Tag: Thoughts and Musings

My Life

Categories
Mostly Everything

Butch Dalisay’s Anti-Rant Rant

“Poetry, after all, is the opposite of suicide.”
– Anne Sexton

Butch Dalisay, better known as penmanila to the writing community in the Philippines has written a magnificent piece on the ranting culture on the Internet. A professed geek as most of us are at PhilMUG, he raises salient points on the rant culture we have today because of the Internet and many more factors:

Forgive me if I suspect that these are people—many of them in their surly mid-twenties—who’ve never been truly whacked by life over the head, who’ve never laid their lives on the line for a cause larger than themselves, who’ve never stared into the barrel of a gun, who’ve never spent a day in jail, and whose daily crises consist of having to choose between the mocha latte and the cappuccino. [full article here]

The discussion of the article can be found over at the PhilMUG forums.

Categories
Mostly Everything

Shedding Some Light on Disclosures

Before we start to get “disclosure happy,” here is a very good piece written by Read Write Web on when bloggers should disclose information. This was pointed out by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger. The article actually illustrates journalism ethics as well as the ethics behind the business models of traditional publishers (it is sometimes tricky to balance business with ethics especially in the realm of journalism).

Nothing new really, but the piece is a helpful all in one guide to how to treat our disclosures as well as see what level we are in to becoming more professional about our blogging.

You’ll notice that I don’t include a rule about disclosing when you were paid to write about a specific topic or company. The reason is that any blogger who wants to be taken seriously as a journalist cannot and will not accept money or gifts from a source (or vice versa). That said, it should also be noted that there is a big difference between accepting gifts in exchange for writing a story and accepting review copies of goods for free. [full article here]

In summary, the article says that disclosure should happen when in these situations:

  • Financial association (investment, ownership etc)
  • Employment with the company being written about
  • Writng about the Competition
  • Personal involvement

Crocs, Revisited.

scutes_yellow_crocs.jpg

Even though this blog is described as “the pseudo personal blog about blogging, technology and stuff” it seems that the most popular post has to do with my fashion sense. Let’s revisit Crocs. Eek!

Continue reading “Crocs, Revisited.”
Categories
Mostly Everything

Compartments

Several months ago, I was having a conversation with Joey Alarilla about how the Internet and social media are causing a phenomenon which I want to call “compartmentalizing” your life.

This phenomenon is most apparent, but not limited to, bloggers who have started several niche blogs – compartmentalizing their life to food, technology, travel, politics, pets, etc. It is even almost correct to even say that the sum of these blogs equal the person.

Because the Internet is the new Forum Romanum, our lives converge in the most visible places, making what was once private, now very public. We now know what the family did for lunch, what we ate for dinner, where we went for the weekend, what we bought… all good. Very interesting. What you do with your blog is a masterpiece that no one else can copy even if you write about the same topics.

Continue reading “Compartments”
Categories
Mostly Everything

The Narrow River of Content

Winthrop Yu, former head honcho of PC Magazine Philippines led me to this Forbes piece on how specialist blogs are stealing rich advertising from tech media – and I don’t just mean traditional tech publications, but their online counterparts also. In other words, if I were an advertiser, I’d actually see more value in putting ads in TechCrunch and Engadget than in CNET, PC Magazine and its online PC Mag website.

What?! Why the online counterparts? Because the surfing public is smarter now. They use popup ad blockers to get rid of annoying and unwanted ads that cram content into a funnel, you’d be forced to sprawl a 600 word article into 4 pages just to get more page views.

According to the article, Google Search revolutionized advertising, as searching for content in the form of products and services proved to bring in a sense of “demand” from the consumer and contextually targeting advertising to match content. Hence, Google AdSense is raking in tons of cash from just technology blogs alone.

In the “old model” of print, you’d need a publishing house and a printing press as well as your editorial, sales and marketing staff to run the business. On the web, you barely need an office. You don’t even need a sales team as the consumers themselves target ads for you via contextual search.

OK hold on. Before this post grows into a “new vs traditional media” rant, I kid you not, it isn’t. Let’s talk about traditional web sites.

Continue reading “The Narrow River of Content”