Tag: Thoughts and Musings

My Life

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A Change of Email Address and an iRant

This is just a friendly note that for those who have been trying to email me at my .Mac account email address, you will no longer get replies from there as I have decided not to renew it. See my about page if you want to contact me.

If its one thing I do hate about Apple. its the fact that they charge a steep price for a perk that doesn’t even deliver much in terms of value for features. They’re stuck in the old days (late 90’s) where not everyone could put up their own blog for free, buy your own domain and email address, share photos online, backup files, or establish a file sharing system. I can think of dozens of free Web 2.0 services today that outmatch purchasing a .Mac account, and costing you so much less too.

So the switch from a .Mac to a Dreamhost account made perfect sense. I’m paying almost the same yearly price for 160GB versus a measly 512MB of storage and getting over 1TB of bandwidth. I can install all the blogs and forums I want and create unlimited email accounts. The need came when I reached my fourth podcast episode. I felt that I would be needing a lot more space to host my online show, The BuggedCast and half a gig worth of space wouldn’t hack it in the long run.

So adieu, .Mac. It was a fun one year, but I’ve moved on to other things. My priorities have changed, but really, at the end of the day, its not you. It’s me.

Book Recommendations May 5 2007

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I’ve been scouring the bookstores for this particular title. All of the Fully Booked and Powerbooks branches in the metro either have never heard of the book or have it on order basis. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers by Henry Jenkins takes a look at how media influences the geek culture with focus on the digital age. The estimated price of the book is about P1,200.00 on order basis from Fully Booked.

Bringing together the highlights of a decade and a half of groundbreaking research into the cultural life of media consumers, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers takes readers from Jenkins’s progressive early work defending fan culture against those who would marginalize or stigmatize it, through to his more recent work, combating moral panic and defending Goths and gamers in the wake of the Columbine shootings. Starting with an interview on the current state of fan studies, this volume maps the core theoretical and methodological issues in Fan Studies. It goes on to chart the growth of participatory culture on the web, discuss blogging as perhaps the most powerful illustration of how consumer participation impacts mainstream media, and debate the public policy implications surrounding participation and intellectual property.

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Another book – this one I have on the shelf – is Dominic Gettins’ How to Write Great Copy: Learn the Unwritten Rules of Copywriting. It is an easy-to-follow book about .. err .. writing great copy. I appreciate the way Gettins tackles copywriting also from a technical standpoint, knowing when to apply which grammar rule to a particular situation for maximum effectiveness.

…”a shortcut to the sort of knowledge gained by trial and error over many years by the icons of the advertising business.”

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We are Contemporary Historians

Are photos your deceit or your truth?

In the last iBlog 3 summit, Anton Diaz of Our Awesome Planet talked about how his photoblog chronicles the Philippines in circa 2000, with a focus on the beautiful places to explore. Last night I guested with Lourd, Gang, Rem, Grace and Tammy to talk about photography on air.

It was discussed also, rather briefly, how photography and blogging become tools to chronicle history in this decade. Perhaps, in about a hundred years, our descendants will look back at our blogs – read our entries and look at our photos – and define for themselves the state of the nation during that circa using blogs as a microcosm of our country’s dreams and impediments during that time.

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I guess by reassessing the content of our blogs with this “contemporary historian” mindset, it will help us further develop and understand our niches, passions and expertise. Above is a shot of the pondering Lourd de Veyra. More photos and show notes on the link above to Rock Ed Radio.

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The Two Sides of Photography

Sometimes I argue that photography has enshrined the superficiality of experience. It has contributed to the over-valuation of appearances to a point where image has (subconsciously) replaced the reality as reality. – Gang Badoy

I get excited whenever someone calls me over the landline. It is partly attributed to the surprise that the caller assumes I’m home coupled with the mystery factor of not knowing who that person is (I don’t have caller ID). in an age where we’ve replaced our landline with mobile phones, we hardly get surprised by who’s on the other line. We can reject the call if we don’t want to talk to the other person and make up some excuse like “hey I was at the spa and had cucumbers in my eyes so I couldn’t answer.”

In a similar light…

Is it better, as a tourist to have never seen a picture of your destination so that there are no pre-conceived notions of what the place looks like?

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European Food Festival @ Serendra March 2007

Can the same be said for photography? I see many great pictures of the sights – that look so much better than the actual image itself. Is picture perfect an oxymoron? Here’s a simpler analogy: food stylists for instance try as much as possible to make the dish look really good on camera. Take for instance how appealing a Big Mac looks on the product shot. Not that it has anything to do with Sharon Cuneta, but does the real image justify what the consumer was led to believe?

This isn’t a bash on photography. It is actually a reaction to a post made by Gang Badoy about photography and how it can be used as a double edged sword. The first side is here. And the “>other side here.

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Preparing for iBlog 3

I’m preparing some slides for my presentation this Saturday. I’m supposed to talk about blogging as a profession in front of a couple of hundred people at the iBlog3 Summit in UP Diliman.

Last year, the same topic was given to Abraham Olandres who talked about (1) the different types of bloggers and (2) the many ways to monetize whether you (3) belong to a blog network or (4) work alone.

I’m trying to get input, and I hope its not too late, as to what type of things I can cover in the small span of 15 to 20 minutes, that has not been covered already. Leave a comment for suggestions and insights 🙂