Blogging is my advocacy

Blogging is my advocacy
J. Angelo Racoma

You see it in my profile, and it’s evident in my writings. They all seem to shout out “blogging is my advocacy.”

Ever since I started blogging a couple of years ago, I was hooked. Never before had I harnessed the power of the written word as effectively and as efficiently.

Come to think of it, I have always been a connected person.

It started about a decade ago. I was the tech junkie I still am now. Before the advent of the Internet—at least before the ‘Net was commercially available here in the Philippines—I was already going online. I was logging into Bulletin Board Systems, commonly referred to as BBSes or simply “boards” with my trusty old 386 laptop. Connection speed maxxed out at 2400 bps (yes, that’s 2.4 kilobits per second); you were lucky if you didn’t get dozens of busy signals before successfully logging into a system.

I loved the fact that you could communicate with other people through electronic means. You can actually send messages across the world. You can play role playing games with people time zones away. You can download softwares and other basic multimedia.

Eventually, I had set up my own BBS, running it from my laptop every evening. This went on for about two years until I got to upgrade to a faster machine and was able to subscribe to a decent dial-up Internet connection.

As I mentioned earlier, I was hooked on connectivity, and my now being connected to the Internet was truly a delight.

I moved on to authoring several personal and group websites. Back then, it was all HTML—none of the fancy server-side hypertext pre-processing we are used to now with PHP and ASP scripting. It was plain ol’ static pages with tables and frames (CSS was then just a figment of some genius’ imagination).

It became cumbersome to maintain the static HTML pages and I eventually discovered tech/mobile forums. Ah, I loved the interactivity—the synergy of many minds converging in one common discussion theme. It was better than mailing lists (or “e-groups”) that were beginning to take off in popularity email, after all, had been the killer app of the internet. I had learned a lot from forums, and I was able to contribute a lot, as well. We were a group of knowledgable people, able to discover new things, able to explore and invent—we were hackers!

I loved the way the Internet brought the world closer to me, and me closer to the world.

And when I was introduced to the concept of blogging, it just blew me off my mind! Anyone now can be a personal publisher—putting out your thoughts online is as easy as a few clicks of the mouse, strokes of the keyboard, and a few thought cycles from the good ol’ brain. And this is way better than how I used to express myself before. IMHO, blogging beats static sites, forums and e-groups in bring my message across.

And I just love it so much that I have adopted this as my personal mission, to spread the word—to educate people—about the benefits of blogging and other forms of grassroots publishing, whether they be audio- or video-casting, photo-blogging, or simply text-blogging. The people can now take back the publishing sphere previously dominated by the big media companies. We are the new medium, and we can bring out our message more effectively and efficiently.

So if you have something to say, shout it off from the top of a mountain! Or better yet, blog it! Blog and be heard.

Blogging is my advocacy.

J. Angelo Racoma is an economist and I.T. executive. He maintains a tech blog at http://jangelo.i.ph and a personal/political/social blog at http://jangelo.racoma.net and contributes to various tech and other team-blogging efforts, notably the Pinoy.tech.blog, Pinoy Teachers Network, and the Sun Star Blog Chronicles.

tags: advocacy  blogs  blogging  education  

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