Category Archives: Cyberculture and Blogging

2009 Philippine Blog Awards Winners

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Here are the winners of the 2009 Philippine Blog Awards announced last October 9, 2009:

Props are also in order for Micamyx for winning the Bloggers’ Choice Award, Let’s Go Sago for the Geiser-Maclang Transformation Award, and Good Times Manila for the Chikka Media-Readers’ Choice Award.

Congratulations and keep on setting the gold standard for Philippine blogging! :D

(Note: I got the list of winners from Tonyo Cruz’s blog)

2009 Philippine Blogging Awards Finalists Announced

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The finalists to the 2009 Philippine Blog Awards have been announced and list is pretty long. Here are the finalists for the different regular and special categories:

Best Technology Blog

Best Travel Blog

Best Entertainment Blog

Best Personal Blog

Best Food & Beverage Blog

Best Family & Living Blog

Best News & Media Blog

Best Business Blog

Best Sports Blog

Best Hobby & Recreation Blog

Best Fashion Blog

Best Photo Blog

Best Culture & Arts Blog

Best Commentary Blog

Best Videocast

Best Podcast

Best Humor Blog

Best Gaming Blog

Best Advocacy Blog

Best Beauty Blog

Special Award: Best Blog Design

Special Award: Best Foreign Blog

Special Award: Best Filipino Abroad Blog

Special Award: Best Filipiniana Blog

Whew! That was a pretty looong list. But nonetheless, congratulations to everyone for reaching the finals of the most prestigious blog awards in the country. :)

WordCamp Philippines 2009

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I was only there during the morning sessions, but from the looks of it WordCamp Philippines 2009 was a success.

Held at the Asian Institute of Management in Makati City, WordCamp Philippines provided venue for WordPress developers, bloggers, and enthusiasts to talk about the best open-source blogging platform and blogging topics. It was also great to catch up with my friends in the web and blogging scene here in the Philippines. :)

The talks I was able to attend were very good. Here’s the morning program I was able to catch:

  • 9:30am – Meet the WordPress Family by Beau Lebens
  • 10:30am – WordPress in the Wild by Markku Seguerra
  • 11:15am – Citizen Journalism in the Context of the 2010 Elections byDanilo Arao
  • 11:45am – A quick look into the Mozilla community through the lens of localization by Seth Bindernagel

I particularly liked the talks of Danilo Arao and Seth Bindernagel. Professor Arao shared nice information on blogging as a form of citizen journalism. One thing that stuck to me from his talk was that blogging per se is NOT journalism, until the blogger is aware of the practice and responsibilities of journalism. More over he added one tip for the bloggers: “To be a good blogger, you have to write well, you have to write fast, and you have to write responsibly.”

Seth Bindernagel of Mozilla’s Localization team talked about Mozilla’s efforts on localizing Firefox to different locales and upcoming open web standards Mozilla is supporting. I was pretty amped with his demo of HTML 5, and the audience were in awe with what crazy stuff you could do with the upcoming HTML 5 specs. This was a great preview of what will happen in next year’s Form Function & Class Web Design Conference.

Just before I left, I addressed the audience and gave a short talk about the Asian Institute of Management.

Hats off to the Mindanao Bloggers for holding a great event. I had a great time working with them in coordinating the event venue and logistics. I’m looking forward to next year’s WordCamp Philippines. :D

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Update:

Here are some WordCamp Philippines 2009 posts I’ve found so far:

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Here are a few snaps I took from WordCamp Philippines 2009:

Book Review: SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate

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Joel Postman’s SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate may be lightweight in terms of pages (it’s under 200 pages), but the contents pack lots of good content for companies trying to get on the Social Media wave.

As the title suggests, the book is targeted to corporations who would like to put a Web 2.0 spin to corporate communications. The tone of the book is not technical– as a matter of fact, there is no code anywhere in the book. This makes it accessible to managers and executives that know something about the internet and marketing. One theme the book touches on is “Going for it,” that is, allaying some of the fears most corporations about social media (e.g. lack of control, unauthorized information, chaos, etc.).

There are easy to read case studies of how companies implemented social media to their advantage.  From corporate blogging, Twitter, and social media ethics, Joel Postman showcases the wide array of online tools in a practical and concise manner.  Also, the book touches on the fudgiest part of social media: measurement.

If you’re looking for a play-by-play guide for implementing Social Media-powered corporate communications, this book may disappoint. Postman gives a pointers approach to showing the way to the promised land of SocialCorp and chooses his words carefully to to avoid confusion. But if you ask me, SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate is a great starting point to begin the Social Media journey for companies.

Speaking at the 2009 Y4IT Conference

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I’ll be speaking again at the Philippine Youth Congress in Information Technology (aka the Y4IT Conference). I’ve had talks in Y4IT 2007 and Y4IT 2008, and for the 2009 edition, I’m going back to basics.

The themes of my last two talks were about Web 2.0 (Social media, user generated content) and I figured either I take the notch up or blaze a new trail and I chose the latter. Tomorrow, I’ll be talking about Web Usability and User Experience Design– two topics that I know pretty well and topics that are closer to my heart.

To be honest, I avoided talking about usability in the last two years because I felt I wanted to stretch my wings a bit, but now I feel that I need to remind the young IT college students again about the value of web usability.

So, for everyone who’ll be attending the Y4IT Conference tomorrow, expect the same nice talk from me on a very interesting topic. :)

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This year’s Y4IT conference is full of very interesting topics and catchy titles and here are some that caught my eye:

  • Developing Web Toys - Mr. Luis Buenaventura II
  • Marketing Through Social Networks - Mr. J. Angelo Racoma
  • IT in the Early Grades- Ms. Sabrina Par
  • The 7 Habits of an Effective Developer - Mr. Chuk Munn Lee
  • The Next 5 in 5: Predicting Innovations  - Mr. Lope Doromal, Jr.
  • Love in Cyberspace - Prof. Cherrie Joy Billedo
  • Creating Dynamic Web Application Using ASP.NET 3.5 - Ms. Alezandra Nicolas
  • Democratizing Innovation Using the Web - Mr. Mark Ruiz
  • Empathic Computing: Innovations and Challenges – Dr. Merlin Teodosia Suarez
  • Innovation on the Web -Mr. Jay Trinidad
  • Internet Romance - Mr. Jayvee Fernandez
  • To Tumble, to Twitt; to Twitt: Perchance to Plurk: Ay, There’s the Rub - Mr. Juned Sonido

Thank You Bloggers

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I’d like to the the bloggers who participated in the Blogger Round Table in our Winning Internet Marketing Strategies and Tactics sessions.

The Blogger Round Table is intended to give the class participants (MBA students and Media Strategists on different sessions) a glimpse of how professional and hobbyist bloggers work and give an idea how internet marketers can engage bloggers properly.

Like I’ve mentioned, we had two sessions and we had to find several bloggers who would be available at odd hours (one in the morning and one in the afternoon.) Again, my deepest thanks to the following bloggers:

Special thanks to Noemi and Jonas for attending both the sessions. :D

I Will Mark You as Spam

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This blog has been getting a lot of spam lately, so I’ve been putting the clamps on the virtually all comments. However, what problem that has risen is that I’ve risked tagging the real comments as spam.

Last month, I’ve mentioned that identity theft in blog comments have infested by blog and it has been a losing battle. What I did was to loosen the comment moderation, but the identity theft still persisted. :mad: I guess people are trying to abuse the Top Commentors plugin I’ve installed in the past but I’ve now disabled. (Heck, is that plugin even still supported?)

After much consideration, I’m giving the border-line spammy comments the benefit of the doubt but outright labeling the comments that steal the identities of the other commenters. The reason I’m really miffed by this is that a good portion of the folks who posted comments here prior to the spam comments a re people I personally know.

So, to all those who will be trying to post comments as someone else, I will mark you as spam, as simple as that.