Defining the Philippine Blogosphere

Last month, we had some good discussions about who or what comprises the Philippine Blogosphere.

With the numerous projects (or lists) that I’ve launched and with the different entities/groups that help promote Filipino bloggers or Philippine blogs, there have been varying distinctions as to what makes a blog Pinoy.

Take for example the Philippine Blog Awards (which btw is now expired). Though the qualifications where not clear, it was mentioned to me that only Filipino citizens or those with Filipino decent are eligible. (note to self: recover the domain and re-launch the site to something worthy of its name).

When we launched The Philippines According to Blogs, Connie defined similar qualifications, i.e. (a) a Filipino citizen or (b) of Filipino ancestry irrespective of citizenship. On the other hand, my requisites for approving entries in PinoyTopBlogs extended to those blogs which covers topics about the Philippine or the Filipinos even though the authors/bloggers are foreigners.

You see, it’s really hard and tedious to individually investigate the affiliation or citizenship of a blogger just by reading his blog. What I usually do is look for identifying elements — domain whois info, use of Filipino language, profile of blogs linking in and linked out, topics or theme of subject entries, profile and language of commenters, among other things.

Anyway, Von of the Filipino Librarian suggests a good umbrella definition of a “Pinoy” blog. You can read his full entry here but I’dlike to take his definition and refine it a little bit more:

Blogs about the Philippines or the Filipinos. It doesn’t matter whether the blogs were produced in or outside the Philippines, by Filipinos or non-Filipinos, in any of the Philippine languages, or in English, as long as majority of the content is about the Philippines, its culture and its people.

I basically refined it to cover two points – (1) only English content should be considered when including foreign languages because it becomes illogical and incomprehensible to include languages that a vast majority of the Filipino audience do not understand and (2) when the author/s are not Filipinos, the majority of content of the blog must cover the Philippines, otherwise, we will see social/news blogs like Global Voices included in the list even if they only cover Philippine-related content with less than 1% of their entire blog.

The definition above is still subject to further refinements.