Last Friday, the first
DigitalFilipino.com Club eyeball for 2007 took place with the theme "
Blogging / Social Computing".
Jasper Jugan, a technology evangelist from
Microsoft Philippines shared numerous interesting points. This includes:
- There are 1800 Microsoft bloggers
- Microsoft has active communities such as Channel 9, PressPass, Windows Live Spaces, theSpoke, Aggreg8, Microsoft Philippines Community, MSDN, TechNet Forums, and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Program
- In-person community activities are important that includes game eyeballs, tournaments, free-playing, parties, concerts, and socializing. They have plug n play activities where the community members form their own band and play.
- Two of Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals today are club members too. They are Rodney Jao and Wilson Chua.
What makes Jasper interesting also is that he got discovered by Microsoft Philippines through these communities and is a Most Valuable Professional himself.
The eyeball was scheduled quite early this year. We took advantage of club member
Sacha Chua being here for a vacation, escaping Canadian winter for the next four weeks. Sacha is currently taking her master's degree at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on social computing for large enterprises, and is funded by the IBM Toronto Centre for Advanced Studies. She is a technology evangelist who has given numerous talks here and abroad.
Sacha gave a great presentation about what social computing is and how it can be used to grow one's network. She featured tools such as
del.icio.us,
Upcoming.org, and
Xing. Her talk about
LinkedIn.com is a great relief for me as all
club members can actually post the club logo in their profile. We had the club joined the
LinkedIn for Groups program. However, some members aren't sure how LinkedIn can be of use and don't see the need for it. I'm sure her perspective on social computing had a great impact with
club members.
One person I'm actually pretty excited to hear was
Noemi Lardizabal Dado. Her blogging journey is simply amazing and recently won the best blog in the
Philippine Web Awards. Her personal blog gave birth to new niche blogs that is giving her good revenue as well. What I learned from her that I will apply in my blog includes:
- Create an About Me section
- Use senses in expressing oneself in writing
- Encourage readers to tell something about themselves
- Use one topic per entry
What awed most
club members is
J Angelo Racoma's professional blogging adventure. This is where one blogs for income. I agree with his observation that as a blogger tackling tech stuff may not necessarily be sustainable, as the target audience can be advertising blind (therefore pay-per-click programs may not be the way to go). He tried ghost writing as well but one can't take credit for the hard work done. He also joined a blog network but exclusivity and non-competition hindered him to do other stuff.
One great break Angelo got is to manage the
BlogHerald. It gave him the opportunity to manage a big blog network without the exclusivities. He is now on his quest to be a Blog Overlord and generate bigger income through aggregated revenue.
Although the expense of being a problogger can be higher as one has to cover equipment, bandwidth, time, among others. But I agree with Angelo that it can be one's ticket to bigger things. My experience in having
DigitalFilipino.com took me to places, outsource and self-started projects, writing, and research assignments that I never thought would be possible.
More power to bloggers! This recent eyeball also inspired me to finally work on the launch of an
advertising revenue sharing program for club members who blogs. I hope this will inspire more
club members to blog professionally.
Check out the
coverage and
photos for more! Here are some:
For those who attended and blogged about it, do let me know and will add you here. Thanks!!!
