Editor’s note: With the author’s permission, we’ve updated this entry to clarify some terms.

By Carlo S. Ople*

Over the past few weeks, there have been talks going around on what advertising agencies and marketers should expect from bloggers. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time now, and I think I have enough examples and put enough thought into this to publish it on this blog.

Companies who want to tap bloggers should be aware of the different kinds of bloggers. Not all bloggers can influence your target market, and not all of them can have the same level of interaction with their readers.

I’ve generally defined the types of bloggers into these 4 categories: Value, Hobby, Journal and Google. There’s a fifth type which I’ll share at the end of the post. Note that these categories can overlap, and in fact some of the best bloggers have stricken a balance on how to be all 4. However, these are rare bloggers. Most of the bloggers right now just fall to either 1 or 2 of these categories.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net

How do you create blog? What copyright rules should be followed? How can you earn from blogging?

Blogger and editor of Digital Filipino Janette Toral hopes to answer these questions in her latest book “Blogging from Home,” which she launched at the recent Internet and Mobile Marketing Association of the Philippines Summit in Makati City.

Toral, who has been blogging for the last five years, said that she has been thinking of coming out with a book on blogging since 2006 but realized she needed to understand the blogging community more in particular its dynamics.

“I hope to share how [people] could make a presence in the blogosphere and perhaps earn a little, without having to be so gung ho,” Toral said in an interview.

Watch this video interview with Toral.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

By Abigail Kwok
INQUIRER.net

IT was not until two years ago that I got hooked into blogging.

Before that, I found it absurd that people would post their thoughts and their daily activities for all the world to see. I found it even more absurd that people would post on their blogs yet change the preferences to private so other people will not read the entries. I thought, “Why create an online diary if you are not going to make it public anyway?”

So I shunned the idea of creating my own blog, even as my friends maintained either a personal website or an account with a blog site. But everything changed two years ago. My friend sent me a link to her blog, and I decided to check it out. Within minutes, I found myself absorbed in reading her blog and was amused at how many people gave their inputs to her entries. It was more like an online community where you can share your thoughts with your friends and they get to share their points of view as well.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

GOT this via TechCrunch.

Here’s a nifty tool you can add to your blog courtesy of Sketchcast.com.

So what the heck is sketchcasting? I’ll let them explain it themselves — which they do by using the Sketchcast tool itself.