I have nothing against Pat Mangubat. He seems to be a decent guy and a patriot, but one recent post he did on his blog has him accusing unnamed bloggers of being sell outs, specifically to  “corporate Public Relations practitioners (and Malacanang press operators).”

He goes on by pleading to these unnamed individuals:

YOU–YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID–SHAME ON YOU! Shame that you sold your very soul to the highest bidder. Shame that you even sold your friends, telling politicos and marketing managers that you own them when you know in your heart that you don’t own anyone. Bloggers are not commodities. We are not for sale!

This is OK. An honest man pleading to a unnamed dishonest persons to be honest. This is fair. What I find disturbing, however, is the following paragraph.

To my fellow bloggers, hear my plea—MAKE THE PHILIPPINE BLOGOSPHERE CLEAN. DON’T ALLOW THIS HALLOWED PLACE OF FREE EXPRESSION BE CORRUPTED BY CORPORATE SPONSORSHIPS, POLITICAL OPERATORS AND WHAT HAVE YOU. WE MUST POLICE OUR RANKS. WE MUST STAY CLEAR OF PEOPLE WHO USE US JUST TO PROMOTE A DEFECTIVE PRODUCT, DEFEND A DIRTY POLITICIAN OR DESTROY REPUTATIONS.

This sentence in particular–We must police our ranks–I find presumptuous. Policing the blogosphere is PRESUMPTUOUS. The Web is a free medium and blogs being the freest of all websites. It’s easy to put up and easy to “promote” (make popular, in blogging terms). You do not have to be a programmer or a designer to own your own blog and if you wish, you can have a blog for free. You also don’t have to be anything else: not a writer, not a scientist, not a PhD, not famous. Hell, you do not even have to have a brain. Then this word RANKS. What does this mean? Are we troopers in a battle field? Are we a clan, a club, an org? And who is we?

Pat also mentioned being invited to a party of sorts attended by these so-called Most Influential Bloggers. He relishes the time he spent talking to his mentor and some famous bloggers like MLQ3 and even mentioned the elusive cutie, ROM, how lucky he was that he got to finally meet her. Great, but I get the feeling Rom is only meant to be eyeballed by the likes of Marocharim, Jester and Atheista. Yikes, no BrianB in your itinerary Rom? Oh well.

And you mentioned that “People like Butch Dado and his lovely wife Noemi, Dang, Janet, JV and all others are trying their darnest best to keep the Pinoy Blogosphere clean as a whistle but this stupid ingrate tried to spoil everything.”

Are you serious? You really think they have a say whether the pinoy blogosphere is clean or not? I don’t think so. And what makes you think they do not allow corporate influence in their own sites? Not that I know they do.

The thing is this, and this is going to hurt. I believe all this influential blogger and top blogger business have gotten into the heads of a few honest souls here in the “pinoy blogosphere.” What is the pinoy blogosphere anyway? Does this include all the 3 million blogs owned and maintained by pinoys? What does Pat mean when he says US?

Let me reveal a little something to you folks. I am a paid blogger. I have managed about a dozen sites in the past 2 years I have been working as a blogger. Many of these sites have had modest successes. Successes? Right now, I am managing three blogs full time. One of them is PMPtoday.com, which gets about 7,000 pageviews daily. We sell ad space and we also have adsense. Our biggest earner so far is an affiliate program, which I shall not name. Basically, every time a poor soul buys thru our site, we get a cut. PMPToday has been mentioned in many of the most popular sites on the Internet regularly. Meaning, we get sourced by the likes of Engadget and Gizmodo. These two sites get millions of readers every month. Every month. We were even cited on a major (I mean $100 million big ones) ad campaign by a cellphone maker. Don’t even start me talking about the two other blogs, which I won’t because I have signed a confidentiality agreement not to tell people the writer of these blogs is a Filipino.

I am telling you this for two reasons. First, I am a paid blogger. Second, I know blogging. I suppose many people here think they know blogging, but let me tell you something, the tech blogger really knows blogging. We know because among all blogs we usually get the most traffic and we know because tech blogs are the most active and, arguably, among the most influential. Political blogs are great but have you heard of a political blog who has caused a major US company to lose billions of dollars in stock value in one day? A tech blog did that. We are the ones who decide economics-wise whether banner advertising should affect the posts or not (it should not) or whether pay-per-post is viable (not in a highly trafficked sites, especially a site with a good reputation). Wait. I am telling you all these for a third reason. You need to know a little more about me because that is SUPPOSED to create trust. Well, short of meeting some of you at Starbucks one of these days, there it is.

Am I bragging? Maybe. Am I being an A-hole? Maybe. The point though is this: I don’t give a good HOT DAMN about myself as a blogger. I really don’t. It’s a livelihood, that’s it. I plan to get out of blogging altogether after a year. What would I do after? I dunno, maybe I’d go sailing. I do give a damn about ethics, even online. I also know that pinoy bloggers do not have to re-invent the wheel. I mentioned the two most popular tech blogs, now I’ll mention a very popular political blog, Huffington Post. For people who do not think Huffington Post is a blog can go to this wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_blog. It’s at the bottom, under notable blogs. Now, Huffington Post is very blog business. Yes it is about politics but it is also a BUSINESS. Most blogs are businesses. Nothing PURE about them. The only pure thing, if we are lucky, is the truth that is sometimes revealed and talked about in these blogs.

Now, let me get back to Pat’s post. I agree that a blogger who gets paid by a politician to promote said politician is a bad apple. What I don’t agree with Pat about is his belief that keeping the identity to himself is the ethical thing to do as opposed to being the unethical. He’d rather have us all guessing and accusing one another. He’d rather have the likes of me, who does not twitter or plurk, to be totally in the dark about it. A blog, I used to think, is where bad apples get outed. It’s where ordinary people get to listen to shop talk. Where known sell-outs in our newspapers, TV and radio get exposed by their own colleagues. Blind items, I believe whether online or on print, is unethical. It exists because of a loophole in our libel and slander laws, which we cannot do anything about.

Like I wrote in Rom’s comment section, these nameless accused bloggers deserve a chance to defend themselves. They really do, especially when people like your commenter Gail already think they know who this blogger or these bloggers are:

Gail(Who am I?) said…

Nice to meet you at the party, Pat! Sorry I stole Juned (and ran out of calling cards hehe), we haven’t chatted for about a month already :) Anyway, if he hasn’t sent you my email yet, you can reach me through my site.

Hmm.. I have a feeling this is the same person that made my blood pressure rise a couple of notches when I was told about it.

But, as I have said, there really are still people who WILL make the effort to keep some things “clean.” Some just have an awful moral compass, they think everyone is like them just because they’re like that. They’re deluding themselves, but the fact remains that there are still people who will try to keep things clean no matter what.

December 12, 2008 6:07 AM

So what do you say, Pat? Do we deserve to be enlightened further?

About the writer: BrianB manages several popular blogs including pmptoday.com. He also has a new personal blog–bigsmallepisodes.wordpress.com–that he updates whenever he CANNOT write.

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