UPDATE: Here’s Alex’s Breaking News story for ShowbizandStyle.INQUIRER.net.

ALEX VILLAFANIA and I covered the photo shoot of Alicia Mayer just a while ago, where she wore a lettuce bikini to help promote vegetarianism in the Philippines.

Alicia is helping People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) raise public awareness, and the media was invited to take photos and videos in a sneak preview of the ad campaign that will be shot by Raymund Isaac.

This is one event where I was really struck by the impact of technology on the way we cover the news. I actually overheard one person who sounded dumbfounded that we were using a mobile phone to take photos and video.

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INQUIRER.NET is sponsoring the Philippine Blog Awards, and our editor in chief JV Rufino will be one of the judges.

It’s great that the Philippine Blog Awards has been revived, with the main propagators being Abe Olandres, Gail de la Cruz-Villanueva and Jayvee Fernandez.

Here’s an update on the search for a venue that Jayvee blogged while we were recording the Nikki Coseteng Eleksyon 2007 podcast:

Our most urgent requirement is a venue. Not that there are no venues - but we really want to get that “sweet spot” between elegance, space and location. We’d love to hear suggestions from the community on where we can hold the venue. We are currently thinking of the mini theatres in Ayala Greenbelt 3 or Shangri-La Mall. Other known venues would be The Events Place and Teatrino at the Greenhills Promenade.

I GOT to meet a lot of people in Clark, Pampanga when I attended and blogged about Media Nation, and one of the coolest journalists is Joe B. Javier, director for Allied Businesses and Special Projects of broadcast network ABC-5.

Joe and I had an interesting discussion about technology, online journalism and games at our breakfast table, which also included Isagani Yambot, publisher of the Philippine Daily Inquirer; my college orgmate Dodge Dillague, who directs shows for ABC-5; our INQUIRER.net reporter Thea Alberto; and PDI reporter Alcuin Papa, who was also my UP Tinta college orgmate.

It was great to find out that Joe is really into technology — he loves gadgets and is an avid gamer, and you’ll find out more about that soon. He’s also a big believer in the power of online journalism and tech-enabled news delivery.

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UPDATE: For more information on Lagalag, go to lagalag.moleskine.ph. Thanks to Benedict Bueno for the heads up.

WAS great to hear from Willi Pascual, whom I met once in 2004 when we won Palancas for the Essay (English) category — he won first prize for “Devotion” while I placed third for “Surviving the Zeroes.” Since then we’ve corresponded via e-mail every now and then.

Willi e-mailed me today to tell me about his new project, Lagalag, which will bring together 20 Filipinos in different countries who have never met but who will share a global journey by all taking pictures that they will share with each other via a traveling moleskine notebook on Flickr.

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UPDATE: Thanks to dimaks for the heads up, YugaTech is back online, yay! (posted this update earlier but apparently it didn’t get saved — hmm, are gremlins out in full force today, heh)

UPDATE: Checked Abe’s blog again and it’s still down as of this writing. Took another screenshot and used this one instead ‘coz it’s clearer — opened the site on a separate window instead of a tab.

OK, this is weird, clicked on the YugaTech blog of one of the country’s most popular bloggers Abe Olandres and got redirected to this instead — click on the thumbnail below to see the screenshot:

Hope everything will be OK. I’ve asked Erwin Oliva to contact Abe.