Thursday, December 21, 2006 Toral: Rediscovering the Web By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
I REMEMBER the first time I went online in 1995, I was using a 386 computer with a paper white monitor. I was so excited that I hopped from one website to another, just to explore.
I felt like celebrating whenever I discover a website that has a unique content or feature and told friends about it. I even built my first all-Filipino bookstore website with that computer and using Microsoft Word.
Through the years, and as I matured with my Internet usage, my appetite for online surfing declined. I only visit websites whenever I needed to do some research or for communication purposes.
As I became more active in teaching e-commerce development to professionals, educators, and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the need to expand the website menu became a necessity as there are numerous Filipino websites out there waiting to be discovered and recognized.
Sadly, a lot of them are very conservative or shy in nature that they are not any better in marketing themselves online. To answer the need to educate new e-commerce developers and satisfying one’s desire to find out new things on the Internet made by Filipinos, the DigitalFilipino.com Web Awards (http://digitalfilipinowebawards.blogspot.com) experimental project was born.
Definitely, this is not intended to compete against any ongoing web awards or any upcoming effort. It is mainly designed for education purposes of the DigitalFilipino.com community and at the same time, recognize them in our way.
Any Filipino website can be nominated, whether one owns it or not. There are no fees to be charged. Simple recognition will be given this March 2007, along with the winners of the Philippine Schools Cyberfair 2007 (http://www.cyberfair.ph).
This project became possible because of the maturity of online free tools today. The whole awards nomination process is done transparently, thanks to blogging technology. I used the Blogger.com beta edition for this purpose.
It has allowed me to maintain the website much easier and to integrate content syndication feeds from another blog. It has also enabled me to add Google AdSense for potential revenue generation.
I’ve created vertical categories too as these are sectors that are also maturing today with their Internet use. This is where real estate, pharmaceuticals, apparel, insurance, events management, consumer electronics and web-enabled offline services are categorized under.
To weed out spam, all submissions are moderated, which also enables us to recognize anonymous votes. Two days ago, I must say that my excitement in re-discovering the Web is sparked again.
It is amazing to see how Filipinos from all over the country can take advantage of the Internet to document their work, market their product and services.
Whether this will be an annual thing or not will depend on the feedback and the experience.
I encourage you to support this effort by nominating a Filipino website today at http://digitalfilipinowebawards.blogspot.com.
