This year’s awards will include Citations for Blog (text) and Photo Blogs (Single Photo and Photo Essay) in recognition of the significant contribution of bloggers, or citizen journalists, in enriching the public discussion of population and human development concerns vis-à-vis socio-economic issues.

Click here for bigger version of the poster.

The 5th PopDev Media Awards is open to all print, broadcast, online, photo, and citizen journalists nationwide and covers topics on public health, reproduction, climate change, poverty, education, housing and urban development.

Winners in the major categories will receive a cash prize, trophy, certificate, and a chance to participate in a study trip to a PLCPD project area in the Philippines.

We had some pretty interesting discussion during the last roundtable of judges between the criteria on “form vs. substance”. It was an easy debate when it comes to professional journalists but is different when you bring in bloggers to the list.

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Back then, news about online libel are very few and far between; the only other case I knew of was the TRO against PCIJ’s blog in 2005 (now there’s your precedent). Those who are not familiar with my case can read thru my lawyer’s explanation here.

Facing such a criminal lawsuit is no laughing matter. True, very few get convicted of libel — the only one that I knew of was the 6-month prison term for a guilty verdict against The Daily Tribune publisher and editor-in-chief Ninez Cacho-Olivares in June of last year.

Unfortunately, the problem starts even before the case goes to court. Libel is about power, influence and money, the latter carrying the most weight. The time and money you spent just to get representation and appear in the fiscal’s office on a subpoena costs a fortune. Elevating it to the sala of a judge, which could drag on for years, may spell bankruptcy to the less fortunate. It’s like getting a life sentence before the final verdict has been passed.

Today, libel on the internet seems too common and we hear/read a lot of lawsuits being filed left and right. (I won’t enumerate them here anymore as those issues have been debated way too much, IMO.)

What’s more ironic is that “free speech or freedom of expression”, which is supposed to be literally free, isn’t cheap when confronted with a libel suit.

The guy who sued me 2 years ago may have successfully sued dozens, maybe more, individuals and companies. The latest victim is i.PH, the local blog service provider. I got a call from them months ago asking for info/advise as we both have the same complainant. I urged them to stand their ground and fight this libel suit. They are now looking for more evidence and testimonies to help them defend their case.

I am no lawyer (though my experience has sparked much interest into going to law school) but I think there must be something that needs to be done with Libel Laws in the Philippines. They’re outdated, unreasonsable and extreme.

Maybe we should already decriminalize libel. If people wants to sue, they go to the civil court. There’s a filing fee of 2% (if you sue for Php1M, you pay a fee of Php20,000) so people just don’t claim outrageous amounts in moral/punitive damages. By decriminalizing it, you remove the fear of imprisonment (that’s a 6-year jail term).

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The list include people in the techbiz, both on the international and local scene.

Other people mentioned were Intel GM Ricky Banaag, Canon President Ramon Arteficio, Microsoft Managing Director Rafael Rollan, Level-Up Founder Ben Colayco, Chikka Asia Founder Dennis Mendiola, and Anino Entertainment Founder/President Niel Dagondon. Tech journos TJ Manotoc, Leo Magno and Jing Garcia completed the local list.

It’s great to know that bloggers such as myself were considered on this list. I hope more bloggers will make it next year. Thanks to T3 for the mention.

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Yes, Blogger is also widely used as a blogging platform by a lot of Filipinos but it did not generate the same level of popularity as YouTube in the country. This is primarily because of other competing platforms:

• While Blogger had the first mover advantage, it did not enjoy as much popularity in the early 2000 as LiveJournal (DiaryLand, Pitas, Blogger and LiveJournal were all launched in 1999). The Philippines is on the Top 10 LiveJournal users worldwide, at #8 with 60,961 users. In terms of search volume, Philippines is at #5 for LiveJournal.com
• According to Google Trends, Multiply has 200,000 daily unique visitors from the Philippines, twice as many from a year ago. In Alexa, the Philippines ranked #5 for Multiply’s traffic origins contributing to an estimated 13.4% of its total users. With Google Insights, Philippines is #1 for Multiply searches. (Read my related story on ABS-CBN and Multiply deal.)
• According to Google Insights, the Philippines is in the Top 5 for Xanga.
• Friendster also enjoys the #1 spot for the Philippines worldwide. Google trends estimate 1 Million daily unique visitors to the site. There’s an estimated 10 Million Filipinos having a Friendster account. If just 1% of them opens a Friendster blog, that’s already 100,000 users.

On the other hand, Blogger.com isn’t even on the Top 25 of countries by usage according to Alexa. I can’t get any more traffic details since Google Trends don’t show data from Blogger.com. However, Google Insights rank the Philippines #5 for blogger.com searches.

And almost everybody knows that BlogSpot is the #1 host for spammers. Last year, a study found out that 75% of all blogspot.com accounts are spam blogs. Even antivirus and security company Sophos noted that the number one host for malware on the web is Blogger, with blogspot.com accounts contributing to at least 2% of total malware webpages globally.

There’s also the growth of an alternative (and ad free) platform in i.PH, WordPress.com as well as the self-hosted WordPress.org application. Even offline support is present, credited to the two upcoming WordCamp Philippines. We’re not even counting the local Drupal and Joomla community as well as alternative platforms such as TextPattern, Expression Engine, and MovableType.

Unlike YouTube, Blogger has so many other popular competing platforms being used in the Philippines that it failed to dominate the market despite the surge of blogging in the country.

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The Fuel Price Protest, an initiative to suspend the VAT on the ever-increasing oil prices. This is complemented by a website called Virtual Rally where people can sign up, select an avatar and join the rally in a virtual EDSA against oil price hikes.

In a welcome entry in his new blog, the senator invites people to share their views with him and spends the rest talking about how our taxes (i.e. VAT) should be spent.

The race to reach as many Filipino people online before the 2010 elections has already started. There are close 9 million Filipinos abroad and a sizable percentage of them are voters that can only be reached thru the internet.

We’ve seen this happening in the current US presidential elections. Whether this trend will be adopted and be as effective on this side of the globe is something we’ve yet to see in the next 2 years.

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Anton earlier filed a Php 1.2 Million copyright lawsuit against Manila Bulletin (including the graphics artist and section editor) for publishing his photos without his permission {see earlier story here and the first coverage here}.

In return, Manila Bulletin is suing back Anton with exemplary and moral damages for Php 2.0 Million. MB claims fair use in its publication of the photos.

The developments are getting juicer. Will post updates once I get a copy of the complaint.

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The Sprint-Samsung Instinct Commercial:

It’s a commercial spot equally deserving for Gizmodo or Engadget. Congrats to Brian of PMPToday.

Disclosure: I have a blog monetization agreement with PMPToday.

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This issue first came to light back in October 2007 when I suggested to Anton he send Manila Bulletin a bill for using his photos.

Several months have passed and discussions between the two parties didn’t end up with an acceptable agreement.

On June 5, 2008, Anton finally elevated the issue to the Regional Trial Court.

The picture above is the subject of the case. Is this going to be the first time that a case on copyright infringement and the Internet as a medium is in question? Will it be the first time that camera EXIF data will be used as evidence in the Philippines?

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I was just informed that a website I’m previously connected with is being sued for linking out to a blog. Can’t share any more details for now and yeah, I know it’s a stupid thing to be sued for libel because you just linked to the offending source but that’s how it goes here in the Philippines. I know this case will be dismissed and all but the hassle of getting and paying for a lawyer is a pain in the neck and the pocket. We’ll have to wait and see how this pans out.

The clincher here is that it could have been me. Again! And to think I’m not yet through with my own libel case in the civil courts.

As for the previous case, one of the defendants posted a blog entry (dated March 19, 2008 at 1:04 am) about his own experience:

For those who do not know, I have been under legal fire during the past couple of years – late in 2006, someone sued me for libel over a string of allegedly defamatory comments posted in a private internet forum. Last year, I recieved a warrant of arrest and was temporarily held under the custody of the Makati Police (I was never jailed nor handcuffed for those who want to ask) and within that day I was able to bail out, with a scheduled arraignment in September. I asked for legal and financial assistance (we even did a benefit event) and was able to support my ordeal.

Reference to this case can be read by following these links:
http://www.yugatech.com/blog/daily-dose/surviving-a-libel-case/

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/infotech/view_article.php?article_id=68456

My case was dismissed last month over a technicality that questions the court’s jurisdiction of the case. In this case, records show that “the Prosecution failed to allege in the informations the province or city where the libelous article is printed and first published or where any of the offended parties actually resides at the time of the commission of the offense” – and I just have to wonder at the fact that the alleged libelous comments were posted online and the website is hosted in a facility outside the country where different laws on libel apply. There will be a whole lot of definitions to go by in order to determine what should be applied in this case. Bottomline is, you cannot just sue someone for libel over a forum or blog post where the local trial court has no clear jurisdiction on the case.

Anyway, I am just thankful that this is over and I’m sure my co-accused is very much relieved as well. It’s a learning experience for me, and while I am still a strong advocate of freedom of speech and self expression, there is still the responsibility of exercising our freedom – in my case I got into a whole lot of trouble and was almost living dangerously. To the person who sued me, I can only wish that he would let go of all the anger in his system and be able to accept his own mistakes as well. I will admit that there has been some wrong in my part but I will make a stand on what is right and truthful. It is time to move on now and attend to more important matters, holding a grudge would only do more harm.

The blog’s domain has expired but I was able to get this from Google cache.

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Hello everyone,

A quick update on how things are going.

First off, we have now tracked over 1 million unique visitors and almost 3.5 million pageviews, and we have sent out over 11,000 clicks to our participating members. You can see the stats here.

Also there has been some discussion about cheating and so forth, and let me quickly address it with some history.

The first top list we created was in 2000, and was named GameSites200.com. It is a site that now gets over 100,000 unique visitors a day, and has sent out over 100,000,000 clicks to the participating sites. That was the first version of our ‘top list’ script.

We then released the script publicly as evoTopsites. This was the script that Abe (Yuga) used to setup PinoyTopBlogs.com. It was a nice engine, but it had problems with scaling.

The next version we released was for BlogTopSites.com. It took evoTopsites and added performance measures, and extra stuff such as tag-support.

The latest version is what we have on TopBlogs.com.ph. What it does is analyze traffic over a bunch of days and, finding anomalies, reports them to us.

Now – this analysis takes time. Having two days or even a week of data does not make for good analysis. It takes time for the system to become ’smarter’ as it recognizes what is regular and irregular behavior.

Furthermore, we have to err on the side of a mistake. For example, a blogger who operated multiple blogs was copying over some HTML from one blog to another, and accidentally included the TopBlogs.com.ph code. We could have taken the quick (and unnecessarily harsh) option of just banning his blogs.

Instead what our system does is flag potential blogs, and we had check over them. No system is perfect, and we want to make sure that we give legitimate bloggers a chance to fix anything they may have done wrongly.

With that in mind, I expect the fruits of the automated system to start coming into play next week. In the mean time, if you do see someone cheating, please do not hesitate to contact us.

I can only thank everyone for all the input we are receiving – it helps solidify that what we are doing is a valued part of the Filipino blogosphere.

Thanks again for using TopBlogs.com.ph.

- Andre
TopBlogs.com.ph

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It was about 6 months ago that I let go of the project and handed it over to the guys at Enthropia, Inc., who originally developed the top lists. The last 6 months since then was spent re-coding everything from the ground up and doing a much better design. Congrats to the guys at Enthropia for getting this done.

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When Guitar Tutee and Blog ni Inday became a hit, it was obvious we had to explore several more ideas. There were some hits and misses but so far, here’s what we’ve got out of the barn:

• Pinoys Got Talent. The content model was a bit blurry when this was conceptualized but it’s now turning out a bit clearer. That is, to scout for Pinoy talents everywhere and feature them on the blog. It had to start somewhere and YouTube had tons of Pinoys with exceptional potential and indie Fil-Am YouTubers with huge following.
• Mundiarios. It’s a travel blog written in Spanish. The blogger is a friend from Argentina I met in Germany last December. Other big blog networks are doing foreign language blogs (usually Japanese, Chinese, German, and Spanish) so I thought this was one way to spread the network. It may open new doors to more blogs in Spanish too.
• Mac Complainer. The most recent one we just launched. This was in anticipation of MacWorld 2008. Written by PMPToday blogger BrianB (also a regular reader here), this week old blog has already had relative success. In the twit-words of Migs Paraz, “Looks like the guy who put up maccomplainer.com has a winner site!“. Credit goes to Brian.

The other one was supposed to be a group blog on sports — Spike it Hard is a huge hit in the UAAP & NCAA volleyball crowd. Though I also used to play volleyball and I love the sports, I don’t think I can be a sports blogger.

MarcVill sure knows how to get things going in there. Hundreds of replies in the comment discussions and thousands of voters in the polls. For now, I’m just a photo-contributor. The rest of the photos are here.

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I’m tagging along with a bunch of travel and photo bloggers to Microtel Boracay. Big thanks to our sponsors Microtel, SeAir and Zuzuni Boracay for this blogger excursion.

So, while I’m out, I’d like to apologize to those who won the last giveaway winners. I won’t be able to send your new year’s gift by the week-end. Will do that on Monday. Also, reminders to everyone else on that list to email me before Friday, 5:00PM. Otherwise, we’ll re-raffle them again.

To those who won the Auction.PH eMoney Contest, please email Manu Ofiaza (mofiaza@auction.ph) of Auction.PH so you can have your accounts credited with the 300 prize. Send him your Auction.PH username/email. Don’t make him wait any further or else we won’t get any more prizes from them in the future. *hehe*

And lastly, I’m launching my very own photo blog — the Abe Olandres Photography. It’s just a hobby blog by a really amateur photography enthusiast (please take it easy on me in the comments). I’m hoping I could post one picture each day for the entire year. You can subscribe to the feeds here too.

Ah, and yes, I got my domain (abeolandres.com) back. Apparently, they were domain tasters as some of the commenters hinted. The domain was released 5 days later and I grabbed it right away.

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This time, we want to make it bigger and grander. So, we’d like to seek your support for biggest blogger gathering of the year.

Please help spread the news.

• If you’d like to sponsor this event, you may contact me (abeolandres@gmail.com) for the Sponsorship Package or fill out the sponsorship form here.
• We’d like to allow the blogging community to participant, not only in the awards, but also during the awards night itself. If you’d like to help by lending us your time, skills and talent, please contact Gail at kutitots {at} gmail {dot} com.
• If you’d like to help promote the event and the awards itself, please blog about it, put up a logo on your site/blog (get logos here), submit creative banners and badges for distribution, and send us your photos of last year’s event (send to Gail again).

The details on the venue, time and dates will be announced later on.

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Back in April, Jayvee, Marc and I were debating on the viability of mobile blogging in the Philippines (see: Why MoBlogging isn’t hot in the Philippines?).

Different viewpoints were shared — moblogging is expensive, there are usability problems and more. My contention then was that Filipinos aren’t really that hot with personal blogging. Later on, I got a tip that Smart rolled out a mobile blogging platform (via MMS) and it drew over 100,000 users. The bait — it was totally free. Well, until they made it for pay and then the people stopped using it.

Fast forward today, where every other active blogger also has a Twitter account. Add to that the availability of cheap 3G services from Smart. And since Twitter Mobile (http://m.twitter.com) is a click away, you’ve already solve all the earlier issues on usability, cost and accessibility.

Does that mean that Mobile Blogging in the Philippines has started or maybe even reached its peak?

Let’s do a quick survey, shall we? If you are on Twitter, do you:

1) Use your Mobile Phone Regularly to Post and Access Twitter
2) Sometimes Use Mobile Twitter
3) Don’t Use Your Phone to Post on Twitter
4) You seldom use Twitter

I’ve been making some rounds doing spot checks on Twitter and I also found a lot of them are not actually updating for months now. Would also be interesting to do a survey on Filipino Twitters and see how active or inactive we are on the twitterspace.

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Scott of AfftoolBox thinks John Chow and Shoemoney belongs to that exclusive list. I must first admit that I read these two blogs mentioned and subscribe to their feeds because they had quality content. I didn’t add them right away. Took me weeks before finally deciding they had consistent valuable content.

The Cartoon Blog once put out a funny strip — the 2 Ways of Becoming a Popular Blogger.

Witty.

That brings me to our question — what attracts you to subscribe and read a blog?

• The person is already popular, so when he/she opened up a blog, I subscribed to it.
• The blog is popular and useful with great content.

And speaking of popular, Michael of Basapa put out a list of The Most Popular Filipino Blog Posts of 2007 and The 2007 Top Pinoy Probloggers.

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• Jayvee, Nomei and I attended last Friday’s 10th Web Awards at the Promenade in GreenHills. I initially didn’t want to go as I was pissed at them telling me I didn’t RSVP to a non-existent invitation they allegedly sent two weeks ago. The guys from Globe (which was a sponsor) sent me several tickets (PWA was selling Php1,000 a ticket!) and Noemi convinced me so I went even if it was a little late and traffic was awful. As expected, Noemi won the Best Blog Category (again!) and James of PMT won the People’s Choice. But the luckiest guy in the room was me! I won the raffle for a new Nokia 7370. *hehehe*
• Three Filipinos made it to the semis (out of 35) for the 2008 Voice of McDonalds. Two Filipinas are on the Asia-Pacific list and another pinoy blogger is on the European list. Check out the website and vote for Michael Pimentel.
• Eugene is a genius for coming up with a comics blog. Blogenyo is as funny and promising. More cartoons please! Just be careful with the byline — t’might offend some people. *hehe*

Apparently, a lot of people are still confused between a “personal website” and “a blog” as Gail reveals. The two are mutually non-exclusive. There are blogs, and there are personal websites — it’s possible for one to be the other but not at all times. All blogs are websites — yes. But not all blogs fall under the category “personal”.

In the social sphere, it’s LinkedIn that’s growing the fastest and not Facebook. That’s according to the latest research from Nielsen Online, but that has got to do with the existing size of these social networking sites. The bigger you get, the slower your growth rate becomes.

On a different note, I found units of the Asus PC Eee over at Greenhills, Virramall selling for Php18,500. The only stock they got was in white. I would have bought the black version for a hands-on right away if they were available.

According to a source who attended the recent Philippine Advertising Congress in Subic, a lot of agencies are now allocating budgets for new media. Where these budget will go is yet to be determined — might not be for advertising but more on social engagement.

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Just over a year ago, I wrote an entry entitled “Filipino Catholics petition against Bryanboy“. It was probably one of the first few controversies the local blogosphere had witnessed. It was so hot the topic even got the major daily news.

What we all didn’t know that this incident was a masterfully crafted plan by Bryanboy himself. He emailed me the other day and confessed:

One of the challenges on this year’s gay bloggies is to confess something you’ve never written on your blog before. Well, I thought I’d drop you a note, albeit belated, to say THANKS with last year’s antichrist brouhaha.

His entry, Attention whores, poke, poke and provoke (warning: NSFW!) explains it in detail.

Exactly one year ago I made headlines in my country because of a simple yet effective blog entry that I posted.

What people didn’t know (until now) is that blog entry was planned and executed with military-grade precision.

Anyway, my friend and I concocted a cheap little plan.

* Fake email account? Check.
* Fake online petition because anyone new on teh internets think online petitions are still effective? Check.
* Sanctimonious holier-than-thou quote? Check.
* Crazy “ZOMG YOU ARE SO GONNA BURN IN HELL” letter with a ludicrous call-to-action? Check.
* Email a few folk and leave it to their hands to do a little viral marketing campaign. Check.

First time I read his email, I said “Dang, I’ve been had!!!!”.

B, you’re really gonna get it this time. *hehehe* But I have to hand it to you, master link baiter.

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