Blog, Blog, Blog, It's All About J-Blogs! (Inspired by Gino Dela Paz's SUPREME article)

    An hour ago (around 9 in the evening), I was reading the Philippine Star after my mom bought it when she left the house earlier that morning. I was so relieved since my day is incomplete without my dose of PhilStar. So I was turning page by page and ended up reading this article from my fave lifestyle writer, Paulo Azcarazen which is, and always still about the glory that is old Manila. But I'll tell you more about that later. Sooner after, I was flipping at the SUPREME section of the Star and find myself reading (for the second time) a feature story written by Gino Dela Paz.

   It's been a week since I actually read an article of his, for which his take on tried-and-tested yet "terribly awful" formats used on certain Philippine program genres really caught my eye. This time, his latest eye-catching piece is all about the matter of blogging. To make the long story short, he's been a blogger himself since 2002 and only stopped a year ago, not out of boredom but for "property-intellectual rights" reasons as well as trying to balance being a blogger who post 2-3 entries a day and being a writer for a respectable paper such as the Philippine Star.

  Sa totoo lang, I kind of agree with him. Sometimes, when you start something new, it initially gets to you and before you know, it never stops until the time comes that the steam coming out of doing it begins to dwindle out of your interest. Gino may have lost interest when blogging became a kinda of a trend for which the common tao would show their stuff much the same way that they did to other social networking communities like Friendster, MySpace, Youtube, and recently Facebook.

  Since 2001, I've been in the online social networking thing and right now, I'm active at several community forums as well as a few social network sites.

  I still remember how I got hooked over blogging. It was last March and me and my batch of graduating hopefuls are about to gain our freedom after 4 years of torment and joy under the ruling dictatorship. My friend Dianne indirectly introduced me to Multiply when she posted a blog entry and had the link posted on YM. I wanna comment on her post but I have to register and that was how it al began. Now, I've made around 107 published and unpublished posts. Not sure though when I would stop.

  It's always weird on how I make such blog posts, including the ridiculous titles for them. If you wanna know my secret on making a "J-Blog", here's how:

1. There must be something, or someone that would spark an interest for you to write about. It can be a person, a place, a thing, or even an unfortunate event happened to you. (For example, whenever I take the jeep ride home to Valenzuela from Monumento, Caloocan City, I have to bear the ever annoying filibustering of Mamang Barker who does nothing but hit on us commuters while at the same time, having a smoke)
2. Your mind would suddenly undergo brainstorming the moment it caught the attention of such. You would mentally compose your proposed blog post. Skip to the actual writing, you would print out through you fingers your "mental draft" over the matter.
3. Here's the most difficult, having to think a very eye-raising title to your blog. It has to reflect the content of your blog so that your readers would raise interest on reading it, if ever it tickles their fancy. It doesn't have to be overly ridiculous or boringly simple, but just right. (Remember the controversial "La Muda Chillon" post? The entry's title caught the attention of more than 25 bloggers passing by, and before you know it, the blog ended up with having around 500 views in total).
4. Write it like you've never write before. From the start, you really need have an idea of what you're suppose to write from the very start. Without it, you'll end up getting tired of writing something not worth your time nor the electricity bill Meralco would charge to your parents. Take it from me, the reason, I had more than 100 posts (including still unfinished and unpublished ones) is that I know what I'm writing about and once I do, it's only a breeze. The fun part is that I get to finish one blog for an average of 2 hours (long posts usually) and 1 hour at least (for shorter ones), thanks to my fast typing fingers and my brain-fixed ability to unknowingly recognize keys from the keyboard without looking or not looking at the monitor while writing with minimal errors. That's how it feels to be IN THE ZONE.

 

   So far, I have a lot of things that I wanna write and yet I can't write them all because not all the time kailangan ko isulat ang lahat ng mga hinagpis ko nor anything that crosses my mind unless I have to (like this one). Not really sure when I would actually stop blogging since I'm still hooked to it much. Other than that, I don't really have the kind of pressure that Gino dela Paz may have trying to balance being a PhilStar writer an a blogger. I'm not a professional writer but I love to write since it serves as my comfort zone, an alter ego, a friend. Gino's main reason for it is that blogging had become too mainstream but it became mainstream because of people like him in the first place, plus he's concerned about identity theft or something.

  I'm not totally close from the last thing that I've mention but if you feel your heart is with this, then go pursue it. No one could stop us from doing what we wanna do except for ourselves so let them be. To close this conversation, I just hope this 108th blog would become a big inspiration to everyone.