I had an interesting micro-debate with @digitalfilipino on twitter yesterday that got me thinking about blogs and their rather sordid relationship with mainstream media. At the heart of the discussion was this article involving writer Luis Teodoro’s comments about how journalists need to set an example for bloggers to follow. Specifically: many bloggers tend to be irresponsible with the way they write about news. Now, naturally this is the kind of statement that would invariably incense the blogging community, although I am of the opinion that Teodoro was mostly correct.

I will bet any amount of cash that upwards of 99% of all bloggers will never double-check any of their facts beyond looking at Google or Wikipedia for some external site to link to (preferably another blog, as there’s a greater chance of a linkback). “99%” sounds pretty close to “many” to me.

But this lack of proper, accurate reportage in the blogosphere is a subset of a much larger condition, i.e., the Internet itself. When people salivate about  how the Internet has “lowered the barriers” for everyone, they focus mostly on the good side of said barrier-lowering, which is that people now have (mostly) free access to copious amounts of information. There is a less good side though, in that people are now able to generate copious amounts of information as well. The Internet has lowered the barriers of information exchange to the point where everyone can participate. And when I say “everyone,” I actually mean “anyone.” Even those people whose work should never see the light of day are able to publish themselves online, and the overall level of quality is invariably decreased by the amount of unbridled crap that is generated. Mainstream media, on the other hand, has a much higher barrier to entry (e.g., you have to go to J-school, must be accepted by a large, established organization, must answer to several levels of editorship and an ombudsman, etc.). Because the quality control is more stringent, the product is almost always of a higher-grade.

We talk about this in relation with blogs because they’re an easy target, but generally speaking, everything the web touches experiences this phenomenon of Explosive Crap Growth. Think about web design, for instance, a personal pet peeve of mine. “Web design” as a profession has lost much of its gravitas because it’s so easy to get into. So easy that literally anyone can do it, and, as of this writing, it really does look as if everyone has. Look, I don’t care how many hundred Wordpress skins you’ve designed — if you can’t tell the difference between a DOM element that hasLayout turned off or on, then you’re not a web designer, capische?

But I digress. The point I’m trying to make is this: I do not begrudge anyone their grammatically-challenged, horribly-written detailing-my-last-shampoo-purchase train-wreck-of-a-blog. This is your God-given right as someone who (probably) pays for Internet access. However, we shouldn’t sell it like it’s the cure for cancer either. We need to accept the fact that the Internet - particularly the part of it that’s user-generated - is full of crap. It’s filled to the brim and everyday the container overflows and splashes everyone in the face with crap. And we shouldn’t wonder why people on the other side of the fence look at us and shake their heads, saying, “Wow, look at those people doing backflips into that giant pool of feces.”

But that doesn’t mean we should give up on it either. There are gems in that big pile of shit after all; the question is, how long are you willing to sit there and dig.

No updates recently, been pretty busy. Here’s why:

Once upon a time, there was young byte named 01.  It was a special day for him; match-maker X was finally going to introduce him to his bride-to-be, Aleph.  Unfortunately, he found out that she was infected. But that never stopped 01 before. He likes taking it slowly. The fact that she was infected was a challenge . The infection commonly known as love made her much stronger and anyway, “love” wasn’t the infection she had. It was “Loss Of Verbal Elucidation” or LOVE again , which was the more accurate terminology. Match maker X had to do something to help , as it was clear that this LOVE infection was an unknown phenomenon in the realm of Galdalland, south of Castle Lichtenstein where Aleph the prince lives. And by “the prince” we of course mean “the princess.” …

From “A Byte’s Tale,” our very first ongoing octale. Watch out, Morph. 

Over at WordPressPhilippines, Ia writes:

The New York Times reports that “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop“. Drop dead, that is. They consider professional blogging a “digital-era sweatshop”, referring to a factory where its workers are sorely underpaid and unprotected.

It’s an interesting analysis of how Filipino bloggers, unlike their American counterparts, are not getting proper benefits or even proper compensation. I like how this article tries to make a point to a very specific outsourcing niche, but I do think that it’s pretty much just describing the nature of outsourcing in any industry.

Let’s not forget that the Internet is a free market just like most other offline industries, and that the main reason why Filipinos are getting paid peanuts to blog professionally is because they accept peanuts. Let’s disassemble that notion briefly.

If Filipino bloggers are not getting paid enough, what will happen to the local professional blogging industry? The answer is really simple: either 1) blogging as a profession will cease to exist locally or 2) the market will readjust its prices to support a smaller number of higher-quality bloggers, essentially locking out the lower-end suppliers. Now because I don’t think people will ever stop trying to make bucks from blogging, let’s talk about option number 2.

Notice that I said the market will "readjust its prices," and not "the market will increase its prices." To illustrate, here’s a really simple economic thought experiment:

Sam in the US is paid $100 per post. Pedro in the Philippines is paid $20 per post. Using these numbers we can make the erroneous, simplistic comparison that Sam is 5 times more valued than Pedro, which is the mistake that most people make when they talk about outsourcing. We can, however, say that for every 1 Sam, a company hiring professional bloggers could alternatively look for 5 Pedros instead.

Now let’s say Pedro decides that he’s not getting paid enough, and starts charging $50 per post (a huge, earth-shaking increase in any industry). Now the company looks at the numbers and thinks, "Hmm, so we can either hire 1 Sam, or 2 Pedros. Which option should we go with?"

The answer will almost always be "Sam," and the reason for that is that there are issues intrinsic in outsourcing that make having two Pedros less appealing than just having one Sam. As a US company, outsourcing your writing to the Philippines carries with it many pitfalls: cultural differences are the biggest one, but you must also contend with incompatible work ethics, timezone differences, geographical costs, etc. The only way you can justifiably accept all of these problems is if you can get 5 Pedros for the price of your 1 Sam. At 2 Pedros for 1 Sam, however, that arrangement ceases to become cost-effective, and the correct thing to do is to either go back to Sam, or wait for China to start blogging in English and outsource your requirements there.

Now, this thought experiment kind of sounds like I’m saying that Pedro is forever stuck at $20/post, but that’s not necessarily true in practical terms. If Pedro’s overall quality and work ethic improved, you might only need 4 Pedros to accomplish the work of 5, meaning they can now all get $25 per post, a 25% increase. (What happens to the 5th Pedro however? Well, he loses his job most likely. Creative Destruction is a powerful force indeed.)

The lesson here is that you should never, ever forget that outsourcing is forever a price war, and will never be anything other than a price war. The reason why Filipino bloggers don’t have health benefits is because the added cost of health benefits will result in some Filipino bloggers losing their jobs, and at the moment, the market requires a certain number of available bloggers to fulfill the requirements of various businesses.

The other thing to consider here is that as we become more progressively globalized, the costs of maintaining Sams and Pedros will become more and more similar (so it is totally possible — although I personally think it’s unlikely — to have Pedro earning a very similar amount of cash as Sam). However, remember that the available funds have not changed in this scenario. If 1 Pedro is making $80-100 per post, that means that 4 other Pedros will no longer be able to find work, and will either switch industries, or try to undercut that 1 brilliant Pedro. The former action just shifts the burden to somebody else, and the latter restarts the whole price-war process.

Erwin Oliva at the Inquirer writes:

IMAGINE a large group of users who write stories together one phrase at a time. That is actually the simple and yet brilliant idea from a startup simply called Octales.

Unanimously, the panel of experts said Octales is a “refreshing” idea after an afternoon of elevator pitches.

Although it’s not immediately obvious from the writeup, that was syndeomedia’s pitch he was talking about. I twittered a little bit during the elevator pitch sessions yesterday, and one of the things I said was that I was beginning to feel like a rock guitarist at a jazz recital. The 14 other groups before us each had very revenue-focused business concepts, with copious amounts of market research to back up everything they said. We were the only group with a concept that was purely for entertainment, didn’t do any market research, had only the barest idea of a revenue model, and didn’t fall into any of the three general categories for the sessions (E-learning, E-Government or E-Health).

As it turned out, the fact that we stuck out like a sore thumb was a good thing, and the fact that we were the very last group to pitch helped make it really memorable. To be honest, it was really surprising (to me, at least) how easily everybody got it. I’d run the Octales idea by dozens of people prior to this presentation, and all I’ve ever gotten was polite nods. (Ok, maybe the fact that I’d been practicing the pitch over and over while driving to work everyday for the past week had something to do with the clarity of the message.)

After it was all over, I had quite a few people come up and congratulate me, saying that they thought the idea was really elegant and original, and that the presentation was the best one they’d seen that day. I honestly couldn’t have hoped for a better result. (Well, ok, that’s a lie; the best possible result would be if people started whipping out their checkbooks right then and there, the odds of which are probably slim to none, but you never know.)

All that’s left for us to do now is wait and see if this materializes into what I’m hoping for.

(Slight digression: I had a conversation with one of my friends earlier today about it and she asked if I was nervous. I was like, jesus, of course I was nervous. If I screwed this up, I wouldn’t just be letting myself down, I’d be letting the team down as well. So yeah, wow. I think I really lucked out there.)

Managed to throw Moomai’s new layout together over the long weekend, and have focused a lot on simplifying the sidebar and tightening things up somewhat. We’re gearing up towards giving the underlying math for the ratings system an overhaul as well, which should be happening within the next week or so.

Overall, I think it’s starting to really come together finally. I’ve been having issues with moomai’s look and feel from the very first version I put together over a year ago and I think this recent overhaul might actually be The One We Go Public With. From here on out, I should be able to concentrate on just bug fixes, minor improvements and that Facebook app we’ve been putting off for like forever.

I’ve been listening to so much new music this past year, and I realized recently how much I really miss sharing it with folks. Back during my highfiber days, we’d have a weekly featured download with a short writeup of the artist. I doubt I can pull off a weekly effort, but I think I can at least manage to keep this semi-regular. We’ll call it “Viva Pirateria” because my first choice, “Download Free MP3s at Guttervomit.com,” seemed a little too much like search-whoring. (As always, these tracks will be deleted after 30 days. I can’t really afford the bandwidth costs involved in keeping them up indefinitely.)

Our debut batch of MP3s is all fun-rock; catchy toe-tappers you can play in the car with friends.

Spoon – The Underdog
From one of last year’s best albums. Spoon wrote a good two-thirds of the soundtrack to my favorite Will Ferell movie, Stranger than Fiction, back in 2006, and are the vanguards of indie rock.

Orson – Broken Watch
Orson isn’t the world’s hardest-working indie rock band, but they’re probably in the top ten. “Broken Watch” is from their 2006 debut. The whole album is full of sugary pop confections; perfect for a summer trip to the beach.

Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin – Modern Mystery
SSLYBY (and man, even the acronym is long) is oddly-named, but they’ve got a great jangly-rock guitar sound that’s reminiscent of Rogue Wave and Maritime. Their choice of name pretty much prevents them from ever going mainstream, so if you are a fan, you are 100% assured that these guys will never sell out.

Nada Surf – Weightless
I’ve been listening to Nada Surf since “Popular” back in 1996 (which is pretty much when everybody else started listening to them), but the recent two albums have exhibited a kind of growth to their musicality that has been both fascinating and off-putting for older fans. “Weightless” is very similar in technique to an older song “Killian’s Red,” but it’s got a much more fleshed-out outro.

In case any of the direct links above don’t work, ol’ Apache will hook you up.

Ah, the shopping lists of the young and sleepless.

So by now I guess we’ve all seen Janina San Miguel’s epic soliloquy on the important persons in her life during the recent Binibining Pilipinas 2008, a monologue that was only slightly more impressive in its scope and daring than Miss South Carolina’s treatise on geography last year. I actually have a bit of a rant regarding beauty pageants that I’ve been nursing quietly now for years, and this seems like just the right week to whip it out.

Now before I embark on my own epic soliloquy, I want to first address the feminist argument that beauty pageants should be abolished because they are degrading. I personally find that rather ridiculous, as beauty pageants are no more demeaning towards women than Jeopardy is demeaning towards smart people. Or hotdog-eating contests, towards guys that like a little sausage. I think that it’s important that we celebrate the things that are outstanding and exceptional in this world, and by golly, if we can have World Rock-Paper-Scissors championships, then a competition that judges female beauty is a no-brainer. (Haha, sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)

The problem is not that there are beauty pageants, the problem is in the rules. I find it frustrating that there are interview portions at all during these contests, because a contestant’s brains should have no effect on her overall “beauty” score. No Jeopardy player has ever lost because of his/her looks, because obviously, in a contest of wits, appearances are irrelevant. Strange that it doesn’t work the other way around.

Now, some people like to argue that beauty extends beyond just looks, all the way into the mind and soul of a given contestant. That’s all well and good, but if you want to accurately measure a girl’s mind, I think you need to base it on a little bit more than a single 60-second response, you know? Instead of having a single evening’s pageant, you need to have a week-long marathon with IQ tests and moral/ethical dilemmas mixed in with the bikini segments and talent portions. (That’s not a particularly bad idea either; get Mark Burnett on board and you’ve got yourself a real concept.)

I know that sounds like I’m being facetious, but I’m trying to make a point. Why do we even pretend that it matters whether a contestant is smart or not, when no beauty pageant has ever crowned a smarter girl over a prettier one? I personally think it’s this half-assed approach that makes beauty contests feel so farcical. The pageant industry’s desire to satiate critics by adding these silly question-and-answer portions has had the rather more negative effect of highlighting the fact that some of these contestants are real dullards. And it’s a shame because ultimately, they would have won regardless.

I finally got my Wii today, after "retiring" from gaming 2 years ago. I got a basic package for Php17,980 in Greenhills (console, controller, gun, and voltage adapter), and paid an additional PhP2,900 for a second remote and nunchuk.

Had a bit of an interesting time getting the thing running with my Samsung LCD monitor, as the Wii only supports composite or S-Video signals (read: television sets). Fortunately, I was able to find a cheap TV-converter that accepts various video and audio inputs, then remixes them into a VGA-compatible out (it’s the little black box sitting on top of the ipod hi-fi).

Even better, the Samsung connects to the Macbook Pro via a DVI cable, so I can switch between the Wii input and the Mac input by pressing a single hardware button. Unfortunately, my sound setup isn’t quite as simple, as I haven’t found a way for the MBP and the Wii to share the hi-fi are their respective outputs. (The hi-fi was originally connected to my Airport Express, so I could stream music wirelessly to it. Seemed like a good idea at the time :/ )