Two years ago, there were only a handful of Philippine blogs barely three years later, every niche, idea and advocacy have been blogged about. Most are personal, as blogs evolved or metamorphosized from the online journals of old. From entertainment and technology to travel and business, it seems that anything that can be blogged about has been.

Blogging is communication. Positive, neutral or negative, it lends a voice to the blogger.

Blogging is art.  Weaving words and images, taking things point blank or figuratively. Ideas sorted, arranged or dispersed, opinions refuted or supported. Reading beyond, above and into.

Blogging is global. From all corners where you can log on to the net, from the space station to the submarine thousands of feet below, it has transcended boundaries, torn down fences and redefined community.

Blogging is “my news and information”. From the mainstream media culture of “Here is what is worth knowing” to the new social computing paradigm of “Here is what I want, what I know, faster than you can sneeze, plus upsize it with catsup please”, news and information as we know it has been transformed to where we source it, how we’d like it packaged and what perspective we want it to take. No  longer will we be content with what the newspaper say or what TV would want us to believe. Truth or fiction, better or worse - our choice. Which means we have to be discerning and picky to be taken seriously, not merely emotional, reactive or childish.

So is there really a Pinoy Blogging presence?

I’m going to the Philippine Blog Awards on March 31, 2007 at the RCBC Auditorium. The finalists are in. Some of those supporting the event are Automattic, Globe, b5media and iKobo. I’m going around the finalists blogs to ask for some information and give them instructions about their roles and registration stuff.

Blogging is……

alive and well, thriving, pulsating, beating, fluorishing.

Philippine Blogs and Bloggers on the rise.

And we have only just begun.

Many of us wish that there were more than 24 hours in a day to accomplish all the tasks we have set to do for the myriad of roles we have. If only we had more time.

 

The real solution is not to gain more time. It is to balance roles.

 

In our quest to be production and efficient, we tend to accept a myriad of roles that keep ultimately eats up our time. We find out later that our main roles are suffering because of the other less important roles we have assumed. We often complain that our roles as a family member suffer because of work, and vice versa. Many of us seem to think that in order to be good in one role we have to neglect some other equally important role.

 

We do not know what our real roles are. We just assume anything and everything whatever comes our way.

 

Roles we have should emanate from our mission. Our mission in turn, grows from our principles.

 

Stephen Covey illustrates this as a tree. The leaves are our roles, which grow from the trunk which is our mission. The mission however is attached and shoots up from the roots – our principles.

 

Principles => Mission => Roles

There is a great difference between doing the right things versus doing things right. We may cerebrally know this truth. But in reality, we do not practice what we know. From an unconscious, almost rote level, we tend to get busy, doing things right. Unfortunately, we miss the whole point of doing the right thing because we are too preoccupied. For us, as long as our hands are typing, the paper work is piling and we get that rush of “doing”, we feel we have done our job.  Only to find out that our output does not necessarily match the actual needs of our company.

 

Just recently, I agreed to take on some editing job thinking it would be good extra income.   It was exciting at first, but the reality hit me when it came into conflict with my main roles. It was eating up time that I have sworn to spend with my family and long term interests. In other words, although I was doing things right, it was the wrong thing to do.

 

One of my long term interests is in eLearning. Since my first encounter with the possibilities of non- asynchronous, empowering and drastically life-improving changing mode of learning, I knew in my guts that this is what I wanted to pursue. Investing time in learning the industry and networking with people with similar interests has paid off. Though I still have a lot to learn and accomplish, I am now at a level that makes me an asset for my company and those we serve. Aside from that, I have started a personal project that will probably lead to more opportunities for learning, collaboration and contribution.

 

We have to constantly ask ourselves: What is the best use of my time now?

 

Let’s do the right things and not only be concerned with doing things right.

Ideas from the book First Things First by Stephen Covey, A. Roger Merrill and Rebecca Merrill:

Doing the Right Things vs. Doing Things Right, and

Doing more things faster is no substitute for doing the right things.

There’s this story about a man who climbs a ladder of success to the top, only to find that his ladder was leaning on the wrong wall.

The Four Human Needs and Capacities: To Live, To Love, To Learn and To Live a Legacy.
Balance isn’t running on between compartments; It’s a dynamic equilibrium. It’s all parts working synergistically in a highly interrelated whole. Balance isn;t “either/or”. It’s And.

You think because you understand One, you must understand Two because One and One makes Two. But you also must understand And.

I’m not talking about Abe.

He loves Linux and is an advocate of open source (though he would often use the term Free software), wears a collar and you can tell him your innermost secrets and he would not be able to tell anybody else.

Fr. Stephen Cuyos, MSC. Blogger, podcaster, FOSS Advocate. A priest with a microphone, Wordpress and a camera.

A couple of years ago, when I was introduced to the world of podcasting, I googled these keywords: Philippines Podcast. The number one on the list was the Cuying Podcast. Clicking on the link led me to a Filipino priest in Italy who, like Fr. Roderick of  the SQPN network and DailyBreakfast, drew faith lessons from Star Wars.

Conversing with the man, you can immediately sense his passion to help and elevate his neighbor’s plight. He has found his niche: Open Source. He is an active advocate of it’s use in the Philippines. And I think he was tickled pink to know that the Vatican used Linux too. Headed by a nun no less! He can talk to you about the various flavors of Linux, compare the commercial productivity suites with OpenOffice, and yet you can sense that all these come from an informed person, not someone who is anti-establishment or anti-business. In fact, he says he is not anti-anything but is more of pro-open source. If anybody wants to convince congress how open source is a good thing and not a barrier to business, I think he is the man.

He reasons that his advocacy smoothly blends with his vocation. The concept of open source jives with the teachings of the church on social justice, whose bottom line is the common good. I agree. And they really do.

We need more people like him. I think we’ll see, read and hear of him more often.