Fri 29 Sep 2006
Thank you for being the funny, sweet, kind man that you are.
Thank you for sharing your stories, secrets, and dreams with me.
Thank you for sharing the day to day adventures of life and marriage with humor, courage, and strength.
Thank you for being you.
Happy birthday, sweetie! 
Posted under Navel-Gazing
Mon 25 Sep 2006
Please allow me to tell you a story about how one blog entry led to a project envisioned to make info about Philippine music and literature more accessible on the Internet.
One day in July 2001, Mark posted a press release on his personal blog. The press release was an invitation to a mini festival of Filipino contemporary short movies, which also mentioned Filipino authors and filmmakers.
This press release included the words short story and Rogelio Sikat, words that Mark couldn’t have imagined would be the subject of hundreds of comments on that post.
In the last 5 years, there have been 500 comments on that entry…and the only reason it stopped at that number was because Mark finally decided to close the comments section for that post. However, the emails still keep on coming. What kind of comments or emails? Here are some examples (verbatim):
I think you get the idea. In case you want to read the other interesting, and often desperate requests (sometimes demands) for help, you can view them here.
Honestly, at first I was only amused by the response…then perplexed…then saddened. Mark, too, became more and more disturbed by the sheer amount and urgency of the requests.
We began to wonder - was there no other place on the Internet that students could find this information besides a personal blog that clearly wasn’t about epikos and anekdotas at all? We searched, and found out that, apparently, there wasn’t much out there. For a long time, Mark’s post was the #1 result on Google when someone searched for “Rogelio Sikat”. Thankfully, that spot is now occupied by a Wikipedia entry, which gives some info about Sikat’s life, but really not much in the way of examples of his works.
THE PROJECT: WHY A WIKI?
On the 6th year anniversary of Mark’s personal blog, he decided to launch PINOYLITWIKI.COM and PINOYMUSICWIKI.COM.
These were inspired by the success of Wikipedia, and his idea was that it would be best to have a community effort to put these information online. While there are already efforts made by some people to do this, there is so far no central repository which points to these sites.
The purpose of the wikis is to have a place for people who are interested in Filipino culture to have a starting point in their search.
The goal is to be able to develop encyclopedic entries for Filipino writers, musicians, publishers, and their works. When these entries are mature enough, maybe we can then contribute these to Wikipedia for a wider reach.
To find out how you can contribute to these projects, please visit Mark’s blog entry about the project.
Posted under Helping , Reading
