I grew up being taught that Filipinos hate the Philippines and that we have this stupid colonial mentality sickness. It’s been said that Filipinos prefer products made by industrialized companies over local products and that our countrymen prefer to migrate elsewhere to escape the hellhole that the Philippines had become. It’s also been said that Pinoy immigrants to the U.S. and Europe are afflicted with the so-called IMSCF syndrome ("I’m Spanish/Chinese-Filipino”), where they downplay their Filipino heritage and promote, possibly invented, foreign ancestors.

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“I was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time…” so starts the intriguing short story set in the United Kingdom and told via the Google Maps API. “The 21 Steps” by Charles Cummings is the first story of Penguin Books’ We Tell Stories, a collection of six stories by six authors and released in six weeks (hmmm, 666?). We Tell Stories aims to do storytelling using the various tools, interactive or not, Web 2.0 has to offer; looking at the two stories so far released, the first uses Google Maps API, while the second uses blogs and Twitter. Interesting, isn’t it?

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Many of my readers are not into the so-called local blogging community, so here’s my unsolicited coverage of The Kid Blogger Affair, i.e., the question of the authorship of the Making Money Online with a 13-Year Old blog, which is owned by Carl Ocab, now a 14-year-old teenager.

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I expected that my recently launched Lakbayan application would become viral and really popular but I was still overwhelmed by the response. I almost did nothing with my free time except to tweak the application and manage the popularity.

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After months of planning and setting up, I am extremely pleased to announce that we have finally launched Vista Pinas, my second blog where I give you a virtual tour of Filipino sights as can be seen from satellite imagery found in Google Maps and Google Earth. It’s like Google Sightseeing done Pinoy-style!

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This blog, that is. Reminisce the first post as well as the first anniversary post. That’s 198 posts and how many tens of thousands of words.

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I was reading somebody’s journal a while ago and noticed the stark contrast between that person’s blog and mine. That person’s blog is quite personal (though not quite) while I blog about a lot of impersonal things. Oh, I’ve read a lot of really personal blogs (like some of the ones on my Biblography list), but I just noticed the stark contrast because this person is someone I know in a professional manner. I’ll definitely never look at that person again in the same way.

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I didn’t realize that I posted my first entry a year ago the other day. I’ve written just under 100 posts . Not bad.

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Jason Kottke, the high-profile New Yorker blogger and web designer, has quit his job and decided to blog full time last Tuesday.

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So I finally have a blog. Just like most pseudo-losers, I’ve decided to join all the cool people and jump on the bandwagon, adding my voice to the cacophony that is the blogosphere. It would be an interesting experience maintaining a blog as I never really had a journal or a diary nor even written a regular column in any periodical.

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