Why is Doggone Dong blogging? Is it because it’s a fad, craze or fashion, whatever category it falls under? “Everybody is blogging already, except me,” a friend quipped. The reason was that she was too busy for such. Other friends likewise feel they don’t have either the talent for writing or the guts to exhibit their attempt at it.
I guess that I got the talent for writing as well as the guts to exhibit what some might view as crap. I’ve been keeping an irregular journal the last five years. I’ve kept a manual method until I found the database method a cool thing (with the privacy and security aspects considered). And until the concept of “online journal” was introduced two or three years ago. I tried to keep a weblog then but it was off and on. I just felt it was cool to let my friends know what I think about some things.
Last year, I had the resolve to keep a regular blog thinking that blogging is a great tool for advocacy. Two main themes I chose were agrarian reform and free and open source software (FOSS). I entitled my site “Fossified: Activist moorings, FOSS meanderings”. It was hosted under the subdomain dongcalmada.peace.net.ph, thanks to my organization’s web facility.
However, it still turned out that I could not keep myself from blogging about ‘personal’ stuff – wonderful experiences with my kids, for instance. Personal blog categories took up a third of the stuff I wrote, together with agrarian reform and FOSS.
The guilt of using my organization’s web facility for personal stuff creeped in. So I decided to retire the subdomain and get active with LiveJournal instead. But several months into my LiveJournal work, I observed that I’ve been too introverted than extroverted. I’ve veered away from the real purpose of advocacy. I felt that personal stuff populated my blog and little did I write about agrarian reform and FOSS.
I’ve not maximized the ‘community’ value of LiveJournal, which is its strength. I don’t have many Filipino networks with LJ accounts and I don’t want to gain networks with people living in another planet (just exaggerating).
LJ is great as a sociological tool, not an advocacy one. So I got registered with WordPress which I think has gained popularity lately. It may not have a million base as LiveJournal but it has placed itself alongside Blogspot (Google’s blog service). (I remember I tried Friendster – which I dropped altogether feeling that I’m ‘too old’ for such tool – and Yahoo 360 – which is way, way cool only that I wanted to politically get away from the name Yahoo.
Until a month ago, I got a domain of my own: calban.org. I used the domain to house my new blog site: Doggone Dong. It remains my advocacy tool, now thinking that my ‘personal’ stuff are themselves a means to advocate something. So I have become inactive with dungkal.wordpress.com and instead pooled all my stuff in calban.org.
I’m pleased and proud that more and more bloggers include me in their blogrolls, including personalities Rep. Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel and Davao City Councilor Peter Lavina.
Well, that even pushes me to be more active and great in my blogging habit. Did I say habit? Yeah, blogging has become a habit of mine. My high school best bud wondered how much time I devote to blogging. About 30% of my time, I said.
And to conclude, the other reason why I blog is related to posterity. It’s just fair that I do my share of writing about my generation so that the next one would hopefully learn from me and my generation. Likewise, I want a legacy to leave with my children and their children. I want them to learn from what I wrote about, hoping that they, too, would care to follow on what their father did. And I’m not sure whether blogging in the next generation would be replaced with new fads, craze or fashion, whatever it might be called.
Activism 102 