When I tell friends that I have a blog, the question is automatic: “Do you make money out of it?”

   Well, no.  Look around: as of this writing, I don’t have ads.  I don’t have sponsored posts.  For one, I don’t know how.  For two, I used to be just like every aspiring writer who wrote only for the money.

   Before blogging became synonymous with fast money, we bloggers have been derided for being, well, bloggers.  Pseudo-journalists, maladjusted psychological stripteasers, manic-depressive self-mutilators.  Nowadays, it’s different: blogs start to spring up like mushrooms from the void, all with the intent to make money online.  I’m starting to get a wee bit disillusioned nowadays: as it seems, it’s all about the money.

   I sure like to get to know about things like pay-per-click and pay-per-post if only to maintain my site for the next few years or so.  I myself am interested in making money online, but like I said, I am getting very disillusioned.  Is blogging really about the money?  Do you blog - heck, do you even write - just because you want to have money?

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   I’ve been a student journalist for 11 years and worked freelance in a number of local papers from time to time: I know the business of how to make money by writing.  Believe me, in “real world” journalism, it’s hard to come by an assignment.  Getting paid in column inches or fixed rates for every monthly issue is not appealing to people, but that’s the way the business goes.

   Given my short, limited experience in journalism, I should have a good idea of how much professional bloggers make, compare it to what I make when I work freelance, and automatically choose blogging.  The disparity alone justifies the whole idea of why some journalists sideline with their blogs.  But all too often, my own perspectives - distorted as they may be to some - frame the whole idea of why I’d rather not write about making money by blogging, even if I knew how to do it.

   Back then, I was still too young and too immature to adhere to principles and perspectives I hold now.  Everything I wrote back then was framed by money, guided by money, and was all about the money.  Money didn’t just motivate me: I didn’t write anything if I wasn’t paid, or that I made a crappy piece if I wasn’t paid enough.  I got away with it, all right.  After all, nobody knew that I was a puppet for money.

   With all the money I could ask for given my job, I became obsessed with the idea of writing for money.  I was paid generously given the financial limitations of the papers I worked for, but I wanted more.  Pretty soon, I only wrote for the money: money was the singular drive for my writing.  I wouldn’t commit myself to writing an essay if it wasn’t an essay-writing contest that had a cash prize.  So I continued to win, and in high school, I made a pretty decent livelihood out of joining winnable essay contests that had cash prizes.

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   Then, one day out of the blue, I realized what I’ve become.  I wasn’t the “writer” I was working hard to be: I was no different from a hired killer, an assassin, a mercenary.  In college, there were no more essay contests: I was too old for those youth-oriented contests that I used to win and make money out of.  I was - and I still am - not good enough to win that most elusive dream of mine, the Palanca Award.  My obsession with money led me to a rut: back in the college paper, money was not always at-hand because we ran into budget overruns.  I had to write editorials, columns, and feature articles without the promise of a stipend.

   I don’t really know, but that brought the best in me.  I no longer looked at writing as a sort of money-making practice: I just looked at writing as a way to constantly try to improve myself, that everytime I write, I practice.  It took a while for me to get the hang of writing not for the money, but for self-improvement.  I steered clear from the Cash Office and only took my salary when I see people reading the paper.  Then I stopped getting my salary altogether.

   Realizing that my stay at the school paper wouldn’t last for long, I looked for other means to write.  It was then that I discovered blogging.  Pay-per-click and pay-per-post weren’t things I knew of back then: there weren’t people who knew of ways to make money online.  I looked at my new blog and for the first time, saw potential in it.  It wasn’t just the online version of scrap paper I used to practice on before I wrote articles.  For the first time, I found creative freedom: I found a place where I could be myself, where I could write anything I wanted without even thinking about money.

   That was November 9, 2004, when The Marocharim Experiment - now known as Original TMX - was born.  Over three years and over 1,000 entries later, I realized that writing isn’t about the money: it’s about feeling fulfilled, it’s about knowing that you can, in your own way, touch other people’s lives.  And I did, in my own way: I never got a single cent out of what I wrote there, and what I continue to write about here.  And then came my first blog award: the Participants’ Choice Award in Wika2007.

   It is, to me, a reward better than money.  Not the web hosting plan itself, but the chance to touch more lives, to make more people feel good, to irritate more people even.  Most important is the chance to write.

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   Which is why this blog doesn’t tell you how to make money.  I don’t know how: there will come a time that I will have to learn about the strategies of making money online, if only to maintain my blog and my online presence.  I don’t even know what my blog tells you, since I write about anything that comes to mind anyway.

   Sure, money is useful.  It helps to keep the site going.  But it isn’t about the money.  To me, blogging is about improving myself.  I want to be a writer: I look at my old blog entries every now and then and look at how much work I need to do today.  To be honest, I need a lot of practice before I can even call myself a “writer.”  I need a lot of practice before I can even be a professional blogger.

   So I blog for absolutely nothing.  I hope that come the time that I get a job where I’m paid to write, or if I pepper my otherwise clean-looking blog with advertisements for products I don’t know about, I can still remind myself how far I’ve gone from being an avaricious, money-driven guy to being who I am today… whatever the heck I am.  And come that time, I’ll remind myself of how much money ruled my writing as a young man, and that I should never make the same mistake again.

   I hope my own story sort of makes you rethink the whole idea of blogging for money.  If you do, find your center: it’s easy to make money online, but blogging isn’t about the money.  Look back to your recent past and ask yourself why you made a blog in the first place.

   I’m sure you didn’t make a blog because you wanted to make money.

   In an Inquirer report, Lakas-CMD spokesperson Raul Lambino named four people among a short list of 30 names to represent the party in the 2010 national elections.  One’s Sen. Ramon “Bong” Revilla, Jr.: the star of “Resiklo” who tries to pass himself off as the action-hero version of Nobel laureate Al Gore.  Then there’s Sen. Lito Lapid, star of such funny action flicks like “Leon Guerrero” and “Lapu-Lapu.”  Another is former senator Ralph Recto: the husband of Gov. Vilma Santos who was responsible for E-VAT.  Finally, there’s former congressman Prospero Pichay.

   Boy, do I remember Pichay.

   Now don’t get me wrong: Pichay had a strong showing in the 2007 national elections.  One of the reasons why Pichay was the dark horse then was because he spent a lot not only on TV ads, but also on catchphrasing and name recall.

   Mr. Pichay is not exactly a photogenic man: I’m just being honest when I say that his Photoshop-ed campaign pictures reminded me of Frankenstein on botox.  Say what you will about Pichay’s enormous head, but he had an effective campaign.  Almost all of Pichay’s TV ads ended with one catchphrase:

Pangarap kong tuparin ang mga pangarap niyo.  Ako po si Prospero Pichay, pro-Pinoy. 

   Such was the formula for Pichay’s rather successful loss (comparing it to strong contenders like Nikki Coseteng, Vic Sotto and Chavit Singson): the kind of platform you can expect from a high school student body room-to-room campaign.  Promise everything, and worry about it later.  Pichay’s catchphrase became, for a time, part of Filipino pop culture: “Pugad Baboy,” comedy bar jokes, vows you make to your significant other.  Like:

“Pangarap kong tuparin ang mga pangarap mo.  Ako po si [insert your name here], pro-ikaw.”

   How romantic. 

   But what made Pichay the most successful loser in the 2007 senatorial elections was that he capitalized on his name.  “Pichay” is a homonym of pechay, or Chinese cabbage.  Pichay didn’t tell you that you could sauteé him in oil and garlic: what Pichay did was to be the literal cabbage of the 2007 elections.  Pichay’s campaign machine spent a good amount of money on fans (pamaypay) bearing his name, and yes, shaped like Chinese cabbages.  No one else can pull off a stunt like this, even if Restituto Repolyo, Kulas Kangkong, Andres Alugbati, and Mariano Mustasa will run for the Senate in 2010.

   Does Pichay have the winning formula for success in 2010?  I think so: not because he’s a competent politician or anything, but because he’s got a name to back his bid.  This is the guy who defended Gloria Arroyo’s act of imprudence in calling a COMELEC Commissioner, the guy who was a reputed logger in Surigao del Sur, and the guy who sort of defended the right of government officials to go to karaoke bars.  This is the guy running for the Senate, whose own platform included the abolition of the Senate.  But these are issues that don’t matter: our electorate’s personality-minded approach when it comes to voting is what makes someone an elected official.

   So yes, Pichay - the man who compared himself to a cabbage - will win in 2010.

   Hitachi just released the world’s first one terabyte hard drive.  To put 1,000 gigabytes into perspective, imagine six 160 GB hard drives and one 40 GB hard drive all linked together (or two 500 GB hard drives, whichever comes first).  Then put all that hard drive space in one standard hard drive.  This is what the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 has to offer.  All for $399: forty cents a gigabyte.

   Of course, I’m not a technology journalist, so I don’t have a test model with me.  Besides, this is not a review.

   Seems just like yesterday when the gigabyte was big.  Heck, it seemed like only yesterday that the 1.44 MB diskette was state-of-the-art.  Nowadays, you can fit at least 4 GB of data space into a memory card, even more.  USB thumbdrives with 8 GB of space aren’t uncommon, and there are 80 GB Flash drives abroad that cost around $200.  Pretty soon, the next big thing would be a 1 TB Flash drive.

   PC World reports that the computer hardware industry just took two years to release a 1 TB drive since the first 500 GB drive was released in 2005.  The article also reports that the drive is primarily intended for gamers, multimedia artists, businesses in need of massive storage media, and other high-end users.  Or perhaps people who get a psychological reinforcement from having one big-ass drive.  After all, it doesn’t take a lot of work to fill an 80 GB drive nowadays: I filled mine with bad games, great music, and Microsoft Word documents.  Pretty soon, 1 TB drives won’t be enough from MP3 collectors and perverts who like hanging on to their porno MPEGs.

   However, I’m not recommending that you have your relative in the States buy you a 1 TB drive just yet: $399 is a bit pricey (in terms of Philippine pesos, that’s around P16,300: roughly the cost of a budget PC).  And for most computer users, 1,000 gigabytes of hard disk space is too big (unless you like using Vixy to save all your streaming video).  But if said relative from the States would like to give me a 1 TB drive to test out for a proper review, you let me know.

   I was reading danah’s blog awhile ago, and her latest entry posed a very intriguing question: can social networking sites (SNS) be used as educational tools, in and out of the classroom?  This is the premise in the latest debate of The Economist.  And I agree with danah’s disagreements on the responses of Ewan McIntosh and Michael Bugeja: they’re answering the wrong questions.

   I figured that since I know a thing or two about SNSs and social technologies, although I’m no expert on this matter, I may be able to take a shot at this question.

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   It is important to frame the SNS as an educational tool.  Something like Friendster, for example, does not automatically translate as an educational tool just because you have access to your instructor’s account.  For education and learning to take place in an SNS, people have to use it as a learning mechanism.  However, SNSs have yet to effectively structure themselves to function as “mini-classrooms.”  At best, we could expect exam announcements posted in bulletin boards, or if classes made an exclusive Friendster group in order to facilitate homework.  Not exactly a “mini-classroom,” if you asked me.

   I have to agree with danah: SNS users don’t engage in “networking” per se.  But here is where danah and me depart: based on my own research, an SNS is more of a venue for self-articulation (at least here in the Philippines) than to reinforce actual relationships.  While it is true that users learn a bit of HTML in the process, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a substitute for course-work on basic computer programming.  While it is true that you can get to know more about yourself based on the comments you receive, it doesn’t automatically follow that you’re learning psychology or philosophy in the process.

   In my thesis, I wrote about how Internet technologies - particularly SNSs - are “wellsprings” of research.  This, I think, is where the SNS as an “educational tool” is most properly framed: using the SNS as a sort of “social laboratory” to test existing theories and to formulate new postulates on online social behavior.  As a tool for learning, however, the present structures and features of SNSs do not facilitate that or make it all that practical.  It is important to note that as much as an SNS is a social technology, it is also a personal technology: as much as it serves social expediencies, it also serves personal expediencies like self-reinforcement and boosting one’s own sense of self-worth.

   Research is where SNSs are most properly situated as educational tools: learning from an SNS at this point is geared more towards researchers than towards users themselves.  To refer to my (rather pointless) title, the point is not to learn from Dora the Explorer: the point is to learn why Dora the Explorer is part of my “Friend” list (which she’s not, which also begs the question).