Looking back on Jaysee Blabs Journey and Visayas Blogging Summit

I’ve been blogging for more than four years now and it is the best thing that ever happened to me as it opened a lot of opportunities to promote awesome stuffs I have dug, found, saw and believed in. There is a great need for locally generated content because Cebu and Philippines as a whole is ripe for global attention. We have world class products, services and places. But most of all, we have causes and projects that need utmost support from the international community.

Jaysee Blabs Roots

Starting with blogging on Friendster, I know nothing much but the fact that I just love writing so I started blabbing at the first social network with anything personal in my high school life. Then I switched to wordpress.com when all the fuzz about blogging started to emerge in 2008. Kinda deleted it already.

Then I discovered how awesome Google’s Blogger.com was because of the fact that you can edit CSS and I was beginning to get the hang of web design as I went through college. I started blogging with my main blog now, Jaysee Blabs, featuring awesome sites that I had visited via StumbleUpon. But at that time, I was still uncomfortable sharing my personal life online so I steered away from posting pictures and thoughts. It didn’t take me a whole lot of time before I started to implement my mission that life is best shared. I just started to realize that there is so much to talk about, so many places to see, things to do, and lots more awesome things for the whole world to know. Then Jaysee Blabs turned from a website directory, into a repository of the articles and essays I have written in school and beyond, into a mega blog featuring “Anything Awesome,” a tagline I just launched this year.

Jaysee Blabs Today

Blogging has done me so much good. It is very comforting and heart-warming to know that people learn new stuff from the posts I make, not just from my family and friends but also their networks and further as well. Ah, the beauty of socialnomics. There is some level of authority that was indirectly bestowed on me when my posts started gaining traffic and I am not that inclined to optimizing it for the search engines, a practice I should have started a long while back. That is something I didn’t expect for when I started this as a career.

Jaysee Blabs Blog is also the reason that I got into the country’s most organized blogging institution, the Cebu Bloggers Society Inc. (CBSi), an org that partners with businesses, PR firms and social entities into promoting Cebu. Blogging also made me advance my freelance career as a content writer, graphic artist, and web designer. But the biggest advantage that positioned me to take blogging seriously is the social responsibility efforts that I feature and joined in. Online Publishing has taken the advocacies I support to upscale to the next level and even spun off into a blog of its own, Mega Philippines, my advocacy blog. This social media also jumpstarted the causes and projects I worked for as a nation building Young Minds Academy (YMA) scholar of the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc. (RAFI). We launched two sites the Project Liwanag, which details our immersion and project proposals for the Municipality of Consolacion and iluvfarmers, a social marketing campaign for a farmer training program in the same municipality.

That is why it gives me so much joy to give others a chance to consider blogging as a career or just a worthwhile hobby if you want to keep it low. We are offering Cebuanos and the whole Philippines a chance to converge together and learn from world-class speakers, engage with other bloggers and freelancers in one of the biggest events of social media in our country this year, the Visayas Blogging Summit this coming November 26, 2011. Everything is free and all you have to do is register now. We are crunching on making the event happen and fellow Board of Trustees of CBSi are doing their best to make this social media event where Cebu universities, blogging institutions from all over the country, business owners and everyone who blogs learn from each other. Since events like this are REALLY expensive, we went through all sorts of loops and holes to offer this event for free but we do ask participants just one eenie weenie thing: just write a pre event post about it.

Learn more during the Visayas Blogging Summit and the awesomeness it could give you.