racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

Sorry folks if you don’t see your comments on the comment threads. I had to revert to an older version of the blog’s database, and I had to manually re-publish the posts since January 10th. WP 2.10 was giving me headaches so I downgraded!

Actually, I haven’t been able to fix the behavior of the tag archives yet.

Please feel free to post comments.

At least that’s what the Blog Parteeh! 2007 tagline says. Sounds like a cool event anyone into blogging would be interested in going to. Time for a little get-together offline.

The details are here, the list of sponsors is here. I’m actually part of—or was once part of—some of the groups and companies sponsoring the event (namely the Blog Herald, Enthropia and the PinoyTechBlog team).

The parteeh (Why can’t we just spell it as “party”? SEO reasons? Or was the blogparty.com domain already taken? Heheh!) will be this coming Saturday, the 27th of January from 2:00 to 8:00 p.m. Venue is 6th Floor (Poolside Area), Classica Tower 2 Condominium, HV dela Costa St., Salcedo Village, Makati City. Why, oh why, can’t blogger meet-ups be organized in Quezon City or somewhere near my place?!?

See you there!

Update: Sponsor list is included below.

This event is sponsored by: Sheero Media Solutions, MyJournal Philippines, FeedText, Inc., Migs Paraz, A Bugged Life, The Blog Herald, b5media blog network, About My Recovery, Pinoy.Tech.Blog, Enthropia, Inc., Krispy Kreme Philippines, GMA New Media, Awesome Philippines, Codamon.com, Boracay.com.ph, Recipes.com.ph, WebMaster.com.ph, Bouncing Red Ball, Bo Sanchez, Microwarehouse Inc.

BlogParteeh07 Donors:



Marc Javellana, Bubba Gump, e-YellowPages, Adobe User Group – Philippines, Weddings @ Work, Google Philippines, Hinge Inquirer Publications

Oh, the instructions say I should include my email address. Well, it’s in th e sidebar, or I can be reached here.

When Abe Olandres was appointed to the helm of the blog herald and subsequently took me in to help with management (long story—you can email me if you want to learn about it), several fellow Filipino bloggers lauded it as an accomplishment. Some considered it a “Filipino takeover” of the blogosphere. In fact, it was even covered by Inq7 on its tech pages, which is a big thing, considering inq7 is among the most popular of Philippine sites. Coverage in inq7 spikes up traffic, and is akin to being DUGG frontpage (though not on such a massive scale).

Why the fuss? We didn’t even purchase the Blog Herald ourselves. (Don’t ask me how much the purchase price was. If I told you, I’d have to kill you.) We were merely trusted enough by the new set of owners to manage editorial, marketing, and technical aspects of the blog.

Still, this is a big deal, in my opinion. It’s an accomplishment not only for Abe and myself. It’s another feather on the caps of the Pinoy Blogger—and I mean this as a collective. By this I mean it’s not by far the only accomplishment that Filipino bloggers have achieved in the international realm that is the blogosphere. There have been many others before us.

Let me point you to Abe’s recent post about 2007 as the year of the Pinoy Blogger.

See, when I took the position over at Blog Herald, there was quite a mix of ruckus and excitement. It was in the news (well, our news) and some people were asking me why there was so much excitement in our little part of the world about the development.

I explained that our generation (i.e. Filipinos) have become known around the globe as any of of these types of people—domestic helper, nurses, sea men, care-giver, or call center agents. In short, we’re looked down by most as cheap 3rd-world laborers. I have aunts that are working as nurses in the US for decades, uncles, cousins on a cargo ship at sea, relatives who are domestic helpers (OFW is the proper term) in Singapore; HK, older cousins who graduated as nurses but ended up as care-givers in UK and even more younger cousins who are now waiting for their Nursing Boars exam results. So, a fellow Filipino taking over a top position in a pre-dominantly western niche is real news.

It’s in response to Joey Alarilla’s article on inq7 about a media revolution in the Philippines not happening in mainstream, mass media, but in new media—particularly the blogosphere.

I donit think it’s sensationalistic to say that Filipinos are taking over. At the risk of using a horrid cliche, I believe we are now seeing the tipping point for Filipino presence in the blogosphere. This is another arena where Filipinos can compete globally—and succeed.

One point that I didn’t elaborate on in my CNET Asia post is that the Filipino bloggers I cited are all based in the Philippines, which is significant given the brain drain and the feeling of our countrymen that they have no choice but to seek greener pastures abroad.

Knowledge is Power

It’s all about redistribution of capital. Arguably, most of the worldis riches in terms of financial resources still lies in the hands of the developed countries, the first world—mostly the west (I am an economist, yet I speak in terms of “first world” and such, even though they’re considered obsolete). However, in this Information Age, the foremost capital is Knowledge (with a big K). And arguably, we Filipinos—and others in developing economies—are every bit as capable as those in the developed world to develop this new capital.

I say redistribution, because we suddenly find ourselves capable of wielding this new power, wherein previously one would require material possessions and riches to be considered powerful. Knowledge is, after all, something that you don’t need machines to produce nor dig deep underground into, nor use heavy machinery to forge. Knowledge itself, is that that creates value and even material wealth for the enjoyment of people.

Of course, it is something that also has to be developed and nurtured (and need I say how important a good education system is?). And successful blogging is an offshoot of having the adequate skills and knowledge—the ability to think critically, and the ability to communicate effectively.

For now, I’m thankful that I belong to these exciting times.

So does 2007 hold good promise for the Filipino Blogger? Well, I do hope so! And Iim going to do my part to make sure of that.

The last year has come and gone, and if you’re still in that holiday mood, I can sympathize with you. I hardly got any rest during the holidays because of all the traveling to and fro, and the events/parties here and there. It’s the second week of January and I feel like I still have a hangover. And I didn’t even drink that much!

I think a good waker-upper would be a good spring cleaning—and for those of us whose work (and personal lives) revolves around the computer and getting online, that means starting fresh. Here are some things I’ll be doing to clean up that pile of mess on my desk, so to speak.

1. Restart the computer. I’m a sucker for hibernate and sleep whether for laptops or desktops. Both my PowerBook and Windows laptops have been up since late November (only sleeping or hibernating in between use), and my ongoing work is still cluttered across the machines’ respective screens. I wonder which is more productive—not having to reopen each and every document you need to work on every power cycle, or having too much stuff open it becomes information overload.


2. Clean up my email inbox. Gmail says I have 19,000 unread items on my inbox. Of course many of these are spam mail I just ignored over the course of two years since I got a Gmail account (too lazy to hit the “Report Spam” button!). I could probably just leave them in Inbox view and keep using my “For Reply” and “To Do” labels for those messages for urgent action. After all, that’s what Gmail’s threaded interface and almost-unlimited capacity are supposed to be about, right? On the other hand, it might be more sensible to send these all to Archive so I won’t have to feel overwhelmed everytime I look at a very full inbox view.



3. Work on those draft blog entries. My blog drafts area consists of unfinished blog posts, duplicate entries (WordPress saves renamed drafts as new entries altogether) and posts I finished but had second thoughts about publishing (due to various reasons). These are most likely to be outdated a few weeks or even days after being saved to drafts, so it’s time to purge the draft folder and start fresh.



4. Backup important files and delete unnecessary ones. It’s time to save those digital photos and iTunes libraries onto CD or some online-backup facility. You never know when things can screw up and you end up with a dead hard drive—arguably, the data is more valuable than the hardware itself. As for deleting unnecessary ones, files and documents tend to build up in the course of time, and these can fill up your hard drive pretty quickly. I usually fall victim to my own disorganized-ness, which usually leads to shortages in space and even virtual memory.



5. Run maintenance software on my computers. I recommend doing a virus-scan and spyware-scan, and all those other performance-enhancing clean-ups like clearing of caches, defragmenting (if that’s still applicable) and the like. I recommend Mac Janitor for OS X, which lets you manually start maintenance tasks that your Mac is supposed to do daily, weekly, and monthly.



6. Actually go clean up that pile of mess on my desk. Being online most of the time doesn’t mean my physical surroundings don’t affect my productivity. I have a ton of books, tools, wires and gadgetry on my desk that I can probably do without. The still-to-be-used stuff should go to the drawers (which need cleaning up themselves). And those for disposal go straight to the trash or recycling bin.

Of course, this mostly applies to me, and I’d appreciate a little help if you have something to pitch in.

Image source

Happy new year, everyone! The turn of the year is quit busy for me. Lots of celebrations attended (family gatherings) and lots of work done (and still to be done).

Here’s something to do for the new year. If you use WordPress to run your blogs, you’d better do some fixes, as an XSS vulnerability has recently been discovered. The vulnerability entails insertion of code into WordPress core files by passing some arguments onto the URL.

You can check out my post at the Blog Herald to learn what’s actually involved, and how to fix it.