Happy weekend! OK so here we go — I LOLED at most of the entries till about 2:00AM and decided to call it a night before I did a last glance this morning. Great entries — especially the cheezy ones (paging entries of ‘Shiela’)!
Also, sayang ang entry ni Third — he has something going, but I felt it wasn’t witty enough (and perhaps too long). But good job pa rin!:
Search. Add. Confirm. Poke. Poke. Poke. They changed relationship status. Engaged. Married. Guy forgot to send gifts on Farmville. Single.
Anyway, this was fun guys! Time to announce the winner! Congratulations to TheGreatMorinda for her short but sweet entry:
They had a baby. They got married. They fell in love.
This is a good pambawi as TheGreatMorinda almost made it in the last contest and appears to have fans among the other contestants. 🙂
Congratulations to everyone who joined! Enjoy the payday weekend!
EDIT: Because I believe in localization, the vernacular tagline is now PHILIPPINES: BONGGA KA DIVE!
As a diver, I am biased. Beyond the traditional way of viewing the Philippines as the “land of the smiles” and having some of the “best hospitality in the world” and “great beaches” one of the recreational activities that isn’t highlighted is the SCUBA diving. Sorry if I’ve been hankering about this for weeks but if there’s anything that the Philippines has that most countries don’t have — we have the best reefs in the world. We are a world class diving destination in the same way that the Galapagos, Palau, the Great Barrier and Indonesia are as well. But we aren’t just “one of those” other diving sites. The Philippines is situated at the center of the center of the Coral Triangle, one of the centers of biodiversity in the world. We’re world class. It’s all just beneath the surface.
This is an idea I’ve been bugging some dive friends for months and since the recent ruckus about the DOT campaign, I’d like to lend some expert advice on how to do the following:
1. Promote the Philippines as a world class diving site
2. Organically grow the diving community
3. Contribute to the knowledge of tracking and recording marine life for their preservation
Concept
What I’m essentially proposing is a community portal for divers, targeting first the local and tightly knit diving community. The site’s goal is to help divers be more informed about the surrounding flora and fauna underwater. It goes like this:
Divers can upload photos and videos of their trips. These are then tagged (in the same way we have Flickr tags) according to what they saw, when they saw it and where.
For instance, I can upload this photo:
and add the following tags:
Subject: Clown Fish Amphiprioninae Pomacentridae Date and Time: November 15 at 3:00 PM (EXIF data can take care of this) Dive Site: Secret Bay, Anilao
On a collective effort, photos that are uploaded (either locally or through mere links from Multiply, Flickr, IMGUR) can be sorted through tags, dive site and date and time. The result is a database of critter information which you can sort just by mere tags (I was thinking of applying this via Google Maps or Bing but I honestly think geo-tagging is too complex for us regular folks).
Here’s the best example — I always wondered if the whale shark that we saw in Pescador Island travels to other places (i.e. it’s said to have come from a site called Dolphin House which is also nearby). Looking through the crowd sourced photos and video from divers who frequent Pescador, you’ll eventually be able to track a pattern in the whale shark’s movements. This data can be useful for both recreational divers and for scientific study since marine biologists in the Philippines are very scarce given our enormous coast lines.
How does this help tourism? Seeing is believing. You now have a one stop shop for foreigners to go through to read user generated content from fellow divers. Pygmy seahorse locations? No problem. Is that whale shark the same one going around three dive sites? We’ll know. Coral bleaching and COTS sightings? We can track the degradation of the reefs because of the date and time tags. And the best part about this is that the divers don’t feel like it’s work. It’s practically fun. It’s all about how the data can be used by the WWF and the Marine Wildlife Watch. So there. We help tourism. We encourage more people to dive. We help the environment.
If I’m a foreigner and I want to dive the Philippines I can easily plot my trips and get tips from other divers on which resort has this certain house reef as well as get insider information on who they can hire as the best spotter for that flamboyant cuttlefish.
This isn’t a campaign. It’s a site that can be used to build campaigns. I don’t believe that we can promote tourism the traditional way. We need to get smarter when it comes to using the Internet to attract tourists. I’m not an expert in travel, but I do love the diving — and many other foreigners I dive with stay here for months to learn and to dive.
P.S. I know there is risk of me posting this idea out in the open. If you’re an angel and want to fund this project, I’ll build it. My email is jayvee[dot]fernandez[at]gmail[dot]com. What I’ve written here is merely one component of the site. I have figured out a monetization scheme as well to make it self sufficient to run forever. I’ve tried setting meetings with Mr. Bertie Lim and Mr. Romano way back but it seems that having a site “sponsored” can have its pitfalls (meeting never pushed through). So there. That’s one component on how to help tourism. I have more ideas. This is something I believe in and I want to build it. Anyone interested?
I’ve served as the resident blogger and proprietor of A Bugged Life for the past 5 years. Even longer if you count my original domain at http://20six.co.uk/abuggedlife (sadly I don’t have the password anymore). I thought long and hard to see how I could celebrate this milestone and decided that there are really two reasons why this blog has grown to what it is today. Note that I never intended A Bugged Life to be a site for tech news. It was originally intended as a repository of my articles before Mobile Philippines was revamped (those were the good ‘ol days). As I got into the blogging groove, 2007-2008 became the year of SEO so updating the blog almost daily and concentrating on keywords became tantamount. Also, sticking to your niche for Adsense purposes.
The blog changed in 2009 where I realized that I wasn’t happy “reporting.” In truth, the site was always more like a personal blog to me which is why I also do insert some of my geeky cravings (such as reverse vacuum coffee) and of course, diving in the Philippines.
For the holidays I wish to celebrate Christmas by giving away a lot of things. I love gadgets. So do my readers. In a way it pains me that none of the things I will be giving away go to me, but I guess that’s really what giving means — IT HURTS! Netbooks, Android phones, an Android Tablet, an iPhone … well the list goes on. These are all prizes worth winning and I wanted to make sure that every prize is highly coveted.
During the months of December to January I will be holding a gadget raffle. These are all high ticket items from IT companies that have helped me out in the past 5 years in blogging. I had hoped to do this once a week but realized that December is a hectic month so we will be splitting the raffle into two parts — one that starts next week towards the middle of December and another that resumes after the holidays. On a side note I think bloggers should learn to take control of their sites. By this I mean that things like contests and events should be executed with them taking the lead, and not just on the client’s end. I am so happy to have several companies supporting this effort and if it is successful I’ll probably do this regularly throughout 2011.
Next week we start with SMART Communications. They’re giving away a Samsung Galaxy Tab. Stay tuned 🙂
I was asked to showcase my daily gadget haul for Monday Magazine. It’s a great mag run by great people including Conch, someone I used to work with during my days in Hinge Inquirer. Thanks to Mia DeVega for sending me the hires pegs. Click on the images to see the bigger versions.
I remembered Eggy today after looking through the archives of our Afterburner section for the magazine. Unlike most, I was introduced to Alexis outside his career in film, as we went to the same college, he being a batch lower. We were friends. Later on in the following semesters, we got involved in a point of conflict, details of which I would rather not talk about — but it is suffice to say that these were, in his words to Erwin Romulo, “a little bit of weirdness.” We parted ways. Many years later, we were in touch thanks to the wonders of Facebook, but never got to speak in person. I was excited to hear from Erwin that Alexis would be working with UNO. That we’d both be working together. But alas, fate had other plans. Today I still read his work. It’s the next best thing to talking to him again. — Jayvee
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A note from the editor, Erwin Romulo (@erwinromulo)
I wish this issue didn’t have to exist.
It’s been a year since our good friends Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc were murdered in their home. Up until now, there has been no movement on the case and none of us know why they were killed. All I know is that it wasn’t a robbery and that the authorities have not done a proper investigation. I should know. Along with the Tioseco family, I’ve met too many police officials, bureaucrats, investigators, lawyers, politicians, psychics, and inept people named Agnes to say otherwise.
Alexis, in particular, meant a lot to those of us here in UNO. He’d even sit in during our editorial meetings. (See picture.) He was very much a part of what this magazine was all about, why we all chose to take on the challenge of doing it. But our friendship with him went well beyond working together. At least for me, he was no less than a brother. And I’m lucky that I was able to tell him that I loved him before he died. I told it to him quite often actually and he never gave up on me even when I gave up on myself.
It’s also with heavy hearts that we mark the recent death of another friend, cinematographer Miguel Fabie III. Miguel wrote to me last year, shortly after Alexis died. The letter is excerpted below:
Dear Erwin—
I met [Alexis] after one of the first screenings of Batang West Side—he approached me, introduced himself, commended me, then slowly… in editing lingo—“dissolved to black.” That was my first feature film and though he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, I was taken aback by this young punk who seemed so sincere and passionate that my selective-memoried brain decided to keep him in its archives.
Anyway, in his case praise came across not as something to feed my ego but actually inspired me to better my craft. The same way Eddie Romero did on our first introduction when he commented about the same flick (Batang W.S.)—“Young man, either you’re extremely stupid and just plain lucky, or a genius”… To this day, I am trying to prove it’s not the former. The latter is something I believe is a DNA thing; you can’t work to be a genius, but you CAN work to be a better cinematographer/writer/musician/doctor ON YOUR OWN TERMS.
In [his famous letter], Alexis hoped that he and Nika would be together in/’till “the end.” Maybe they’re just beginning, but if this is the first step toward that direction or a major leap to the eternal we have yet to find out for ourselves in OUR own time, willingly or otherwise. Wake up call: get ready to be willing.
May we ALL rest in peace, in WHATEVER stage or phase in life.
Peace,
Miguel
I couldn’t agree with Miguel more though it’s tough for those of us they left behind.
In that Alexis-written piece reprinted in this issue in its definitive form, he says that “There’s a line in Aguila where a Moro secessionist is told his cause is lost. He replies that winning doesn’t matter, it’s doing what one feels one should do. That’s wisdom for you.”
With this issue we mourn, we mark, we reminisce, we remind. Let not another year pass before justice is done. We fight, not just against forgetfulness and the apathy that follows, but because it is what we feel we should do.
Here’s to Alexis, Nika and Miguel. And, yes, we’ll keep on going no matter what. ‘Till we hopefully meet again.
