WOOHOO!

Here’s an excerpt from the Breaking News story.

MACAU, China–INQUIRER.net on Wednesday won the Judges’ Special Recognition award in the online media category at the 7th Annual Asia Media Awards 2008 held here.

Its parent company, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, won a silver in the Best in Newspaper Infographics category.

Both awards were for media groups with circulation of more than 100,000.

SAY hello to Karen Galarpe, who has started blogging for INQUIRER.net on our Open for Business blog for entrepreneurs.

Here’s the intro from INQUIRER.net business editor Ma. Salve Duplito, who started the Open for Business blog and handed over the reins to Karen:

Karen is the editor of SME Insight, the Inquirer group’s magazine for entrepreneurs, and has been a journalist for almost two decades now. She has written extensively on entrepreneurship in many different magazines and books like The Ultimate Guide To Starting Your Own Business and has been a consulting editor of Entrepreneur. Karen is bringing in her extensive experience on writing about entrepreneurship and is a great addition to the INQUIRER.net team. Welcome, Karen!

And here’s an excerpt from Karen’s first post:

So why be an entrepreneur? It’s to do what you love to do. And I found out, through years of covering interesting people in my work as a journalist, that such passion is the one that will spell success in business. Indeed, when you do what you love to do, you excel in it, and in the process, you help enrich other people’s lives. The money will just follow.

In this blog, Open for Business, we’ll be featuring passionate business people and find out how they run their businesses. We’ll follow the travails of the winners in our mentoring contest and see what will happen when they implement mentor Willy Arcilla’s tips. We’ll talk about entrepreneurs’ concerns and what must be done to address them. We’ll talk business — plain and simple.

Thanks, Karen, and welcome to the INQUIRER.net blog network. And I agree: it’s all about passion. That’s why INQUIRER.net (then known as INQ7.net) has been number one for so many years, and why we’ll continue to strive harder to become the best we can be.

Cheers!

TODAY we launched two more sites under the INQUIRER.net blog network.

Say hello to Original SIM, the blog of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine, and the Morph Code blog, which will cover the bootcamp that Morph Labs is holding for technology entrepreneurs in the Philippines.

Original SIM, which is exclusively available on INQUIRER.net, is the venue for the SIM staffers to “share their thoughts on different ideas arising from the week’s forthcoming issue of SIM” while giving us all a taste of what the magazine has to offer when it comes out on Sunday.

Here’s an excerpt from the first post by SIM publisher Leica R. Carpo.

I COULD say it was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby,” Dickens’ “Great Expectations” or even Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” that turned me onto reading. But that would be a lie. I must confess that historical novels were my secret passion and I was a Barbara Cartland girl first and foremost.

Meanwhile, check out the Morph Code blog as we cover the first day of the bootcamp, which kicks off tomorrow, March 29. We’ll be providing video coverage via INQUIRER.net VDO and blogging the event, of which INQUIRER.net is a partner.

Stay tuned for more cool stuff ahead as we continue to expand our multimedia content and services

YOU may have noticed that, starting today, we’ve switched to our own video platform for INQUIRER.net VDO.

Now that we’ve taken care of the infrastructure that will support our current and future services, expect INQUIRER.net VDO to go full speed ahead in the coming months. We still have some kinks to work out, but it’s been an incredible journey from videos being seen as a novelty on our site, to making it an integral part of our coverage.

So have fun. Check out our different channels, and keep coming back because we’ll be launching lots of new stuff soon.

Watch the new “Kung Fu Panda” trailer courtesy of Solar-UIP Philippines.  Hear Kiko Pangilinan sing (briefly) a song dedicated to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.  Revel in the triumph of Team PH, which defeated South Korea to become the first world champions in Supreme Destiny. And find out who won in the Pinoy Indie Games Competition.

The funny thing is that, from the moment we started INQUIRER.net VDO, we made sure we wouldn’t just be copying TV, or trying to compete with it. We wanted to focus on the strengths of the Web, and create content that was developed with Internet users in mind. It’s guerrilla TV, and I’m confident that we can reach out to an audience that doesn’t want recycled TV content that’s just shoveled on to the Web.

Ironically, some of our competitors seem to be ending up copying us.  But that’s OK. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about who has the best equipment. It’s not about who has the most money. It’s about who has the people who are passionate about what they do — and as I’ve always said, you can’t teach passion.

We believe in what we’re doing, and we know,  just as we’ve proven year after year, no matter what happened along the way, that we’ll emerge victorious and give the best service to Filipinos everywhere.

Try copying that.

YUP, as part of our continuing efforts to improve our video service, today we launched the Channels of our INQUIRER.net VDO multimedia hub. These categories are for the most part based on the Channels under the INQUIRER.net network, and our goal is to make it easier for you to find the kind of videos you like while also highlighting our different video content.

You see, INQUIRER.net is more than just news; we want to make sure we address the needs of our different audiences. Our journey will see the transformation of INQUIRER.net from an online newspaper to a full-blown multimedia site. I can’t tell you the stuff that’s going on in the background, but yes, we’ve got more new stuff coming your way — and even new people

Are you a sports aficionado? Then check out VDO’s Sports channel, which has as its latest video Pacquiao sparring in San Francisco. Check out our DJ Spinbad in Manila video in Showbiz & Style, a mosquito repellent made from a rare Palawan plant in our Technology channel, Fil-Am video blogger Christine “HappySlip” Gambito’s visit to Intramuros in Global Nation, and the business mentoring session INQUIRER.net held in the Business channel. And hey, we even have a Lighter Side channel for all those lighthearted, offbeat, “YouTube moments,” like this video of a bird attacking a cat.

Check out INQUIRER.net VDO today