On this day (June 14), everyone who is part of the blogosphere will celebrate the International Weblogger’s Day as a way of marking another year’s worth of changing the way the Internet sees personal journalism.

As a sign of solidarity, I shall be drafting my own essays to answer the following questions:

1) Why did you start blogging, how long have you been doing so, and why have you continued?
2) Do you think webloggers have a lot of power? If so, what, and how can it be harnessed?
3) Why do you think weblogging has become so popular?

Why not create your own essay so we can join 7 million bloggers around the world in celebrating InWeDay.

Check out  www.chronicled.org/intlblogday on how to become a participant.

Here’s my entry for this event:

Why did I start blogging?

Truthfully, I started blogging in 2003 since all my officemates were doing it. It was hosted in blogdrive and I didn’t pay much attention to it. We even created a common blog where we all served as authors but our interest in blogging waned until finally some of our blogs died a natural death. Still, others continued maintaining their blogs and made it part of their daily routine.

My interest in blogging resurfaced when I saw that a friend hosted her blog in Friendster. Her blog had a dynamic badge from Flickr and at that moment, I knew that I wanted to maintain a blog in Friendster too. Just a few days after my discovery, Friendster allowed its members to create blogs through an easy-to-follow procedure and just like that, I became part of the blogosphere once more. Since the day I created my first post on April 19, 2005, I’ve been improving my blog to best reflect my personality as a gimikera with a zest for life.

        New Gimikera Is In banner

I have grand plans for my blog and hopefully, I can get started on my next project — creating a vlog or video blog.

5 Things I learned while browsing through blogs:

5. Your sidebar is just as important as your blog’s content. I often check out a blog’s sidebar first before reading the entries since I’m constantly on the lookout for ways to improve my own blog.

4. There is a thin line between browsing through blogs and lurking.

3. It’s nice to have a blog description at the top of your site so people can get the gist of your blog at a glance.

2. If you like a particular feature of a blog, ask the blogger how s/he did it. More often than not, bloggers are accomodating and will not hesitate giving you advice and pointing out useful resources you might not have heard of.

1. Blogmarking someone is the highest compliment you can give to a blogger.

Note: This entry will remain on top of my blog as a reminder to everyone about InWeDay. Keep on blogging everyone!

Update: Join 587 blogs in 43 countries worldwide celebrate International Weblogger’s Day. Go to www.chronicled.org/intlblogday and post a comment today.