I left it.

So why now, you ask? what changed? Well, it's my upcoming Europe trip that got me all excited again. One of the things that I'm already excited about the trip is I get to write about my experiences...and this time, not in a lil journal bought in Amsterdam like on my last trip, but on a blog.  So there you have it, my long-winded re-entry post.

I'm back. BIIIAATCCH.