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

David Rohde, a journalist, was kidnapped in Afghanistan, and his employer, the New York Times, has tried to keep this information from going public for the past nine months. Some Wikipedia editors had been persistent in adding the kidnap information to his profile, but this was thought to potentially endanger his life.

Would you withhold information to help save a life?

My readers must think I’m a lazy blogger. Most of the time, you would see Twitter updates filling the front page of the J Spot. It’s because of the twitter tools plugin I’ve installed. It allows me to automatically publish tweets anywhere on the site (currently at the bottom bar, for instance), and publish daily summaries of tweets.

But the lazy blogger I am, I usually just get to update the site with real blog posts every other day or so. The rest of the time, it’s just the twitter updates. This made me think. If I keep the twitter updates, I benefit from the added keywords I post via Twitter. The updates also make for substitutes to blog posts, since I wrote them, anyway, and a collection of tweets are actually micro-blog entries.

But then again, I’m in doubt whether the tweets I post make for good substitutes to actual blog posts.

So an alternative I’m thinking of now is reviving my personal blog, the J Spotter (which has gone offline for some reason) just for the purpose of hosting my daily twitter summaries. I would then retain the current updates on the footer of this blog.

What do you think?

Here’s an article I wrote for the UP Law-ISP’s iBlog special publication this year. It is largely based on other Social Media-related web content and blog posts I have written through the years.

iBlog 3, the 3rd Philippine Blogging Summit, will be held on the 13th and 14th of April at the UP School of Economics, in Diliman. I will be speaking in the Blogging and Journalism panel.

Social Media: Changing the Way We Publish, Consume and Share Information

Social Media is one of the most profound products of the 21st century. It has changed the face of publishing, marketing, public relations, and yes, even media itself. Social Media is about the empowerment of you, the user. It is a paradigm shift in how the World Wide Web is structured, and how we publish, consume and share information today and in the years to come.

Blogs are but a part of the big picture. Social Media, after all, encompasses a variety of mediums, which includes just about anything that concerns being social and being able to communicate. You also have podcasts, wikis, social bookmarkers, social networks, social news sites, and even online games.

However wide the coverage of social media, it boils down to five basic concepts: participation, openness, conversation, community and connectedness.