START Sun.Star started blogging in earnest on the day President Arroyo said she was sorry. But months before that, we had been looking at blogging to manage special sections or introduce new ones. The Sun.Star Network website started trial blogs by four staff members of Sun.Star Cebu in December 2004. These blogs - the second version of my site Leon Kilat: The Cybercafe Experiments, Cebu Football and Sunspot - were discontinued by February. On June 27, the Sun.Star website staff were preparing to put out a special section in anticipation of a statement the president was due to make later that day. The website staff members were considering how best to put out a special online section in less than two hours. Their choices were: 1. use the website's breaking news facility, 2 reconfigure the content management system that ran the site to add a special section or 3. manually lay out pages of the new section. The staff decided that the breaking news facility was not enough. Reconfiguring the content management system running the site would take days if not weeks. Manually laying out web pages was tedious and prone to errors. The website staff eventually decided to use a blog content management system to run the section. INSTANT WEBSITE Blog programs and services offer publications easy content management systems to run their sites or special sections. This is particularly helpful to community publications that typically do not have programming teams to write scripts to manage online content or funds to pay for hundreds of thousands if not millions of pesos for customized content management systems. At Sun.Star, the availability of packaged content management systems has made it easier to create special sections for events, the recent one being the Sun.Star Economic Forum. The blog was used to host the presentations of the different speakers. The presentations are still there and the blog is on hiatus, waiting for next year's edition of the annual forum to discuss the Cebu economy. For the Arroyo special section, the Sun.Star staff initially used a Blogger account to manage the content and upload the files into the Sun.Star website. I suggested that they immediately start with WordPress but the website staff decided to do it with Blogger because most of them were already familiar with its interface. After several days, however, the website staff decided they needed a full-fledge blog CMS to manage the site. CHOICES One of the driving forces making blogging widespread is the open source community. The community has turned out robust and easy to use blog CMS that has allowed more people to use the publishing platform. Community papers that decide to use a blogging script to run a special section or a blog have a lot of open source programs, plugins and themes to choose from – most of them at no cost and with an active user and developer community supporting the projects. I initially suggested that Sun.Star use the Serendipity blog engine. Up until May, I thought it was the best blogging program available, even better than WordPress. The only problem with Serendipity is its lower user base and fewer themes and plugins to choose from. The site then installed WordPress to take over the management of the Arroyo special section. WordPress comes with a script that can import your Blogger posts and comments into your new blog installation. Every step of the way, we were guided by FAQs, tips and forum postings on how to install and configure WordPress. CONVERSATIONS What's striking about blogging is the community conversation generated by posts. Readers are able to immediately write their reactions on the same page as the article is printed - unlike before when they had to go to the forums and log in to discuss the issue with other readers. The trackback facility also allows the site to monitor conversations on the article in other blogs. The Sun.Star Network blogs allow readers to immediately post their comments with minimal screening save for anti-spam solutions. The Sun.Star Cebu Citizen Journalists site has more stringent controls. This is because discussions can at times degenerate into name callings. If not monitored, trackback spams from sex or poker websites will start appearing in your blog. SILENT In contrast, we are not able to track community conversations on articles printed in the main news site. The only way to track whether the articles are being read at all is to go through the server logs. If readers want to comment on the article they have to use other facilities by either sending an e-mail to the editor or posting a comment in the website's discussion forums. With the ease of putting out blogs, the website planned several weblogs to cover niche topics. PAPER Sun.Star Cebu also decided to put out weblogs but not by staff members. The paper wanted to centralize existing facilities for reader-generated content and repackage it as a blog. Not all letters to the editor can be printed by the paper. Not all press releases from civic organizations can be accommodated in the community section. Reader comments sent through text messages are also overwhelming and the backlog in the printing of messages runs to more than a hundred pages. We decided to use the blog to host reader-generated content. CITIZENS Sun.Star Cebu started less than a month ago the Citizen Journalists website. It is patterned after what several newspapers abroad are doing. With the site, readers can report, in text and photos, about their community, club, organization, church or school. They can express views on issues affecting their barangay, town or city. They can take part in online debates on the issues that affect Cebu. They can take a position for or against a Sun.Star editorial and this can be used as OpEd in the opinion section. They can use their camera phones to take pictures of common problems in communities: uncollected garbage, poorly maintained roads etc and send it to the newsroom or the blog. Editors can then choose materials on the blog they want to print in their sections. The site still has a few postings. I spend at least an hour a day explaining to a newly registered member or two how to use the blog software or how to manage their account. We hope that after the blog is launched next week, we can get more postings from readers. COMMENTS / POSTS We've e-mailed active users who comment in our blogs to invite them to write articles. Most accept the invitation but only very few people post articles. Most readers are more comfortable with posting comments on articles than writing posts. In Sun.Star Cebu we've been encouraging our readers these past weeks to use the blog. It is a daunting task considering that most of the readers do not regularly go online. Many readers still prefer to hand in typewritten letters to the editor. Those who go online prefer sending reactions to issues via e-mail. Majority of the readers still prefer to send comments and complaints through text. But the facility for an online venue for reader generated content is already there. We hope that as more of our readers know about the existence of the blog, they'd be encouraged to use it. Thank you.