Filipinos launch blog countdown to 2010

By Erwin Oliva INQUIRER.net A FORMER and a current Filipino journalist have created a blog countdown that a ims to gather the sentiments of Filipinos who are impatiently waiting for Presi dent Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to step down in 2010. "It's certainly not inspired by (Antonio) Trillanes IV. I'm not a fan. But yes, the Manila Peninsula incident did just happen to bring up the point again. Whe ther you believe in coups or not, everybody agrees that 2010 is a long way away ," said Bangkok-based journalist Roby Alampay in an interview, as he introduced the Ang Tagal Naman blog. "Ang Tagal Naman" is a Filipino phrase that roughly translates to "This is taki ng too long." Unlike Senator Antonio Trillanes IV and his supporters who led a siege at a hot el in Makati to ask for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's resignation, Alampa y and co-founder Data Tolentino-Canlas, a former TV journalist who now runs a m ultimedia production company with her husband, said the objective of the blog i s simple. "I just think it expresses the least common denominator of how people feel: Ang tagal. Yun lang (It's taking too long. Thatâs all). Whether that lulls people into counting sheep or its spurs them to reflect on what they could be doing un til then, is entirely up to them. But we all agree, don't we all, that 2010 is a long way away. Depending on how you look at the countdown, the very thought t hat Gloria will still be here for two and a half more years either moves you or it paralyzes you. Either way, it's exhausting. This is a just an expression of how I think a lot of us feel," he said. Alampay is also the executive director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, a non-government organiza tion based in Bangkok, Thailand. The blog countdown, hosted in Blogspot, also looks simple. It features a Flash animation countdown with a background of two bouncing pink creatures with yello w, flapping wings. Alampay said a downloadable widget of the countdown will be made available soon. "This widget can be placed by people in their own desktops and they can depress themselves even offline," the Bangkok-based journalist quipped. The blog has also been left open for comments. So far, the blog has reported more than 2,000 hits.