By Erwin Oliva
INQUIRER.net

A FORMER and a current Filipino journalist have created a blog countdown that aims to gather the sentiments of Filipinos who are impatiently waiting for President 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. Whether 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 taking too long.”

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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.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has started blogging.

In its first post, the Canadian official writes:

With this tool, we hope to make the activities of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner more accessible to Canadians and to increase contact between the Office and Canadians interested about privacy issues and legislation.

As an Officer of Parliament, the Privacy Commissioner has a mandate to protect the privacy rights of individuals and promote the privacy protections available to Canadians.

By Erwin Oliva
INQUIRER.net

FILIPINO tech blogger Abe Olandres wanted to jump out of his seat and explain to senators the technical aspects of the controversial national broadband network (NBN) project, as he watched the live broadcast of Thursday’s Senate hearing.

In his recent entry, Olandres wrote:

[I've] been watching the live broadcast of the Senate hearing over the National Broadband Network Project for the last 7 hours and I must say that despite the politics behind the issue, I was more frustrated with the Senators asking repetitive questions and making non-sense tech-related conclusions (that goes to Manuel “Mar” Roxas and Richard “Dick” Gordon).

Olandres was among the local bloggers who are weighing in on the issues surrounding the NBN project.

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SOME Filipino bloggers did not mince words, as they blogged about the recent State 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 writes:

Things are not definitely getting better. Seriously, if things were booming and zooming and talk of all this economic activity was real then i wouldn’t be holed up here in Dubai, of all places, if the prospects of all economic progress are pointing to the Philippines.

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WE also had our share of using technology such as short message service (SMS) or text messaging to organize a mass protest against then President Joseph Estrada. But imagine if blogging was widely available at the time. We would have seen Filipinos liveblogging about it.

In China where political bloggers are censored, the recent mass protest in Xiamen against the planned construction of a toxic chemical plant dangerously close to the city core on June 1 was seen as a landmark move for China’s leading independent blogger’s collective Bullog, Global Voices wrote.

Excerpt:

With a media blackout on news of the demonstration, the time, location and target turnout of one million people were spread almost exclusively by SMS, bbs postings and on blogs. The government was able to stop the SMS from spreading for several days and nearly all bbs webmasters and blog service providers were swift to delete any related discussion, leaving Bullog members free to go on to post several in-depth posts this past week looking at various angles of the situation, including one of of the key public figures lobbying against the PX plant, Southern Metropolis Daily columnist and Xiamen resident Lian Yue.

Several other Bullogers took it a step further by attending the demonstration in person, leaving one at home to post their SMS live updates straight onto Bullog, giving it a national exclusive as to what was happening minute-by-minute down on the ground which, by the afternoon of the 1st, had attracted enough readers that Bullog’s host server was left unable to keep up. With Bullog inaccessible, the live SMScast was temporarily moved here, from where many of the below discussions mixed in with the live reporting were taken.

OK, so what should be the rules for diplomats who blog?

Ian Proud, a 38-year-old British diplomat in Bangkok, caused a furor with his blog that shared what he thought were “harmless” stories about his life in Thailand.

Here’s an excerpt from the BBC News story:

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A SINGAPOREAN agency announced Monday it was looking into extending regulation to new media, which includes websites and blogs, Agence-France Presse reports.

It says the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore is currently seeking public reaction to its Media Market Conduct Code. Implemented in 2003, the Code regulates the print and broadcast media, including the newspapers and television. But with the emergence of new media, the agency feels it is time to revisit the Code.

Excerpt:

“The media landscape has changed since 2003, and a good example is the adoption of different business models by traditional and new media players,” said Ling Pek Ling, director for media policy at MDA.

“With the emergence of new media markets and the introduction of HDTV and IPTV services, it is timely for us to look at how we can update our code to meet the needs of the media industry,” she said.

The story notes that the MDA is “responsible for the country’s censor board.”

It ends:

In a country where all local broadcasting outlets are government-owned and newspapers are expected to be “partners” with the government, many people have turned to websites and blogs for alternative views of the city-state’s political and social issues.

I remember writing a similar “futuristic” article about supposed automated elections in 2004. But this recent blog entry from James Jimenez, the official spokesperson of the Commission on Elections, is simply hilarious. He writes:

The widespread acceptance of modernized voting processes spurred a change in campaigning strategies as well.

The internet was proven to be an effective campaign vector in 2007 and by 2010, podcasts have all but replaced traditional broadcast advertising. Podcasts are cheaper to produce, and persist far longer than 30-second spots on tv and radio. Newspaper ads are taken over by on-line advertising.

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