Japanese Idol Abused in Cebu

Japanese filmmakers come to our beautiful islands to make movies, and how do we welcome them? We detain them, take their money, take their equipment, humiliate them, and blacklist them. That’s what happened to actress Miyawaki Yuki (aka Kaoruko Wakaba) and her crew in Cebu. They were fined $260 each, deprived of five video cameras, paraded before the press, and banished from our shores — all because some puritanical provincial politicians decided to play perverted peeping toms.

I feel ashamed to be Filipino right now.

Tag Your Events!

I’m now reading David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, and I just came across a passage that made me LOL.

Indeed, it’s becoming common at technical conferences for the organizers to recommend the attendees tag their conference-related blog posts, photos, and online articles with a tag specific to that conference — “etech2006” or “poptech07” — so they can all easily be found by using tag search sites such as Technorati.com.

This is exactly what I’ve been telling Philippine event organizers to do in this fiesta-happy nation of bloggers. Every time I do, they look at me like I’m insane. One even accused me of sabotaging their site’s security, apparently confusing spam-vulnerable tagboards with tags. Another accused me of facilitating massive copyright infringement through tag streams, as if they were selling content instead of events.

Well, now it’s in a book available on dead trees in Philippine brick-and-mortar bookstores. Filipino event runners, most of whom have been taught since youth to know nothing but what’s written verbatim in dead-tree textbooks, should be able to appreciate that. I am officially not insane here.