Cyberbaguioboy

It is a personal conversation, says Manolo Quezon III. It is an exercise in expression. It is your virtual and personal journal. It could be anything, actually. We blog because we want to say something that we hope would interest others. We can blog about our interests. And it so happens that others share your interests.

I started blogging after my youngest daughter was born. That was more than two years ago (at the time of this writing). I have been hearing about it from friends but I never considered doing one. Friend and colleague Joey Alarilla somehow convinced me that blogging was a worthwhile activity, or should I say experience for journalists like me. First and foremost, I am a journalist so I believe I am still governed by a certain code of ethics. I also am compelled by force of habit to edit and re-edit my posts (sometimes I’m too embarrassed to find past entries containing errors).

Unlike literary writers, journalists are often in a hurry to deliver news to readers. I remember one saying that goes: journalism is literature in a hurry. We are expected to write short, punchy, and yet accurate stories about things we experience, see, hear, feel, taste, touch, think, and smell.

Blogs or blogging has somehow given us another venue to write. In my case, this is an extension of stories I write for INQUIRER.net. Sometimes I’m tempted to just cut and paste all my stories here. But I have found out (based on keyword searches and traffic I get–not that much though) that people want to read original content. It might be your musings. It might be your take on certain political issues. Or it might be simply a caricature of life using words and pictures, and yes, videos.

Blogs are actually websites. But they have made its creation a lot simpler. It can be done by simply clicking on buttons, typing in the content, and publishing it. It is a point-and-click web publishing tool. Since this tool now empowers people to produce their own websites/blogsites, blogs have mushroomed all over cyberspace.

Why we blog? Why do I blog?

We blog because we have been given wisdom by God to express our thoughts. Conversation, I like that word. I have included in my music blogroll a blog called “Jazz and conversation.” It is a blog on Jazz music. This is an example of a nice blog because the whole experience of listening and reading about Jazz and the musicians are all included.

The next generation will surely be blogging. But they would do it mostly for fun. Because they are born into a world where technology is now taken for granted. Perhaps blogs would later be forgotten. In the future, we might end up with multimedia content that won’t need a lot of words. Just tags.

I remember having a conversation with a friend who admired what we journalist are doing. She says, “Your job is important because you document life.”
Blogs also allow people to document their lives. How you see life differs from how I see it. We all have different experiences and that makes for a good blog, right? Conversations. We blog because we all want to write our history. And our history will not be seen in a linear manner. It will be like a mesh. My history will be linked to someone’s history. And your history might end up in my history. And so on and on.

I was reading a Newsweek article on where the web is going. Answer: this will depend a lot on us. We will take the web where we want it to be. Right now, we’re blogging. Tomorrow, who knows. A mesh of “collective thought” from billions of people in this planet? The Internet has sparked the explosion of information and knowledge. Right now, we see the Internet being organized initially by web services like Google. But it is really up to us to decide how we organize the Web.

We blog to organize our thoughts into something that people can tag with keywords for easy searching. Millions of blogs are created everyday. Eventually, all of these can be searchable in Google or Yahoo! or whatever new technologies and services that would become available to people in the future.