2005 is the year of the Philippine blogs. Let’s review what happened this year, shall we?
- March 15, 2005 – Manila Bulletin adds Blog-O-Rama section featuring Filipino blogs as interviewed by Annlyn Jusay.
- April 4, 2005 – the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism launched its blog.
- May 7, 2005 – iBlog, the 1st Philippine Blogging Summit was hosted by the UP College of Law, UP-ISP headed by JJ Disini.
- June 12, 2005 – Gloriagate & Hello Garci scandal was exposed on the PCIJ blog with full recordings made available for download.
- June 17, 2005 – the Sun Star Chronicles launched the Citizen Watch blog to take a closer look at Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo during the heat of the “Hello garci” scandal.
- July 5, 2005 – Connie Veneracion (The Sassy Lawyer) became the first blogger-turned-columnist in the Philippine blogosphere. She now writes for Manila Standard Today.
- July 15, 2005 – the Pinoy Top Blogs project was launched revealing the popular blogs in Philippine blogosphere.
- August 4, 2005 – iBlog Mini – Blogging Gloriagate was hosted by UP College of Law, UP-ISP.
- August 4, 2005 – The Philippines According to Blogs turned 1 year with over 2,000 aggregated pinoy blogs.
- October 22, 2005 – Journalist as Bloggers Conference at the Linden Suites, Ortigas was heavily attended by journalist-bloggers and would-be bloggers alike. (sponsored by PCIJ)
- November 4, 2005 – the PCIJ was slapped with a TRO to remove a certain post from its blog about Michael Defensor.
- November 14, 2005 – big time blog network Pajamas Media launches with $3.5 Million in venture capital. Manuel L. Quezon III is among their top bloggers.
- November 18, 2005 – Market Man runs after Inq7.net for blog plagiarism.
- November 22, 2005 – Microwarehouse sponsors podcast session for 12 channels which included Jessica Zafra and Danton Remoto.
- December 15, 2005 – first fan blog (Retzwerx) to be featured on ABS-CBN (only to be cancelled later).
A lot of other things happened though I can’t trace the dates. A lot of prominent people got into blogging as well, led by a pack of journalists like Ricky Carandang, RG Cruz, Ellen Tordesillas, Carol Arguilles, Tina Panganiban-Perez, Howie Severino & Bing Guanzon. Jessica Zafra joined the fray and Dean Jorge Bacobo went back to blogging as well.
If you know of any other blogworthy additions, please leave a comment.
Yeah, everybody’s calling it an “experiment”. Why experiment you say? Because it’s all about “wanting to see, learn, and profit” from search engine traffic for popular keywords. And Pinoy Big Brother is the word these days, and so is Ang Panday.
Manolo came back with a vengence to all Pinoy Big Brother bloggers out there, wanting to help political blogs like his regain the top spots in the Philippine blogosphere. Mikey surely did gave him that impression.
Benefitting from search engine traffic is not about how good you write about a certain topic, how passionate you are with the issues or how aggressive you are with your principles. You get ziltch in Google for that.
It’s all about how many times you wrote the popular keywords (and its permutations), how many times you stuff universal themes such as “sex”, “scandal”, “nude”, “videos”, “pictures”, and “sexy” with each and every popular name you see on TV, and how often you write about them.
While very good and popular bloggers are generally known/discovered thru “blogrolls”, the more popular blogs are discovered thru Google. Yes, Google makes it possible for an unknown bloggers to have a popular blog. If you get the drift. Just ask Big Brother.
P.S. Just checked. PinoyBigBlogger.com is still available. Anybody want to own it for a blog project?
About two weeks ago, Smart’s Addict Mobile blog portal was reported as not being filtered for nude pictures. The scandal was posted in numerous other blogs but the AMBlog portal went on its exhibitionist spree.
Some newspapers were alerted about this issue but they didn’t pick up the story. I guess, Smart’s on their top and favored advertiser’s list. Or, maybe it’s not really worth their while and they’d rather report about a Philippine Senator’s proxy-blogging history.
Anyway, Max of SunStar Cebu picked up the story in his column “Porn in Addict Mobile’s blog portal“. And true enough, an official of Smart sent them notice about it and closed the AMBlog portal.
The question remains hanging — what will it take for Philippine service companies to read blogs?
To better understand the traffic of your blog, you will need to identify and dissect the source of referrals you get.
During the Gloriagate scandal last May, I decided to install and use Top10 plugin to track down page views of each blog entry. This allows me to check which posts are still “hot” even after they’re already burried deep in the archives.
Today, I checked the Top 20 most viewed posts and see which ones are still getting hits ’til now:
As you will notice, topping the list is the Hello Garci ringtones followed by the post on the complete Gloria-Garci tapes which I mirrored for PCIJ. It was an abnormal season for blogs (in a good way) so these stats are an isolated case.
The more interesting part here is the post on Sey of Pinoy Big Brother and Smart WiFi, both of which are still getting daily hits because of search engines, primarily Google.
My WordPress Image Hack followed suit and got its number because several prominent blogs in the WordPress community got wind of it and spread the word.
The rest of the posts in the Top 20 are a mix of Google’s magic and a farely good discussion on some intriguing/interesting topics.
So, what did we learn from this short dissection? Blog both ways — blog for your audience and blog for Google. A good mix of both will continuously increase your blog traffic. I just realize this is an insider tip to those gunning for Pinoy Top Blogs front page.
