iBlog: The 15th Philippine Blogging Summit #iblog15

http://deanalfar.blogspot.com/

Dean Francis Alfar is a five-time Palanca awardee, a contributor to the National Book Award-winning comic book anthology Isaw, Atbp., and was a fellow at the Silliman and U.P. creative writing workshops. His first internationally-published short story was chosen for inclusion in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He is a playwright, a fictionist, and a scriptwriter, but adamantly denies being a poet, despite having written some really quite decent verse.

http://www.kutitots.com/

Gail Dela Cruz is a 23 year old freelance digital artist for almost 9 years. She also considers herself an expert in Website Design, Photography, Logo Design, Graphic Design, Flash and Banner Design. She started designing websites since high school, but only took the field seriously last May 2004 when she began to forge partnerships with international web solution firms as an outsource designer.
In 2004, her site www.Kutitots.com won the Filipino Blog Site of the Year award.

I’ve got some interesting memories of the National Institute for Science and Mathematics Education Development (NISMED), our venue (please see our map and directions). It’s where I first saw the web, demo’ed via projector, by a visiting American professor whose name I can’t even remember. That was almost ten years ago, when I was just a freshman who’d read about this Internet thing from Time Magazine and Doctor Dobbs Journal. Jeff Veen describes his first encounter with the web, just like his first encounter with the Mac GUI, as a mixture of connectedness and isolation. For me it was like falling from a manhole and ending up in Myst island. This was when Yahoo was just a collection of links in a Stanford server, before Google and Blogger crawled out of the woodwork.

Though I doubt if anything these days can compare to the frisson of surfing the web for the first time, I hope newbie bloggers can walk out of the summit with something comparable: Isolation from staking out their personal spaces in the blogosphere. A sense of connectedness to a larger community of bloggers. As for old-timers, perhaps a recognition that all their voices, big or small, add up to something new and powerful.

See you all at NISMED!

[UPDATE: Download PDF map/instructions courtesy of Prem]