BOY, everybody is blogging — even the Kremlin.

Check out this article from The Washington Post.

Excerpt:

Pavel Danilin, a 30-year-old Putin supporter and blogger whose online icon is the fearsome robot of the “Terminator” movie, works for a political consulting company loyal to the Kremlin. He said he and his team, which included people from a youth movement called the Young Guard, quickly started blogging that day about a smaller, pro-Kremlin march held at the same time.

They linked to one another repeatedly and soon, Danilin said, posts about the pro-Kremlin march had crowded out all the items about the opposition march on the Yandex Web portal’s coveted ranking of the top five Russian blog posts.

FILIPINO blogger Ding Fuellos thought nobody would notice his simple act of extending his sympathies for the families who have lost a loved one during last week’s mall blast that killed 11 people.

“Everyone seems to be blogging about what happened, to the point of pointing fingers to every possible suspect in the country. Everyone is busy trying to know what the cause of the blast was. Every blogger is interested on the political angle, and its repercussions, too mechanical, too cognitive. But no one is paying attention to the mourners themselves. I would have written my own blog about this incident but what counted more was the fact that there seems to be no one expressing their sympathy to the families of the victims,” he said in an e-mail interview.

Fuellos, author of the Inkblots: Life Unraveled blog, has urged bloggers to offer their prayers and post a photo of a flower in their blogs.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

HERE’S an interesting entry from my erstwhile fellow CNET Asia tech blogger (before I gave up the gig to concentrate on managing INQUIRER.net’s blog network and my other responsibilities as gaming and multimedia editor) Ignatius Javellana, who wrote about the news coverage of the Glorietta 2 blast by both mainstream media and citizen journalists.

Excerpt:

It’s this type of speed and efficiency that frightens me. For one thing, back in the day, when events such as these would occur, it would take a while for actual coverage of the event to even reach those who would probably be only a few blocks away. Take the first EDSA Revolution back in 1986—I was still a kid then but it took hours for people to mobilize, and for the news to reach us. But when it happened again in 2001, within minutes I received an SMS and Inquirer.net (then Inq7.net) already had it on their headline. Because technology affords us this speed and efficiency—wireless connectivity, portable digital cameras, 3G cellphones and more—any newsworthy event can be broadcast in seconds.

And because of the growing popularity of blogging among Filipinos, news of this latest terrible event spread like wildfire. Already within an hour there were hundreds of blogs writing about the explosion, all with their own speculations and theories as to what happened. Hundreds of photos of the carnage were being sent over email, posted on photo blogs. And even better, actual, first-hand accounts of the incident began to spring up—from people who were right there when it happened to people who knew other people that were there even to people at the emergency room of the Makati Medical Center where most of the victims of the explosion were brought. And to think this happened during the afternoon, during a time when loads of people are still online, getting updates from friends’ and friends of friends’ blogs.

My friend Azrael was one such person. Within an hour of the explosion, he was watching the news and already posting images he’d taken from ANC on his blog. An hour after that, another guy on Multiply started talking about his first hand experience of the explosion, even posting images he’d taken himself while he was there.

Indeed, news travels with blinding speed in the age of online media and citizen journalism — and so does fear.

The Chinese have a curse: May you live in interesting times. We’re living in that kind of world right now.

APART from blog entries and photos of the Glorietta 2 blast, citizen journalists have also uploaded video clips to sites such as YouTube.

Here are two such clips from a concerned citizen that Tonyo Cruz uploaded to YouTube — thanks to Tonyo for the heads up.

Here’s the first clip.

And here’s the second clip.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

THE “LIKELY bomb” blast that has rocked the Glorietta 2 Mall is now reverberating in the Philippine blogosphere, with bloggers even posting photos from the blast site.

One such site is the Disney Cute Land blog on Multiply, which has several photos already uploaded.

User disneycute wrote:

Very tragic day….I was 40m away when it happened….Thank God for Ice Cream for it wasn’t for it…..You know what I mean….I decided to buy one when I was coming back to Park Square 2 walkway….P***shet nanginginig pa din ako hanggang ngyon kasi i saw debris falling down when it exploded and people were screaming and running coming out of the smoke……I dunno how many were killed….

Here’s the link to one of the photos he posted.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

BANGALORE, India–The mass blogging project, dubbed Blog Action Day, has attracted more than 20,000 blogs and close to 15 million readers, organizers reported.

Held on October 15, Blog Action Day was the first time bloggers worldwide united to blog about a single topic: the environment.

“Measuring an initiative like Blog Action Day is difficult. In 2007 we asked bloggers to register their blogs and a rough count of RSS (really simple syndication) subscribers. It is worth remembering that RSS subscriber numbers are only one half of the readership of a blog. Many and in some cases all of a blog’s readership will simply be visitors to the site. The real reach of Blog Action Day is far greater than the number below,” the organizers said on their website.

The organizers said 20, 603 blogs participated, and 23, 327 blog posts were found on a Google Blog search. Meanwhile, RSS readers that supported the global blogging initiative reached 14,631,038.

Blog Action Day also generated media buzz and support from the United Nations Environmental Programme and European Union Commissioner for the Environment Stavros Dimas who held a special live Internet chat to coincide with Blog Action Day.

In the Philippines, a Google Blog search search of the term “‘Blog Action Day AND Philippines” showed more than 50 blogs joining the global action.

BLOG Action Day, a global mass action among online diary sites or weblogs, has gathered more than 15,000 blogs and millions of readers, organizers said Monday.

Established to encourage people to blog about a chosen topic for a day, Blog Action Day is a form of “people power” in action that was conceptualized for the Internet, they said.

Choosing the environment as this year’s topic, Blog Action day organizers say they hope they can make a difference by steering the “global conversation” towards important issues.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

A PHILIPPINE Science High School social studies teacher, known to his students as “Sir Martin,” believes teachers can use blogs or other web-based tools to connect to students.

“Blogging has allowed me to connect with my students this deeply,” Martin Perez said in a speech he made during a blogging forum organized to gather teachers who blog.

A blogger before he became a high school teacher, Perez admitted that blogging is not easy. In fact, it meant extra teaching load.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

A GROUP of teachers will be talking about blogs as alternative tools for education.

The Bloggers Kapihan has invited two well-known teachers who use “old” and new tools of web publishing to extend learning beyond the classroom. Sharing their experiences are Martin Perez of the Philippine Science High School and Danny Arao of the Department of Journalism of the UP College of Mass Communications.

More details:

The BK Crew presents Bloggers’ Kapihan 2.0: Blog Ed 101. This time around, let us tackle the importance of blogging in learning, learning in blogging and blogging as a tool for alternative education. The event will be held on October 13, 2007, 1:30 p.m. at the Ramon Magsaysay High School in Quezon City.

Blog Ed 101 is in cooperation with the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT), a nationwide network of educators from different schools, colleges and universities.

Tonchi Tinio, chairperson of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers, will also dive into the controversial CyberEducation Project of the Department of Education during the event.

REMEMBER, Oct. 15 is Blog Action Day. Join thousands of bloggers around the world in uniting for the environment.

Here’s a video clip courtesy of ReVampTV.com.

And read Erwin Oliva’s previous blog post.