Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

Agenda

• He gives us mangoes (which are probably yummy, but I am allergic to them, sadly)
• “The Philippines”
• began blogging February last year
• thinking the blog would be a voice for all Filipino librarians. About 5,000 librarians in the Philippines.
• He shows us some of his older posts on archive.org
• FO = filipiniana online
• There are some US troops based (friendly) in the P. but there is some controversy in Filipino community over this. P used to be a commonwealth of US.
• He has a neat librarian trading card!
• Lots of what I write about is stereotypes about librarians
• He writes about resources online, and focuses on the Filipino materials. Ex, he profiles Project Gutenberg, but he focuses there on the Filipino books, esp the ones in Tagalog
• the image of the Filipina online is is mainly for dating sites etc (exotic/eroticized). So some Filipinos started to googlebomb the word “filipina” so for a long time the top link was Bagong Pinay, a group of US Filipina women. The googlebomb is no longer active though so the dating sites are up again
• Yan Ang Pinay movement – how Von learned about Global Voices, cos GV linked to him re his involvement in that site. “*This* is the ‘Pinay'” is rough translation.
• He also met Beth Kanter who is a blog grouper
• He is also conencted thru meeting j at last year’s SLA conference in Toronto (he had a travel award – one of the nice side benefits of getting well known through blogging, and of what he learned through being part of blogging community and was able to apply professionally)
• He began unknown, eventually grew popular. Now he has more credibility than he thinks he deserves. People think he;’s a big techie cos he has a website and don’t know how easy it actually is.
• Blogger has no categories, unfortunately. He chose it cos it’s free. This was before hosted wordpress.com was available. So he made his categories manually. Side benefit for google juice in that his blog gets an automatic link from hosting categories externally.
• Sidebar – Flag, motto, “vonjobi” handle
• He learned about bloglines, feedburner etc. Thinks he has about 58 regular readers thru RSS, more thru email in addition. Around 150-200 hits/day. Maybe half librarians. Don’t know distribution of regulars vs search engines.
• He formed a google group for Filipino librarians – around 200 members. Based in Manila, mostly. Most are librarians. Some in US with Filipino connections.
• Most of the sidebar code he was able to copy/paste right in
• Though bonus, he was able to learn html
• He;s going to Toronto for PhD
• Also in sidebar: categories, etc. He worries people miss it tho.
• “blograrians”
• Uses bloglines for reading aggregation. Though lately he follows very few, due to time. Subscribed to over 100 tho.
• Online resources & catalogs, mostly for librarians – ie DOAJ directory of open access journals
• Map of where his readers are (ip hits etc) – all over the world.
• He has a few ads – google, adsense, Amazon. hasn’t earned much. Been blogging for 1.5 years. Maybe made $50. Still more than nothing.
• Blog log – what ppl are clicking on. More than a counter. free. Drawback is if you don’;t have paid service you can only see yesterday’s results, never live results. Some other stuff you can’t do, ie all time top 5 links, etc.
• He had to go into adsense and remove all the sex links for the word Filipina, to combat that stereotype. They don’t seem to have general category of preventing adult ads. He has his instructions for how to disable these links on his site.
• Top google referrer is filipino, not librarian or filipino librarian. It turns out not too many people are using “filipino” a lot on websites or blogs. Most other top results for filipino are filipino-american. Not even pinoy (tagalog) seems to get the same kidn of hits
• google trends – he has a comparison on his blog re terms between philippines and thailand. many more non-thais looking for term thailand. poss due to tsunami.
• (brief discussion on the relative merits and yet suckiness of technorati)
• pinoy top blogs – top 2 are filipino but not based in manila. very very heavily entertainment blogs in the top. ie, the top blog rickey mostly writes about American Idol and other American reality shows. He associates himself witha network of TV blogs rather than of filipino blogs. He does post about trhe Philippines occasionally. He doesn’t make his living on the blog but he does earn a lot.
• look at rankings
• some stuff about tagalog – script in “alibata”
• Von’s own short notes, with a few links

• journalizm prof, used to be a core member of this group before he moved away
• http://stylefeeder.com party next week – more to come from Erica