Having said all these, I am personally inviting all interested bloggers, from personal bloggers to travel bloggers, entertainment bloggers to political bloggers, bloggers of all persuasions–let us come together and build a national association of Filipino bloggers! Click here to sign up!

Please read:
* Setting the record straight on the national bloggers association

We, Filipino bloggers coming from various places nationwide and those based overseas, coming from diverse backgrounds and specialties, using various new media outlets, hereby freely come together and call for the formation of a bloggers association of the Philippines that shall unite us around these common and beneficial objectives:

• Promote and defend the right to free speech and to free expression;
• Promote and develop blogging, vlogging, photoblogging, microblogging and other online creative and expressive forms in all their diverse categories, topics and types;
• Gather and share Philippine blogging’s best practices that reflect our contributions to ourselves and our online communities, media, causes, organizations and businesses, government, the nation and the world;
• Draft and adopt a code of ethics that underscore the members’ and organization’s sense of responsibility and maturity;
• Discuss issues and concerns that confront our members; and
• Campaign and work for more affordable, reliable and better internet access in the country

The association we aspire to form is voluntary in membership, national in scope, democratic in decision-making, progressive in outlook, and both non-partisan and non-profit in legal character.

• We draw inspiration from and ask the participation of the city-wide, provincial, regional and island-wide associations, summits and conventions initiated by bloggers across the country. We also pay tribute to overseas Filipinos and their blogging organizations and events.
• We want an association that makes decisions based on democratic processes, consensus-building and mutual benefit.

A long time has passed since the first blog posts and first blogging events. We are now a bigger, stronger and influential community. Businesses, causes and government have started to organize themselves to interact and engage with us. And we also face challenges within and outside our growing community.

The Philippines, our country and people are also expecting more from us, and we bravely and fearlessly say that we want to do more and achieve more

In view of all these and more, we declare that we are joining as founding members of what we hope would be a most awesome bloggers association for our country.

Unfortunately, despite all the remedies, my website had been still inaccessible for the past days for reasons I still don’t know because of the slow response of my old web host’s technical support. I’ve been dissatisfied with my old web hosts services for the past years (frequent downtimes, slow tech support response, etc) and I’ve been meaning to move to another but I always had reservations about the technicalities of moving an entire website to another host. Apparently, it was an unfounded reservation and I finally found myself availing the services of SolidHosting.ph. My blog is now back up and running. I will be back to normal blogging soon.

It wasn’t until the show, QTube, was finally launched and a few months after their first call, or a few weeks ago, when they called back and said it’s my turn to be featured in one of the show’s segments, Bloggers’ Digest. Bloggers’ Digest is where they feature interviews with different Filipino bloggers and their personal profiles.

Three weekends ago, I had a sit-down interview with their crew at UP Diliman, in front of Palma Hall. I was uneasy at first, but I eventually shrugged the awkwardness off. We shot some situationers around campus, some where I was pretending to take photographs with my DSLR in the middle of the Lagoon, some with me using my laptop at obscure places like in front of the Oblation at Quezon Hall. A few days after the first shoot, another set of technical people went to our house to shoot more situationers at home.

It was a pretty short feature on me, a little more than three minutes. I was billed in the web teasers as “a young man who dares to go beyond the youthful trappings of Facebook and Multiply and uses the net to let his views be heard loud and proud.” And that was pretty much how the feature went.

In sum, what I simply said was that, I guess what makes my blog different or what sets it apart from the thousands of other Filipino blogs on the internet today, is that perhaps no other blog can claim to have witnessed or chronicled almost a decade of a young boy’s life, through his formative years, and the changes he has undergone from being a high school freshman at the Ateneo, to the film student he was in UP, to all his socio-political involvements, and up to his being a law student.

Anyway, do catch QTube, the only show in the country that takes what’s online on-air every Thursdays, 10:15 PM, on QTV 11.

Blogging started off a lot of significant things for me. It would take me some time to make an exhaustive list, which I unfortunately don’t have much of at the moment. Needless to say, it was through my blog that I got to know a lot of people, moreso the other way around. Blogging definitely played a big part in my life. It played not just a passive role on being a medium where my I recorded my transformation from a being conservative and naive high school freshman in Ateneo to the opinionated law student that I am now in UP, and all else in between, but an active role in getting me into where I am right now.

Here’s to more years of blogging for me! In four years I would have been blogging for half of my life, would you imagine.

This is less than two days from now, but I hope I could encourage some of you to participate in this endeavor.

On October 15, Wednesday, we in Bloggers Kapihan invite Filipino bloggers to participate in Blog Action Day 2008 by taking a stand on poverty.

Poverty is a reality that we cannot deny. We see it everyday. Many live with and in it 24/7. The imperative now is to change this situation. The Blog Action Day 2008 is an opportunity to get poverty out from under the rug where the government has consigned it. We hope that through this renewed focus on poverty, it will be a new start to better understand and not hide it, to offer real solutions not fake ones, to salve the poor people’s wounds and not give them dole-outs. If you want to join Blog Action Day 2008, there are a number of things you can do. Read on.

To those who read my blog, visit it regularly, or whatever, and think I deserve the a Bloggers’ Choice Award, do vote for Bikoy.net at the Philippine Blog Awards.

1. On your blog (at Multiply, BlogSpot, WordPress, wherever it is), tell us why you voted for the nominee (that’s me, Bikoy.net!)

2. Submit your post URL and some basic info to the Philippine Blog Awards committee using this form. Make sure that you provide the COMPLETE URL of the post you created for your vote to be valid.

3. Once you have submitted your vote post URL, wait for the confirmation from one of our committee members. Please be patient, we will manually go through each and every vote post to make sure it’s valid.

It’s that simple. You also get a chance to win a Nokia N82!

Thanks! Ha ha. This is such a popularity contest. It really isn’t a big deal, as I’ve largely ignored it the past days, but since apparently some people did vote for me, I might as well put some effort into it and campaign to solicit some votes so that the first ones don’t go to waste. I’d appreciate it.

Anyway, so when my blog got back up, what I saw was a time warp from a week ago. Everything that had been posted after a week ago, from entries to comments and pictures were gone. Good thing, good-ol’ Google keeps back-ups of the internet and I was able to recover what I had written this week. My web host explained that prior to the scheduled server migration (whatever that meant), there was also a server crash.

So, since this incident reminded me that this blog, and its 6+ years worth of memories, is vulnerable to such technical malfunctions, and also because I had some disposable e-dollars in my PayPal account, I decided to buy myself a pair of paid/premium accounts at Flickr and LiveJournal.

So for now, I’m going on a Multiply hiatus. See me in Flickr instead. And my more personal thoughts shall have a new home in LiveJournal.

Despite all these minor contradictions, and all the difficulties (understatement) of being a neophyte and a junior fellow, I don’t regret joining, and I am proud to be an Upsilonian. Anyway, my reasons for joining and other such apologetics won’t be the topic of this entry.

Perhaps this shall only be a disclaimer. Needless to say, quite a handful of the things that have happened and other things that I have done over the past two months are frat matters which I barely ever mentioned in my blog. I never even posted any picture of my brods nor pictures from any of the functions I’ve been to. For someone like me who’s so used to documenting my life and narrating my daily experiences in my blog, it’s something that I had to get used to. It’s not that the fraternity is shrouded in secrecy. Aside from a handful of anti-Upsilon comments in some previous entries, it’s pretty much given that the internet does serve as a place where various fraternities gather information about other frats. Even though I’ve practically outed myself to possibly other aggressive fraternities, the identities of my brods, and detailed personal documentation of activities are things I have to keep from posting here.

Other finalists in the Personal Blogs category are LastLeaf.org, Fight Pompe, Jessica Rules The Universe, and Misteryosa.

Now I have been blogging for almost six and a half years and this is the first time my blog is being officially recognized by an award giving body. There’s even an awards night on March 31, how’s that? It’s not that I have been waiting for a recognition like this all these years, because honestly the traffic and the comments are more than enough ‘recognition’. Needless to say, however, this recognition is highly appreciated also. Hehe.

Good luck to all the finalists!

I also placed a pseudo-disclaimer at the blog. I don’t claim to be a professional film critic nor a film academic, so, I don’t claim to write fair objective reviews. I also have many biases. Though I employ a linear rating scale, I do not judge films from different countries with the same mindset. I always take to consideration how, when, with what budget the movie was produced, among other contextual considerations. My comments on certain movies can also be dependent on the types of movies I’ve seen beforehand, or the perceptions I have of certain elements within the film. It can also be dependent on how much I like or dislike an actor or a genre. In other words, my movie commentaries blog can be very subjective. And I don’t want fangirls or fanboys flaming me for ‘bad’ reviews. Or professional critics picking on my commentaries. Hehe.

Anyway, I’ll try to catch a few Metro Manila Film Festival movies tomorrow and get to comment on them.