Quantcast Blog Addicts: July 2007 Archives

July 2007 Archives

PROVING that citizen journalism is coming of age, NowPublic has received a major boost -- namely $10.6 million in financing. Here's an excerpt from the Agence France-Presse article.
The financing is led by Rho Ventures in the United States and Canad a. Uses for the money will include ways to reward people that upload stories or im ages, and developing a system to "geo-locate" contributors so they can be found if they are in range of developments deemed newsworthy.
"We are moving to geo-locating people so we can do some cool stuff, " Brody said. "For example, if there is a bomb in a subway station in London or a virus break s out in Google's cafeteria and media can't get their fast enough we can identi fy people on the scene already and get their content," Brody said.
Hmm, this makes me wonder: is there a citizen journalism site in the Philippine s that you think deserves the same kind of investment? Say, if we had money to spare, which Filipino citizen journalism site would you want INQUIRER.net to in vest money in or purchase outright? :) I'm just curious, but hey, you never know :)
SOME Filipino bloggers did not mince words, as they blogged about the recent St ate of the Nation Address of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Former journalist Anton DeLeon's Slap Happy was not very happy about Arroyo's speech. He writ es:
Things are not definitely getting better. Seriously, if things were booming and zooming and talk of all this economic activity was real then i wou ldn't be holed up here in Dubai, of all places, if the prospects of all economi c progress are pointing to the Philippines.
DeLeon is currently working in Dubai as a media executive. He continues:
Noted as one of the least applauded speeches of Arroyo, the stateme nt of a "President being as strong as she wants to be" did not appeal to my fan cy. I actually found it uh...droll. However, i do agree with the proposals for the anti-terrorism law, which i thin k should be neatly put in place and all that needs to be done should be done. And to summarize what i thought of during the hour long speech; i was looking f orward to hearing something different--specifics-- and not the usual vision, mi ssion, expectations we get every SONA. I am just too tired of it. Coming from someone who just left the government for better things elsewhere, i am really just too tired of it.
Fellow journalist and blogger Manuel Quezon III cited Pinoy bloggers who made interesting comments about the Sona. Quezon found Philippine Science High School teacher Martin Perez' blog entry at Akomismo noteworthy. Perez writes:
Last year, the President debuted the ambitious âSuper Regionsâ infr astructure framework. This year she takes it ten steps further by bannering a n ew ideal â that we become a first world country in 20 years. And in her speech today, she outlines how she plans to contribute to that vision in her last thre e years. While I canât comment fully on the speech yet due to obvious reasons, I also wo uldnât want to say how unrealistic her vision is. Everyone deserves the chance to dream. However, I would like to raise an important point made by the Inquirerâs editorial today â that our country n eeds a leader, not a manager. We donât need just a checklist of accomplishments and goals; we need a direction, a vision and a dream. PGMA may dream all she w ill, but to get our people sold on that dream is another matter. Having our peo ple believe in her and work with her on this requires the talents and charisma of a leader that this manager of a President has yet to or may never even beco me. How she attempts to do this in the SONA will be one thing Iâm looking out f or.
Quezon then went on to link to an exercise Perez conducted in his class. He lat er posted the result in an entry, titled "What my students taught me about the Sona." Tingog.com lists 10 key highlights in the Sona. One h ighlight says:
The last part of her speech was full of hidden clues, agendas, and wink wink type of sentences. She said, âThey say the campaign for the next elec tion started on May 15, the day after the last. Fine. I stand in the way of no oneâs ambition. I only ask that no one stand in the way of the peopleâs well be ing and the nationâs progress. The time for facing off is over. The time is her e for facing forward to a better future our people so desperately want and rich ly deserve. Uulitin ko: Hindi ako sagabal sa ambisyon ninuman. But make no mist ake. I will not stand idly when anyone gets in the way of the national interest and tries to block the national vision. From where I sit, I can tell you, a Pr esident is always as strong as she wants to be.â
From the Bayanihan Blog Network, Sasha adds:
I get the feeling that the SONA here in the Philippines is much mor e closely watched by its citizens than in other countries. Thatâs because for b oth the administration and oppositionâand their supportersâPresident Gloria Mac apagal-Arroyoâs annual speech determines the points and issues to argue over. W hich usually boils down to question of whether the Philippines has improved und er her direction.
What struck me, however, was the observation made by Quezon. He says,
Body language says a lot. The President looked tired and drawn when she arrived at the Batasan; keeping control of things that day obviously wasn ât easy. Compared to last yearâs triumphalist, even gleeful, delivery, she seem ed to falter and stumble over the words a lot. And despite name-dropping like c razy, she garnered less applause than last year: and it was the loyal NBN peopl e who did the counting, mind you.
A-LIST blogger Robert Scoble posed this question recently , as he weighed on the impact of social networking service and other innovation s like Twitter on top bloggers.
I theorized that was due to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownceâs rise. Most of the non-A-list bloggers have been showing up on those places in droves. After all, if you are only writing a blog to tell y our family what your new kid is doing then something like Facebook is a lot bet ter for that.
A-list bloggers are the celebrities in blogosphere. They're today's newspaper c olumnists who write about almost anything. Scoble continues:
Something is happening over on Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce, though. Thatâs where the action is. Does it take away from blogging? No because IT IS bloggin g. Albeit 140 characters at a time.
My take: There are just too many blogs out there. As people produce more conten t, A-list bloggers included, people are starting to choose blogs they want to r ead. Content remains king. If the traffic of some A-list bloggers is falling, i t is perhaps time to rethink their content. In fact, I agree with one comment o n Scobleizer's blog that interest has tapered off, as more people get into blog ging. Or perhaps they're just too busy turning people into zombies on Facebook . Related entries:
GOT this from the blog of Abe Olandres a.k.a. yuga, who took this test and found out he's 87% addicted to blogging. How about you, what's your score?

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