So, are you a nuffnangite?

Once upon a time, when the word blog might be associated with some stains on your pants, personal websites were synonymous with annoying animated GIFs with unreadable text and some totally inappropriate cartoon pictures. During that time, who would have thought that the personal website (now aptly called blog) can be some day generating income for the writer wannabe in us?

Then of course, came Google Adsense, and textlink ads, and all those less effective money maker that promised to turn your site into a big money maker. However, with the exceptions few, most bloggers never get any significant revenue in their blogs. You have to get international audience, you have to use high paying keywords, you have to optimize the blog for search engine, etc etc. All these are due to the fact that the advertisers are mostly non-local.

So you not only have to cater for international audience, but you also receive checks all the way from the States, in US currency, which can be a pain in cashing them out with some of the local banks. Not to mention the depreciation in dollars these days.

Then came Nuffnang, Malaysia’s very own advertising community. Now we actually get localized ads. An advertisement for the Amob.com, the local mobile software and ringtones provider (with free Java game upon registration too, check it out) fits into our blogs much better than a Google ad for some online Japanese grocer that only ships in the US.

Of course, the other obvious advantages are the easier processing of your earnings, and bigger payouts since the guys at nuffnang gets paid less than their counterparts in the States. There are other interesting stuff Nuffnang organize too, like networking session with fellow bloggers, outings, and events such as the upcoming Pirates 3 movie screening.

The bigger picture, though, is getting back the ownership of our collective blogs in Malaysia. With our own ad network, we can now get back to the basic and get rid of all those nonsense that caters to the oversea readers and the search engine more than the actual audience that will actually appreciate what we write. That was the reason most of us started our blogs anyway.