Hi,
We've never spoken before, let alone have properly met. And although I have no doubt that you know me through my blog, you are probably unaware that at this very moment, I am sitting right behind you and your boyfriend, pretentiously reading a book about affiliate marketing, using my friend's Airborne Access account unbenknownst to him where I can see you reading my blog. My name is Mike "Fucking" Villar, I am a rising internet star and I want you to know that I want you to be me life partner so I could touch you all over.
From where I sit at the moment I could see you reading and showing my popular, albeit obviously not my best, Atrocities of Friendster post to your boyfriend, who from what I gathered from eavesdropping on your conversation earlier, and the countless times he mentioned the word "ombudsman", is a lawyer. Given the circumstances and the high likelihood that I will get slapped with (another) restraining order, I would restrain myself from saying that your boyfriend looks like a pompous asshole who's totally unattractive and looks so right driving an old 1996 Tamaraw FX. I'm also going to restrain myself from saying that he looks like one of those creatures from The Lord of the Rings who crawled out of the earth to attack a castle and from saying that he looks like he has STD (Herpes, most probably).
I know that the admiration is mutual as I saw you numerous times looking behind your back and whispering something to your boyfriend. Perhaps saying "In 5 seconds, I'm going to stand up and kiss that smart-looking young man sitting behind us and there's nothing you can do about it" or perhaps "Let's transfer to another table, the guy behind us is sweating like a bitch and he's wiping his sweat with 100 peso bills. I think he's mouthing 'There's plenty more where this came from baby' to me too. How creepy!" Whatever the case may be, I want you to know that you are an absolute sex kitten. And your pencil-cut skirt (which I will definitely ask you to keep on if, nay, WHEN we have sex) accentuates your beautiful heinie.
I also want you to know that I am a man capable of making love to a woman non-stop for an unprecedented 48 hours straight. Also, underneath my sexy exterior is a man made out of pure-fucking-ROMANCE and LOVE and I'm willing to sever all ties with my family and friends and even punch my mother in the face if you allow me to whisk you away to a world of sex, drugs and other illegal stuff.
As you read this, you might be thinking to yourself "I'd love to run away with you but don't you have a 'Girlfriend?' only known as 'Number 21?'" And my answer to that, my love, is that I broke up with her just yesterday. The reason being that I am starting to think that she is a deceitful nympho. I mean what kind of woman says "I love you" to a man and only hours later, massages and has sex with an old Chinese guy for 1,100 pesos? A harpy and a harlot that's what.
I am not rushing you into anything. In fact, I am going to leave now lest you decide to refresh the page and read this before I am conveniently out of your boyfriend's (who I'm positive can beat me up quite easily) massive fists' reach. But please consider my offer, Pick ME. Choose ME. Love ME.
If you don't, you should seriously consider getting some pepper spray and taking a different route home. But let's not talk about that.
Sincerely yours,
Mike "Fucking" Villar
Rising Internet Star
Heir to the Duke of Hillcrest
Darlington Socks model
Made out with an Albino
but that was before
and im not
going
to
do
it
again.
With a lot of confusion and questions plaguing the incipient stages of the network, I feel that it behooves us to post an FAQ about Dash Media.
Who comprises the Dash Media Team?
Being that I'm the ring leader of this entire circus, I'm going to go introduce myself first. I will try to provide a short introduction of the other team members and let them tell you more about themselves in their own blog posts.
My name is Mike “Fucking” Villar, I am 24 years old and I live in The QC. I have been consistently blogging here and here for a year and a half now. I have a degree in Business Administration with a major in Marketing. I spent two years of my life working as a Business Development Officer for a pioneering BPO company that specializes in Directory Assistance. I also spent a year working for the Philippine Domain Registry (dotPH) primarily handling sales and marketing for Calliope, the first locally developed blogging platform.
The other members of the team are:
Get to know more about them as we go along.
Oh noes! You are exploiting bloggers to drive traffic to your site and earn monies! You suck!
Oh noes! You're an idiot! If you look closely at how the site and RSS engine is designed, you'll see that we do nothing of the sort. One of the primary reasons why we started Dash Media is to create a community and give more exposure to those some might call 'underexposed blogs' with excellent content by evenly spreading traffic within the network. The way it works is that summaries from the most recent entries within the network are displayed on the main page, the traffic of which comes from the nifty little badge that is displayed on our respective members' blogs.
How do we do it? Well we simply connected the blue wire to the red wire and– I think I'll let the tech guys explain that to you.
How do you plan to monetize? Do you plan to plaster your members' blogs with ads?
What makes you think we need to monetize? Between the four of us, we make enough money to feed a small South American country for 5 years. In fact, we have so much money, we solve everyday problems like how we solve all our problems—by throwing money at it.
Nah seriously, we're not thinking about it yet. But rest assured that if we do, we're not going to slap ads on member blogs, only on our core blogs and we're going to do it in such a way that ads are not going to, in any way, compromise usability and user experience.
Sweet! How can I join?
Our next round of submissions will be sometime in November. Watch out for the official announcement.
Are you single?
Very. Send me an email at mike [at] dash-media [dot] com and if you're cool with me taking pictures of you wearing my clothes, then you just might be who I'm looking for.
Selection
Whenever I talk to people about Dash Media, one question that pops out more often than others is a question about our criteria and our process. I think such inquiries are warranted because we went out on a limb to describe the type of content we are looking for as 'Decent', a criterion which, by itself, is both vague and subjective.
Let me reiterate some of the principles this network is built around on: Popularity doesn't always equate to quality; limiting one's reading at what every other popular blog is writing about puts one in an echo chamber, and the realization that there is a plethora of excellent albeit, underexposed content outside the echo chamber just waiting to be discovered.
Take for instance Qwerky, one of the blogs included in the pioneer batch of blogs we are including in the network: There's an assload of sites out there which talk about Web 2.0 but exactly how many sites are out there that actually analyze the etymology of Web 2.0 web app names?
Point being is that the heaviest criterion that influenced our decision in this round are content which we deemed interesting.
Of course we expect the selection process to evolve, be democratized and require more involvement from the existing pool of blogs come the next round. People can go on saying how arbitrary our selection process is but we can always say: “Hey, we have to start somewhere.”
It's been close to two weeks since I last updated and I honestly don't know where to begin this update since in that short span of time, there was simply a surfeit of positive change that took place in this rising internet star's life.
This is going to be long and possibly boring so let's get right to it. You're probably all "Positive changes? But you suck dude, how is that possible?" and tempted as I am to say "No, YOU suck", I'm too much in a good mood to do so and instead, I'm going to go ahead and tell you about these changes that I speak of. In chapters.
Career
I've recently been hired by another company and if things go smoothly, I will be starting early october. This is a very good thing considering the timing couldn't have been any better since my contract with my current employer expired a couple of days ago.
And thus continues my puzzling run at excelling at whatever it is that I do. I mean seriously, how I made it to where I am now as far as my career would go is beyond me. See, more often than not, I don't even know what I'm doing and I already lost count as to how many times something like this happened:
Boss: Michael, do you have data on your team's sales and conversion ratio?
Me: [Alt+Tabbing to switch from the porn site I was audaciously browsing to an Excel spreadsheet] Yeah, everything looks good. Especially sales, figures are through the roof!
Boss: Excellent! I knew you can do it!
Me: [Writing "Conversion ratio? WTF?" on my notebook and underlining it twice] Hey man, Like I said when you interviewed me for this position, "With Mike Villar you pay for RESULTS" Just giving you your money's worth sir!
Boss: Good man. Keep up the good work!
Me: Um sir, another thing– Do you think I could have one of those coffee makers [insert name of Director-level guy here who's at least two pay grades above me] has in his office?
Boss: Anything for my favorite employee! I'll talk to purchasing right now.
Me: Good man.
After than, the next couple of hours will be spent on me ordering my Business Development Assistant who's obiously more compentent than I am on so many levels, asking her to find out what the hell Conversion Ratios are while I kill myself with free coffee and surf more porn sites.
I've always thought of myself as an overachiever whose success is based entirely around luck. Also, I have a strong feeling that the aforementioned luck will soon see its end and when it does, it's not going to be pretty. I don't think the top brass would be happy when they realize that the guy in charge of their Marketing doesn't even know how to make a Marketing plan and whose core competencies are limited to his expertise in sexual harrasment and stealing office furniture and supplies for home use.
Please pray for me.
[more later after lunch and possibly masturbation]
In this month's episode of The Man Blog's LAMEcast, Adam and I interview Koryn, a young, scorching hot TV producer who's into guys who:
Listen to the interview and read the full article here. (with more pictures!)
Also, if you're interested in being featured for the LAMEcast, why don't you ping us at editors [at] man-blog [dot] com?
What do you get out of it? Exposure. As Adam pointed out, our first LAMEcast feature, the lovely Denise Albert was crowned the first runner up in the Ms. Mouton Cadet Pageant and was awarded a trip to France to attend the Cannes Film festival shortly after her interview with us. Although we'd like to think that we had something to do with her winning the pageant, we are not guaranteeing anything. I mean who knows? Maybe shortly after your interview with us, you're going to smoke some crazy shit and get raped in a back alley by a midget. Life. So unpredictable.
I go now.
I know that a lot of you read this blog through RSS and I know that you're annoyed at the fact that right now, my blog's feed, when viewed with an RSS reader, looks a lot like I did during that time in college when I got so blitzed and woke up in an alley with a mismatched pair of socks, my pants down and my testicles hooked up to a car battery.
While the wonderful people at I.ph work out a solution to that problem, I'm temporarily going to use a different feed URL. So, point your feed readers to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/mikevillar
(Also, if you don't have a blog yet, or if you're using a crappy service run by imperailist Americans [the same heartless animals who send their elderly to secret jungle factories in India and force them to make Basketball shoes] like Blogspot or LiveJournal, why don't you try out I.ph? Not only will you have an awesome blog, you'll also keep me employed and make sure I have enough money to sustain my worsening meth addiction)
I'm also taking the extra step to provide you with a more convenient way of syndicating my blog's content. If I did it correctly, you should see a form below asking for your email address. If you don't, then I'm obviously so retarded I can't even properly copy and paste a piece of code into my own blog. Or I can't concentrate because two chicks are taking turns giving me a beejer under my table. Whatever.
Anyway, you might be asking yourselves why the hell I'm doing this or why should you trust the guy who wraps his penis with tissue paper and packaging tape with your email address. Well, I guess my answer would be because I want our relationship to be more intimate. Admittedly, I've been a jerk lately but all that's going to change because I changed myself for the better.
I'm no longer the guy who one ways some girl he flirted with for months via Yahoo! Messenger because said girl turned out to look like Long Mejia; no longer am I the guy who chooses to use the treadmill right behind you because he gets aroused at how your heinie bounces when you run.
I guess my point is that you shouldn't feel any sort of apprehension when you type in your email address in the form below. I have no intention of selling them. Checking you out in Friendster or MySpace maybe, but definitely not selling them.
And what do you get when you subscribe? Well aside from the same quality Mike "Fucking" Villar posts that made you laugh, cry, and feel aghast over the last few months delivered to your mailbox, you also get EXCLUSIVE CONTENT
What do I mean by exclusive content? Well you see, I.ph has this awesome recastability feature which means all I.ph blogs recast themselves depending on who's viewing it. You can configure them in such a way that the public/your family only sees innocent posts about your cat and give your friends special access URLs and logins so that they see all the kinky illegal shit you have in your blog.
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE! Did you know that you can use your Flickr or Livejournal accounts to login and view privileged content in an I.ph blog? </ paid I.ph advertisement>
Anyway, I intend to make use of this feature. So you know, while all your totally uncool communist fag friends are talking about how funny my most recent post is, you're in your room beating off to a printed picture of me naked–which you got because you subscribed to this blog and got exclusi-fuck-ive content.
So stop being an asshat and subscribe already.
update: apparently this thing won't allow me to embed a form. Why don't you click here instead?
Mike "Fucking" Villar
"a Manila-based blogger made famous by his Atrocities of Friendster series, a regular feature he publishes on his blog where he mercilessly criticizes and mocks pictures of ugly people he stumbles upon on popular social networking site, Friendster. Although a lot of people are offended by what he writes, long-time readers of his blog regard him as a brilliant satire writer."
-Taken from my WikiBios page
