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

Here’s a compelling reason why celebrities–entertainers, politicians, and other well-known individuals–should start their own blogs.

About three years back, I was checking out the ‘Net for information on Marieton Pacheco. She was then an up-and-coming media personality, having covered the Malacañang (the Philippine equivalent of the White House) beat as a rookie TV reporter, then the Erap Estrada impeachment trial, and then moving on to host a youth-oriented morning show. What’s interesting is that instead of her studio profiles and company links appearing on the search engines, there was this one blog that was consistenty on top. And if I were Ms. Pacheco, I might not like the contents of the blog much.

While the author of the Elephant Still Missing blog has long stopped updating the site, his fictional encounters with Marieton Pacheco still tops Google search. Let me quote a few lines.

Marieton Pacheco and I are neighbours in Kamias, and I bump into her occasionally in the most public places. The most recent one was in the Kamias Lavandera Ko branch, the one beside the video rental place in the Korean building. I was lugging my laundry in a large black plastic bag that people normally use for bringing-out garbage. My laundry’s at least two weeks old, and must’ve been six kilos heavy, possibly eight, even. The bag was heavy and too big for me to look over. I couldn’t see Marieton so I bumped into her and her basket of undies.

The laundry attendants were giggling like catholic schoolgirls when I dropped my bag and helped Marieton pick up her undies from the floor. Apparently, she just walked in before I did, about to hand her basket of undies to one of the attendants, when I bumped into her from nowhere and spilled her undies on the floor by accident. All this I figured from the unwashed-look that her undies had. They were still rolled-around and curled-up along the sides, like she had just used them four hours ago, still looking like they did the last time she tossed them into the basket.

Is It For Real?

When I first read the article, I thought this was a real-world encounter. But then upon further reading (and judging from the nature of the site), I realized it was a literary site. In fact, it was part 2 of the author’s account, where he claimed to be Ms. Pacheco’s boyfriend, that made me start to look twice into the nature of the site.

Marieton Pacheco and I are on an air-conditioned bus to Novaliches, to meet her parents who financed her way through four years in MassComm. It is a sunny Saturday afternoon outside the window, the sort that invites bearded street preachers to bring the Word of the Lord into air-conditioned bus aisles. Our bus is parked near where People’s Park used to be. Marieton is holding my hand, and I hers. Her grip is firm, like a little girl holding her brother’s hand as they make their way inside a Star City funhouse. I’m contemplating about tickling the inside of her palm with my middle-finger when she asks me about my relationship with my father. “Are the two of you close?” she asks me. She waits for my answer with a pout.

Readers who are not as inquisitive, though, might not realize this.

Search Engine Benefits and Being Part of the Discussion

So why should celebrities blog? Simple. Search engine optimization. If I were a respectable young lady who is a media personality, I would certainly not want for-mature-audiences-only stories involving me to be topping search engine results (though I think the Marieton Pacheco stories are well-written and still in good taste, except probably if readers have very playful minds)–more especially so if these were true stories. If I were an incumbent politician looking into re-election, I wouldn’t want claims of my being corrupt being spread online and making it to the number one spots in the search engines.

Or worse, some individual with malicious intent could just set up a blog under another’s name (even signing up for an appropriate domain name) pretending to be that person, but writing material that’s potentially harmful.

The same goes for just about any person who wants to maintain his or her integrity online. While you cannot control what material about you gets published online, you can at least show the people who you really are and what you really think by writing your own blog. And if ever people publish stuff about you that you don’t like, you can always comment on their sites/blogs, and you can always publish your response on your own blog.

This is why big companies like Microsoft and IBM have let their employees blog. Blogs give a sense of honesty and transparency. Readers would rather read accounts and opinions from a real person rather than a press release, which while well thought-of, would not feel as honest.

So why should celebrities blog? To protect their identities online, that’s why.

Oh, and it can be quite fun, too.

I was unable to post about the Isulong SEOPH awarding night earlier because of the extended power outage we had in our part of town. I thought power would’ve already been restored, but it turns out we lost power again after coming back home, and it wouldn’t return until two days after.

Caren and I generally had a good time, save for some not-so-pleasant observations of some people (don’t ask). The food and refreshments were okay (Jason treated me to a pre-event beer. Thanks Jason!), but the venue was a bit cramped. I think Marc wanted people to have more intimate space to interact, so he chose not to set the event up at a larger place.

I was surprised to see my site top a Philippines-only Google query on the keyword “Problogging”.

I was even more surprised to see the J Spot come up on page one (rank #4) for a generic search on “problogging”, right there with problogger.net, problogging.com, bloggingpro.com (which I write for, incidentally) and technorati.com’s list of items tagged with the problogging keyword.

I hope this is an indicator of great things to come for this problogger and tech evangelist wannabe! At the very least, I’m hoping writers and aspiring probloggers would find my writings helpful and inspirational enough for their own problogging careers or businesses.

As I write this, there’s only a week and a few hours left to go for the Isulong SEOPH contest. This is basically your usual search engine ranking contest, where the ones at the top of Google search by the end of the duration for a certain keyword would be awarded the prizes.

It finally happened. jangelo.i.ph is now no longer under my control–or at least a considerable level of control, like before. It has now been auto-upgraded to Calliope version 2, and I no longer have direct access to the base CMS. This is one of the very reasons I decided to move into my own domain and host my own blogging software back in April of 2006–I wanted to maintain control. The prospect of an upgrade had been looming at that time so I decided it was time to gradually let go.

For a while, the most part of 2005, I was part of the team that developed i.PH into what it is now (Calliope version 2)–or so I think–but it’s now time to say goodbye. I actually said my goodbyes earlier, when I first considered moving to racoma . net, and then eventually to racoma.com.ph.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to complete the move within the weekend, and finally say bye bye to jangelo.i.ph. Well, I’m not totally abandoning the site, but it’s more like keeping it as archives. You do know why I’m contemplating this move. I had been part of the i.PH development team during my short stint with dotPH, and I’d been privvy to the planned upgrades. Well, I can say they’re cool and all that, but still I prefer to have full control over my blog installation. And I’m not so interested in friendster-type social networking schemes. I’d rather go for good design and usability. And you do know that by “design” I do not mean only “style.”

Why?

In designing and conceptualizing a blog and blogging platform, I have a few ideas, and they basically revolve around usability (take out the clutter and the uglifying elements). Snazzy features are good, but they’re not essential. If the core functions of an application cannot easily be learned and used, then that degrades the value of the application. If a site cannot be navigated efficiently and effectively, then that just makes the user want to hit that CLOSE button as soon as possible.

Calliope is now no longer a publishing/blogging platform. It has evolved (or mutated?) into a mashup of social networking, publishing, and multimedia linking/hosting/aggregating applications. First and foremost, that’s not what I’m looking for. If you’ve read any good Web app and Web 2.0 ebooks lately, you would’ve realized that it’s the small, independent, but very useful apps that succeed today, not those that try to do everything. And frankly, I think it has lost much of the potential I originally thought it had. For one, there’s the timing factor–when you make people wait for so long for you to tweak something to perfection, chances are they’ll move on to the next great thing.

And may I mention that the upgrade broke all the permalinks and search-engine optimizations I had done to my jangelo.i.ph? That sucks.

Some observations

You’ve been pressing me for a review, Mikey. Yuga has posted his on PTB. Now here are some of _my_ initial thoughts, which I’ve held off writing about and publishing for quite some time, until now that I realized I’ve lost jangelo.i.ph already.

I wouldn’t delve much into the features and details of the new-and-improved Calliope, but I’m writing about the general feel, as I see it.

* Usability. Usability isn’t quite the strongest suit of Calliope. I’m an advanced user and I had a hard time learning and getting used to the original Calliope version 1 concept–and I had to, because it was then part of my job. Now I’m having a hard time adjusting to the new version 2 concept. And for all the snazzy features the upgraded site now has, users still cannot rearrange sidebar contents using a drag-and-drop interface–something the WordPress Widgets plugin has allowed for quite some time now. In fact, one can _not_ rearrange sidebar contents at all with Calliope, as originally promised. Sigh.

* Speed. Sadly, not everyone is on broadband in this country. I’m one of the more fortunate people who enjoy 512 Kbps plus speeds at the comfort of my own home, and I’ve got a relatively new computer. However, my patience still gets tested whenever I try to load up my old i.PH site and most other i.PH sites, and also when I try to change some aspect of the layout using the Calliope interface. That’s why I preferred directly editing the code in plaintext. That may be old school, but gets things done faster for me. However, even novices, for whom the GUI-updating mechanism of i.PH was intended, might find the wait too long for comfort. Hey, I’ve been hearing reports that i.PH sites take five effing minutes to load on some dialup ISPs. And I don’t think it’s the actual connection speed that’s the problem, since loading times still go past my patience threshold even on broadband. The sites are just plain heavy. Period.

* Flexibility. The reason I wanted direct access to the CMS (then Blog:CMS and now WordPress) is because I’m not just any regular blog user. I want to be able to edit my blog the way I want it, from using custom layouts to adding custom design elements, to doing away with the crappy, heavy sIFR fonts and being able to implement other basic stuff. I understand not everyone is comfortable with doing this, but I do remember direct access to the themes’ code was supposed to be part of the plan (at least for paying clients). But then again, I think it’s the Calliope front-end that’s supposed to be the selling factor of i.PH so this would probably never happen. Also, there are a host of other customizations I had on my old site that I was hoping would be part of the default features–basically on-site SE optimizations, and that leads to the following point.

* SEO. I’m not really a hardcore SEO fan, but I do believe that on-site optimization helps usability as much as it helps SEO, particularly in terms of navigability and structure. For instance, I cite two points here.

* Permalinks. Static links are important. Make ‘em too long (like the loooong alphanumeric ones some ASP-based CMSes put out) or too short (like the default WordPress ?p=123, etc.) or too non-descriptive and both the search engines and users would have a difficulty finding your content. Friendly permalinks (using .htaccess rewrites) are just a click away on WordPress. And here’s one really big gripe I have with the Calliope upgrade–all my permalinks have been changed (since Blog:CMS and WordPress use different permalink structures by default). Now all the pages indexed by Google, Yahoo! and other engines would just direct readers to the frontpage and not the actual article.

* The title tag. I have a thing against blog posts and articles that don’t display the exact article title on my browser’s title bar. It’s bad enough that search engines get to index your content using just your blog title on the results (and not the more relevant post title), but it’s also bad when you’re bookmarking a single post. Fixing this is as simple as using the proper tag on each static or archive page. Search engines love this. People also do! It’s easier to find when you have a ton of windows or tags open, and it’s definitely better when bookmarking locally or on social bookmarking sites.

A web app is only as powerful as a user can use it.

It all boils down to whether one is comfortable with using the Web app. And sadly, I’m not comfortable with Calliope as much as I try to _want_ myself to like it.

Maybe when we get to doing the FGD that i.PH has been asking about for quite some time now, we can get to resolve these things.

I’m still keeping jangelo.i.ph alive, though–but just as as an archive site for my old content.