Topic: Exploring the Philippine Knowledge Space

Speaker: Baripov Guerrero, OIC - WikiPilipinas.org

Date and Time: July 1, 2008, 2:50 PM – 3:40 PM

Venue: DOLE Ople Hall, Intramuros, Manila

Mr. Baripov “Bari” Guerrero began his talk with two words: Knowledge Revolution. Its end goal, he said, is knowledge sharing. He then asked what made the Ifugao Rice Terraces different from the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids of Egypt. The Terraces, he said, were built through community effort while the other two were built by forced labor. Even in ancient times, Filipinos knew the value of community effort.

The problem faced by knowledge-sharing, according to Mr. Guerrero, is distance plus cost. The Internet, however can slash the distance and bring people closer although they live in different places around the world. Many people and organizations worldwide thus realized that the Internet can be a good venue to share knowledge.

According to the Alexa website, the top websites in the world are Yahoo, Google, YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia, while the top websites accessed within the Philippines are Multiply, YouTube, Google, Yahoo and Friendster. The top Philippine websites, on the other hand, are PEP, ABS-CBN.com, GMANews.tv, Inquirer.net, and Sulit.com.ph. Mr. Guerrero said that Filipinos thus seemed to be most interested in entertainment and celebritites, news, and bargains. Meanwhile, he added, a survey of the top websites accessed by Filipinos showed that they liked buy-and-sell sites, search engines, news sites, social networking sites, and porn sites!

Unfortunately, according to Mr. Guerrero, as the Philippine population grows, our capacity for knowledge sharing lessens. Fortunately, there are local groups (like Vibal Foundation) with websites that spread knowledge for free in what is termed the “Knowledge Revolution”.

Mr. Guerrero then gave brief overviews of each of the four Vibal Foundation websites: Filipiniana.net (digital library and image bank aiming to preserve Philippine history and culture); Wikipilipinas.org (online encyclopedia aiming to document information about the Philippines); E-turo.org (educational site aiming to supplement basic Philippine education online); and POC (news site aiming to aggregate news and viewpoints from multiplicity of perspectives to create an archive of Philippine news). Each of these sites represents one of the four objectives of Vibal Foundation: Read, Write, Learn and Share.

The websites of the future, concluded Mr. Guerrero, will have the following characteristics: Their audience will be the world; they will build knowledge in a pluralistic and participatory environment; and they will empower people by allowing them to share what they know.

Subscribe to Blogsphere!

Topic: Writing for the Web: The Do’s and Don’ts of Web Writing

Speaker: Kristine Mandigma, Editorial Director of Vibal Foundation

Date and Time: July 1, 2008, 2:15 PM – 2:45 PM

Venue: DOLE Ople Hall, Intramuros, Manila

“Readers on the web don’t read. They only scan. Also, they don’t read pages in sequence,” stated Ms. Kristine Mandigma as she began her lecture. First of all, she said, it’s tiring to read onscreen, so users tend to just scan the material and see what’s interesting. They then tend to download long articles or documents for printing and read the hardcopy. Also, users don’t read web pages in sequence the way books are read from the first to the last page. Because of hyperlinks, users tend to jump between pages depending on what they’re interested in. Also, users tend to read only 20% of the text in a webpage, and they place importance on credibility. Ms. Mandigma reminded the audience that the web is a user-driven medium and each page has to compete with a million other websites.

According to Ms. Mandigma, web users look for highlighted keywords, meaningful sub-headings, bulleted lists, one-idea paragraphs, inverted pyramid or journalistic style of writing, and half the word count than conventional writing. Therefore, to write for the web, she said, one must: summarize first; be concise; write for scanning; and break up the information into logical chunks connected by hyperlinks. Also, a web writer should be frugal in writing, should stick to the point, should cultivate a voice, and should think globally.

She also reminded the audience of the importance of using links to reinforce one’s message and maintain context. Finally, she recommended some reading materials to supplement her lecture

Subscribe to Blogsphere!

Topic: Legal Challenges in the Web 2.0 Environment

Speaker: Atty. Michael Vernon “Berne” Guerrero, Creative Commons Philippines and the E-Law and IT Centers of the Arellano University School of Law

Date and Time: July 1, 2008, 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM

Venue: DOLE Ople Hall, Intramuros, Manila

“Ignorance of the law excuses no one from compliance therewith,” said Atty. Michael Vernon “Berne” Guerrero by way of opening his lecture. This maxim, enshrined in Article 3 of the Civil Code of the Philippines, is applicable to the new legal challenges posed by the Web 2.0 environment. The major legal issues on the web may be grouped into four: security, libel, pornography and copyright.

Of the thousands of Philippine laws that were enacted in this country, only one affords some means of protection on the Internet: the E-commerce Law, which governs electronic documents and information. Atty. Guerrero discussed some of the provisions of this law which governed confidentiality and lawful access to information. According to him, everyone can only access certain information if they have a right to do so. There are two kinds of data access: authorized and unauthorized.

Unlawful access or interference to information provided in the facilities is called “cracking” or “hacking” in layman’s terms. “Cracking” refers to unlawful access to a site or account without being the owner, while “hacking” refers to unlawful access to a site or account without being the owner and making changes in it. “Denial of service attack”, which refers to the method of bombarding a website with information until it crashes, is a form of “hacking” according to Atty. Guerrero. However, there is a conflict between the technical and the common meaning of the term “hacking”, because technically, the term “hack” also means “to create a solution”. Some of the different ways of protecting electronic data are electronic signatures, technical mechanisms for Internet security, access policies, and precautions and contractual agreements in the handling of devices.

Atty. Guerrero also talked about libel, discussing the concept of absolute immunity as compared to qualified immunity. He said that like Batas Pambansa Blg. 22, the payment of a fine is now prioritized as a penalty for libel as against imprisonment.

Finally, Atty. Guerrero discussed the concept of copyright and copyright infringement. He identified who could be copyright owners: authors, co-authors, employees and employers, creators, producers, writers and assignees; and who could be made liable for copyright infringement. He also introduced to the audience the concept of Creative Commons and talked about the different Creative Commons licenses.

The audience asked varied questions concerning copyright infringement, ownership of commissioned works, posting of content on other sites without the owner’s permission, assigning of copyright as compared to licensing of copyright, the use of creative commons licenses, and the privacy of employee communications/workstation within the work premises.

Subscribe to Blogsphere!

Topic: Googling for Research

Speaker: Aileen Apolo, Google Country Consultant for the Philippines

Date and Time: July 1, 2008, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM

Venue: DOLE Ople Hall, Intramuros, Manila

The world’s biggest search engine started as a school project at Stanford University– for indexing books and documents on its website, according to Ms. Aileen Apolo. She said that the next thing the creators of Google thought was” “Let’s try to index the web!” And they did!

Ms. Apolo presented some of the Google research tools and explained how they were used. Some of these tools are: Gmail, Google Calculator, conversion rates, Google Search, Google Translate, Google Dictionary, Google Scholar, Google Book Search, Google Notebook, Google Reader, Google Alerts, and YouTube. She also discussed iGoogle, Google iMaps, Google Apps, and the Google Website Optimizer.

When she talked about YouTube, Ms. Apolo told an anecdote about the time she met actor Dominick Ochoa. She didn’t know what to say to him, she said, so for lack of any other inspiration, she asked him about his most interesting Internet experience. Dominick Ochoa told her that he was once invited by a friend to a party. When he arrived early at his friend’s house, he was surprised to see his friend in the kitchen with a laptop on the table. Puzzled, he asked what his friend was doing because they were supposed to go to a party. His friend said that yes, they were having a party but first he was cooking something following a recipe being demonstrated in a video on YouTube!

Subscribe to Blogsphere!