Pinoy Blog Party Alienates Bloggers

Jan 25 2007 Thu

2:20 am PHT

On Saturday, January 27, the largest ever gathering of Pinoy bloggers will be held in Makati. However, the registration process, deemed simple by the organizers, seems to be alienating a few bloggers.

The event, called the Blog Parteeh ’07, is the first ever major blog gathering that’s organized for fellow Pinoy bloggers by Filipino bloggers. Anyone who is an active blogger is welcome to join. The only requirement is that the interested blogger do these four simple steps: blog about the event, link to the sponsors and donors, tag the blog entry with the keyword “blogparteeh07”, and finally add the e-mail address to which the invitation will be sent. Abe Olandres, the event’s main organizer, has said, “[We wanted the] registration process be made as simple as possible—blog, link & tag—three very basic exercise [sic] we assumed a regular and active blogger would be already expert with.” The organizers plan to find the blog posts through a tag search in Technorati.

Apparently, what’s supposedly simple for the organizers is quite impossible for others. Lisa (not her real name), a Pinay blogger using Google Page Creator, bewails the registration. “I’m sorry that my blog doesn’t have an RSS—whatchamacallit—feed or comments. And the only tags I have are blink and marquee tags!” exclaims Lisa. “I don’t even know what Technorati is!”

Gino (not his real name either) agrees. “I’ve been using a wiki software for my blog. It really makes creating and updating blog posts easier,” Gino explains. “Unfortunately, since I can’t input HTML and the wiki software does not support feeds, I’m technologically barred from the party. I’m an active blogger and I won’t bring along my non-blogger friends; why all the tagging fuss?”

Due to the ease of use of the WordPress blogging platform, which twelve out of thirteen organizers are using, tagging was considered a prerequisite for the party’s registration.

According to Vinz (another unreal name), “While tagging—or categorizing—seems like a very blogger thing to do, it unfortunately excludes some people who use blogging software that can’t do tags or feeds or trackbacks. A tag does not a blog make.” He also discourages pingbacks and trackbacks, suggested by some, as an alternative for registration. “LiveJournal does not do trackbacks and pingbacks—and there are a lot of Pinoys using LJ. I would suggest instead that good, old-fashioned commenting should’ve been used. Every blogger, regardless of age, race, gender, sexual orientation, or blogging software, is quite able to leave comments.”

This paper has not tried to contact the organizers of the blog party and they obviously declined to comment.

Well, this is my belated post introducing the Blog Parteeh ’07. Don’t take the article above seriously. There are prizes for the superlative posts and I just wanted to take a different direction from the others who are trying for the funniest, most artistic, or most disturbing posts. Call this the “most hopelessly satirical post.” Hehehe.

Hopefully I can still make the invitation cut-off since the venue managers wanted the list of attendees yesterday. (Boo!) But intriguingly, I seem to have already received an invite for the party in my e-mail, despite my lack of a blog entry. Must be Migs. (Step 4: my Google Mail username is seav80.)

And no, Technorati apparently doesn’t see the quickly-hacked tag system I just added to my blog. The documentation isn’t complete, so it seems.