What Have You

Whooaah! I’m back in Ilocos Norte after staying for nearly 3 days in Baguio City. I went there to meet a fellow blogger named RJ – a very beautiful, intelligent and very sexy female blogger from the said city. Our topics ranged from personal to professional aspects of our lives and I had this feeling we’ve know each other for ages, which is in part due to our blogging connections in the past. The way we conversed in real life was not so different from the way we exchange shouts and messages in our blogs and chat sessions in Yahoo Messenger.

For the most part, the short break I took in Baguio City was great, especially when it rained and the rainwater pouring down my face felt like snow. Baguio is truly the “Summer Capital of the Philippines”. The only thing I did not like a bit was when a strong but quick earthquake shook the city and everyone in the restaurant I was in at that time ran outside fearing that the catastrophe that hit Baguio in 1990 (?) would once again tear the city apart. That gloomy day claimed thousand of human lives and left the whole city in distress for a decade or so. We were all thankful the shaking of the ground did not last long enough to tear the buildings down as it did almost 18 years ago.

In one of our discussions, I brought up to RJ the concept of community building in blogging. I told her my observations about “clustering” of Filipino bloggers in the blogosphere based on region. I told her that in my 3 months + of roaming around the blogging world, the “Bisdaks” are perhaps the most active and tight as a group of Pinoy bloggers. I was laughing when I told her the meaning of “Bisdak”, which was given by Marlene – Bisayang Dako – a native of Visaya/Bisaya, someone who grew up there.

At this point, my wishful thinking to build a group of Ilocano bloggers came to play. Well, that’s just for starters. In my bloghopping, I have observed that there are only a handful of Ilocano bloggers out there. It was only a few days back that I’ve come to know some Ilocano bloggers through my shout box. However, there is no group whatsoever that could identify these people and perhaps it’s a wise idea to build that group I had in mind. This also prompted me to convince friends in Ilocos Norte to try blogging, either for fun or something else. On the other hand, since they have real jobs and Ilocanos are basically pragmatic when it comes to money-making, most of them hesitated. This is explicable since Ilocanos are perhaps the most hardworking people in the Philippines who have high valuation for education and real jobs. Most of them would rather work in farms or do business in the real world than make money online. I cannot blame them at all since most of them succeed in their own ways because of their wonderful traits as a people. My only hope was to build a community we can call our own, a network of people, however small in number, that will help each other grow and can learn from each other starting from their own cluster then later on expanding to other networks. I think it was actually a brilliant idea since many Ilocanos are highly educated, friendly and patient – qualities that I believe are elements to successful blogging. I think if they can only learn to love blogging, most of them (if not all) will succeed. The group may be composed of small blogs, but small things that go together and can work as a real team will not fail in my view – much like the Bisdaks whose groups and/or subgroups made it big in the blogosphere.

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