Year: 2007

Twenty Filipinos who have never met, coming from different walks of life, will share images and stories in one traveling notebook.

All I have to say is … look closely 🙂

Compare the number of technology, anime and political bloggers to the number of financial analysis and wealth management blogs in the Philippines. No comparison. Personal finance, I feel, is a topic best left written by people who have the “K” to write about managing wealth because they actually practice it.

Welcome to Money Smarts, the personal finance blog of INQUIRER.net. This blog is especially useful for yuppies who want to save, actually have the capacity to save, but don’t end up saving because the best idea they can think of is placing their savings in a savings account. (I’m going to change my mode to the first person now because I’m one of these “hopeless yuppies” who are dying to know the best way to manage and accumulate wealth)

This blog is for those who want to know the ingredients, who want to be inspired by other Pinoys who give the rat race a kick on the butt, and for those who are already financially independent but want to coach some people along the way. This is a blog for Pinoys who want to be money-smart, not just rich, and for Pinoys who understand that the best way to focus on that goal is to help each other.

Money Smarts is written by the famous Salve Duplito. What I love about this blog is that it is going to become more of a conversation than an article piece as Salve encourages readers to become case studies in her blog posts:

I am also going to put so-called financial tips under the microscope and report to you if they really work in Money Myth Busters. (Do you have a tip you want me to test? E-mail me.)

Lastly, I’m looking for an individual (better if a couple) who wants to discuss his financial goals with me and, reality TV-style, record in this blog his journey to that goal with the aid of financial planning experts. (If you want to be this person, e-mail me!)

You can reach Salve’s public mail at lightdream at gmail dot com

Minic Rivera, of The Blogging Times fame, has a new pet project. Here is the press release he sent:

Minic Media LLC today announced the launching of The Pinoy.TV, an online video festival based on themes that hopes to introduce the Phliippines globally through online videos.

Every month a new theme is open for submission, with entries up for ratings from site visitors. Entries should not be longer than 10 minutes and should interpret the theme.

“We are after the interpretation of themes because it is what should tell the story about Filipinos,” Minic Rivera, founder of The Pinoy.TV said.

“I am a Filipino” kicks off the festival as theme for March. At the end of every month, the winner gets $100 as prize.

“It is my hope to introduce my roots to the global community the way it should be seen. At the same time, it is wish to see Filipinos getting into online videos,” Rivera added.

I had written a more detailed explanation of the project at Blog Addicts. Over the past few weeks I had come to know Minic as one of the nicest people on the Internet. He is also one of the examples of how intertwined my life is with the work I do as he also writes the new Inside Online Video blog of b5media (PRESS RELEASE here) and was also involved in some capacity with Inquirer.net (formerly INQ7.net) before he went abroad.

My getting to know Minic is a classic example of how small the blogosphere really is. Prior to this, I had only heard his name in search engine whispers and blogrolls and now we share online snack moments with our favorite junk food.

The Pinoy.TV is also a sponsor for the Philippine Blog Awards happening this March 31 2007.

With the rise of Google Apps and several other online productivity applications like Picnik (online photo editing software), you can now be more efficient with your work since more often than not, this generation is online most of the time.

But you know what?

I just had a bright idea.

Bear with me here and tell me if you follow what I’m about to say.

Wouldn’t it be really cool if these online applications could be translated into a package where you could use them even if you are NOT connected to the Internet? This “offline office suite” would be really handy in places where there is no Internet connection. You’d be able to write documents, do spreadsheets and edit photos without the need to go online. Isn’t that cool? I wonder why no one ever thought of that in the first place.

Now that’s a revolution!

*sarcasm mode off*

EDIT: For those who don’t get my sarcasm …

I’ve been using Web based applications since the launch of Meebo, Protopage and Writely (which was eventually bought out). Free apps such as this one serve as an alternative to Open Office but with the way the Internet works here in the Philippines, you’d be in for a lot more inconvenience than anything as consumer DSL can go down like an unexpected bowel movement. And as Veronica Belmont said in the last episode of TWiT, it is just so hard to re-learn another Office Suite when MS Office is just so engraved into our system already.

I steer away from Open Office for one traumatic reason. It saves files by default using a proprietary format which renders them harder to open in a non-techie environment. I had many scares as articles were submitted for editing using the Open Office extension and none of the editors had Open Office. The poor editorial assistant had to resave the file in a MS Word document format and resend, thus wasting everyone’s time. So there. No biggie in truth, but when you’re surrounded by people who are most familiar with MS Word (a microcosm example of why Microsoft still wins in the corporate environment), I don’t want to take risks.