When Zamboanga City was named Asia's latin city, a lot of people reacted to it. Some negatively and some positively.The primary aim of this new title is to drive in tourism. Some people said that it would be a rip off. But Zamboanga city looks latin as any city in Latin America does. In fact most cities in the Philippines can be branded as a Latin city.
The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee went even as far as saying that "the Philippines is a Latin American country that was transported to the Orient by a gigantic marine wave". Zamboanga City having Chabacano (the only Spanish creole in Asia) as its language makes it even more deserving of the title.
The term Latin or Latino is used to refer to anything or anyone that comes from Latin America. It is also used to describe something which has affinity to Latin America.
The term Hispanic meanwhile refers to anything with affinity to Spain. Remember that Hispania and Espania means the same thing: Spain.
Latin America is the collective term for all countries in the Americas where Romance languages (i.e. languages derived from Latin, and hence the name of Latin America) are spoken: Spanish, Portuguese, French, and their creoles.
Different words mean different things to different people. In Anglo-America, these terms have various meanings. However those meanings do not apply to the people outside of Anglo-America.
I remember a radio announcer saying that the more accurate title is 'Asia's Hispanic city' and not 'Asia's Latin city'. However, let us not forget that from 1565 to 1821 or 256 years, the Viceroy of Mexico directly governed the Philippines from Mexico city. In fact, most Spaniards who migrated to the Philippines came from Mexico and not Spain.
Migrating from Spain to the Philippines would not have been practical because travel would have taken a long time. The Suez canal which cut travel time opened in 1869, only a couple of years before Spain sold the Philippines to the USA. For this, both Hispanic and Latin are correct. I am talking from a historical standpoint though and not political.
In this article, Abu Anis , a spokesman of an organization in Zamboanga City and Basilan province, said Resolution No.760 which branded Zamboanga City as "Latin City" has no justification culturally and historically. He went on to say that Zamboanga City was never part of the Philippine territories. But how can one say that Zamboanga city was never part of the Philippine territories when the Spanish Fort of Pilar was built to protect the city from pirates. This obviously means that Zamboanga was part of the Philippine territories.
This Anis person is nothing but a guy whose knowledge in history is obsolete. He even accused (Mayor) Lobregat of acting arrogantly for never consulting the historians and intellectuals, adding that he is acting in sheer “ignorance” or “pride” as half-baked descendants of the Spaniards.
This prejudice and hatred against the Spanish people is one exhibited by most ignorant Filipinos. It is most commonly an emotion planted in Filipinos by movies like 'Rizal' which depicts Spaniards as arrogant, stiff, and cruel, and by history books which has nothing but bad words for the Spaniards.
Anis even said that: to foreigners Latin is not in Latin American countries but in Rome where the spoken language was once Latin, although Latin is now a dead language. How ignorant can you get? What a statement! It makes my heart ache to see such under researched statements.
A corrupt Spanish, that is what Anis calls Chabacano. This is totally an erroneous statement. For one, Chabacano is not Spanish. It is a well known fact that Chabacano is a Spanish creole.
Mr. Anis' ignorance is cemented by this statement: visitors are sometimes frustrated when they cannot find Romans but Badjaos and Samals, who are begging from these newcomers or urging them throw coins into the sea.
A very good example of proof that Zamboanga City and even the Philippines qualifies as '"Latin" is the fact that this country belongs to the Latin union. The Latin union is an organization of all countries which speaks a language derived from latin such as French and Spanish (Romance languages). The Philippines, even though not having Spanish as an official language, enjoys membership in this union because of its cultural affinity to Spain.
It is a fact that when you are in America, the Filipino would typically be mistaken as a Latino. It is a fact that you would feel more comfortable around Latinos than any other kinds of peoples. It is a fact that the Spanish which we spoke in the Philippines years before was Mexican Spanish.
It is a fact that there are words in our language which comes from Nahuatl (a group of related languages and dialects of the Aztecan branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family which is indigenous to Mesoamericaorigin (e.g. tatay (tatle), nanay (nantl), abokado (avocado), bayabas [from guayaba(s)])
Zamboanga is qualified to be called as Asia's Latin city. However preposterous it might sound to the typical ignorant Filipino, it is the truth.
Zamboanga: Asia's Latin City? Definitely!(Courtesy of Jerome Herrera from http://allicanhandle.blogspot.com)
Showing posts with label Bloggers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bloggers. Show all posts
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
SPECIAL: Newspapers Must Embrace Digital Future To Survive
CAPE TOWN - Newspapers hoping to retain their readers and survive in the technological age must venture into the online and mobile phone spheres, a World Association of Newspapers (WAN) meeting heard Tuesday.
Speakers at a workshop said the newspaper was a dying breed but could avoid extinction by modernizing its approach and extending its digital reach.
"We have to learn that online is where the action is, and we have to move our journalistic resources there," Mario Garcia, chief executive of the United States-based Garcia Media Group, told delegates to the WAN's 60th world newspaper congress and 14th world editors' forum being held in Cape Town.
He described the new path of news, starting with an e-mail or mobile phone alert of a breaking story, followed by reading it online and ending in its publishing in a newspaper the following day.
In such a scenario, he said, there was little point in newspapers repeating the news hours after it first broke. They would have to learn to present readers with new, forward-looking story angles.
"Nowadays, you have to assume that the reader knows more than you do," he said.
Martha Stone, director of the WAN's "shaping the future of the newspaper" program, told delegates the time has come for news organizations to cross-train journalists to tell a story in print, radio, television or online.
"Many newspapers experience today their circulations going down, but their reach into the market place with the internet is surging," she said.
Leonard Brody, chief executive and co-founder of NowPublic.com, a website for "citizen journalism" with over 90,000 contributors in ordinary people worldwide, believed the monopoly of traditional media was being challenged by camera phones and other technology enabling anyone to find news.
"We are moving very quickly into an era where everything is being recorded," he told the meeting.
On Monday, a WAN report said newspapers around the world saw a 2.3 percent rise in circulation in 2006 and a growth in advertising revenue despite the rise of digital media. (We are reposting this article by the international news agency, Agence France-Presse, to help bring awareness about the power of the Internet in today's media. Ed.)
Speakers at a workshop said the newspaper was a dying breed but could avoid extinction by modernizing its approach and extending its digital reach.
"We have to learn that online is where the action is, and we have to move our journalistic resources there," Mario Garcia, chief executive of the United States-based Garcia Media Group, told delegates to the WAN's 60th world newspaper congress and 14th world editors' forum being held in Cape Town.
He described the new path of news, starting with an e-mail or mobile phone alert of a breaking story, followed by reading it online and ending in its publishing in a newspaper the following day.
In such a scenario, he said, there was little point in newspapers repeating the news hours after it first broke. They would have to learn to present readers with new, forward-looking story angles.
"Nowadays, you have to assume that the reader knows more than you do," he said.
Martha Stone, director of the WAN's "shaping the future of the newspaper" program, told delegates the time has come for news organizations to cross-train journalists to tell a story in print, radio, television or online.
"Many newspapers experience today their circulations going down, but their reach into the market place with the internet is surging," she said.
Leonard Brody, chief executive and co-founder of NowPublic.com, a website for "citizen journalism" with over 90,000 contributors in ordinary people worldwide, believed the monopoly of traditional media was being challenged by camera phones and other technology enabling anyone to find news.
"We are moving very quickly into an era where everything is being recorded," he told the meeting.
On Monday, a WAN report said newspapers around the world saw a 2.3 percent rise in circulation in 2006 and a growth in advertising revenue despite the rise of digital media. (We are reposting this article by the international news agency, Agence France-Presse, to help bring awareness about the power of the Internet in today's media. Ed.)
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Non-Traditional News Websites, Blogs And Videos Getting Popular
U.S. news-seekers are increasingly turning to Internet search engines, video clips and gossip-slingers to sate curiosity about current events, according to Agence France Presse, which cited a study released Tuesday.
Visits to the top 10 news and media websites in the United States dropped by nearly four percent in the past year as people turned increasingly to "non-traditional news websites," Hitwise online intelligence service reported.
Meanwhile, websites that "aggregate" news stories by harvesting them online registered increases in visits during the year ending March of 2007, according to Hitwise.
Yahoo! News ranks as the top news website with slightly more than 6.5 percent of the market.
A Weather Channel website is second with 4.75 percent of US online news hunting traffic, while CNN barely edged out MSNBC for third place with 3.95 percent.
Google News ranks fourth in popularity with 1.83 percent of the visits.
Search engines, online news aggregators and Internet portal front pages are main sources of traffic for traditional news websites, according to Hitwise.
The number of Internet users referred to traditional newspaper websites by the world's most popular online search engine, Google, increased by nearly 30 percent in the past year, Hitwise reported.
Internet traffic routed by Google to television or radio station websites rose 35.9 percent during that same period, according to Hitwise.
The rate at which people left news websites to directly view related video clips at online venues such as video-sharing website YouTube has leapt 196 percent in the past year, Hitwise reported.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Copycat publishers in plagiarism hitman's sights
By Robert Andrews
Theft of journalists' work is exploding on the internet thanks to a new wave of automated story-copying software - but news organisations are not equipped to tackle the problem, according to one reporter carving a niche as the web's anti-plagiarism crusader.
Conventional forms of plagiarism, in which writers poach one another's words, resurfaced recently after washingtonpost.com fired its right-wing blogger for the offence and an unproven claim brought against Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown was heard in court.
But now online marketers are harvesting journalists' work to boost their visibility, says Jonathan Bailey, editor of Plagiarism Today, a weblog rapidly gaining popularity with victims seeking help."The New York Times, the AP and countless others have been hit with plagiarism scandals recently," he told journalism.co.uk.
"While computers and the web have made it easier for journalists to do that, the act is the same as it was 50 years ago."What's changing is what is happening to journalists as their content moves online. No longer is their content at risk just from other news sources - they are at risk from amateur bloggers and, possibly worst of all, spammers."
Automated plagiarism, in the form of spam blogging or splogging, is becoming both more common and more sophisticated.
Sploggers can use RSS feeds, which most news sites provide, to scrape content and re-post it on their sites automatically, enabling one person to steal from tens of thousands of sites."The free content provides valuable keywords against which to place contextual adverts.
Mr Bailey, a New Orleans-based writer and journalism graduate, founded Plagiarism Today in June 2005 when he began a private blog to document an ongoing battle concerning theft of his own work.
Bruised by the affair, he turned the site public to chronicle other copycats' misdemeanours and added resources like detection tools and cease-and-desist letters for freelancers to use.Drawing a wider audience as awareness of the problem gathers pace, Mr Bailey offers free advice to journalists who fall prey to lawbreakers and provides professional "plagiarism strategy" consultancy in weightier cases.
He is perhaps the web's only dedicated plagiarism hitman and claims to have shot down more than 350 sites in the past four years - an attempt to bring his first lawsuit against an offender was put on the back burner only after Hurricane Katrina hit his home town.
Mr Bailey advises journalists to create Google Alerts for key phrases in their stories and to request removal of their copied work from web hosts and search services if wayward publishers refuse to remove the material themselves. (Journalism.co.uk)
Theft of journalists' work is exploding on the internet thanks to a new wave of automated story-copying software - but news organisations are not equipped to tackle the problem, according to one reporter carving a niche as the web's anti-plagiarism crusader.
Conventional forms of plagiarism, in which writers poach one another's words, resurfaced recently after washingtonpost.com fired its right-wing blogger for the offence and an unproven claim brought against Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown was heard in court.
But now online marketers are harvesting journalists' work to boost their visibility, says Jonathan Bailey, editor of Plagiarism Today, a weblog rapidly gaining popularity with victims seeking help."The New York Times, the AP and countless others have been hit with plagiarism scandals recently," he told journalism.co.uk.
"While computers and the web have made it easier for journalists to do that, the act is the same as it was 50 years ago."What's changing is what is happening to journalists as their content moves online. No longer is their content at risk just from other news sources - they are at risk from amateur bloggers and, possibly worst of all, spammers."
Automated plagiarism, in the form of spam blogging or splogging, is becoming both more common and more sophisticated.
Sploggers can use RSS feeds, which most news sites provide, to scrape content and re-post it on their sites automatically, enabling one person to steal from tens of thousands of sites."The free content provides valuable keywords against which to place contextual adverts.
Mr Bailey, a New Orleans-based writer and journalism graduate, founded Plagiarism Today in June 2005 when he began a private blog to document an ongoing battle concerning theft of his own work.
Bruised by the affair, he turned the site public to chronicle other copycats' misdemeanours and added resources like detection tools and cease-and-desist letters for freelancers to use.Drawing a wider audience as awareness of the problem gathers pace, Mr Bailey offers free advice to journalists who fall prey to lawbreakers and provides professional "plagiarism strategy" consultancy in weightier cases.
He is perhaps the web's only dedicated plagiarism hitman and claims to have shot down more than 350 sites in the past four years - an attempt to bring his first lawsuit against an offender was put on the back burner only after Hurricane Katrina hit his home town.
Mr Bailey advises journalists to create Google Alerts for key phrases in their stories and to request removal of their copied work from web hosts and search services if wayward publishers refuse to remove the material themselves. (Journalism.co.uk)
GOOD NEWS FOR BLOGGERS: Technorati Teams With The Associated Press to Connect Bloggers To More Than 440 Newspapers
By Peter Hirshberg
Technorati and the Associated Press have initiated a service to connect bloggers to more than 440 AP member newspapers in the United States.
The Associated Press is the world's largest and oldest news service organization serving media outlets worldwide; it's a fundamental backbone to the mainstream media. Several months ago we and The Associated Press began to talk about about how citizen-generated media could enhance the AP in their mission to be "the essential global news network."
Increasingly, what the blogosphere says about a news story becomes part of a more complete story, lending diverse perspectives and often expert commentary. The AP believed it was increasingly important to deliver the living blogosphere as a compliment to their their core professional news product.
As a first step, Technorati is now connecting bloggers to the more than 440 AP member web sites in the U.S. that take the AP's Hosted Custom News product, taken by local papers such as the Buffalo News or the Sun Journal.
The new service will bring blogger commentary about AP news stories to communities large and small throughout the USA, giving bloggers a voice in trusted local papers throughout the nation. For many news readers, this will be their first exposure to the blogosphere with national, international, business and sports news presented along side links to blogger commentary and perspective.
When readers visit an AP member Web site that uses AP Hosted Custom News, they will see a module featuring the "Top Five Most Blogged About" AP articles right next to the article text, dynamically powered by Technorati.Additionally, when readers click on an AP article, Technorati will deliver "Who’s Blogging About" that article.
Now, if you have commentary about an AP story, you can get mentioned in that module simply by linking to that AP news URL, akin to what you can do with Washington Post articles, Newsweek articles, Der Spiegel articles, and a host of other media partners that currently work with Technorati.
We're delighted to be working with the AP and thrilled that blogger voices will now be heard in several hundred local on-line news organizations across the USA. I believe that this is a deep validation of the power of citizen media and how each person is gaining more power - power to have their opinions and thoughts heard, in a truly democratic process.
Technorati and the Associated Press have initiated a service to connect bloggers to more than 440 AP member newspapers in the United States.
The Associated Press is the world's largest and oldest news service organization serving media outlets worldwide; it's a fundamental backbone to the mainstream media. Several months ago we and The Associated Press began to talk about about how citizen-generated media could enhance the AP in their mission to be "the essential global news network."
Increasingly, what the blogosphere says about a news story becomes part of a more complete story, lending diverse perspectives and often expert commentary. The AP believed it was increasingly important to deliver the living blogosphere as a compliment to their their core professional news product.
As a first step, Technorati is now connecting bloggers to the more than 440 AP member web sites in the U.S. that take the AP's Hosted Custom News product, taken by local papers such as the Buffalo News or the Sun Journal.
The new service will bring blogger commentary about AP news stories to communities large and small throughout the USA, giving bloggers a voice in trusted local papers throughout the nation. For many news readers, this will be their first exposure to the blogosphere with national, international, business and sports news presented along side links to blogger commentary and perspective.
When readers visit an AP member Web site that uses AP Hosted Custom News, they will see a module featuring the "Top Five Most Blogged About" AP articles right next to the article text, dynamically powered by Technorati.Additionally, when readers click on an AP article, Technorati will deliver "Who’s Blogging About" that article.
Now, if you have commentary about an AP story, you can get mentioned in that module simply by linking to that AP news URL, akin to what you can do with Washington Post articles, Newsweek articles, Der Spiegel articles, and a host of other media partners that currently work with Technorati.
We're delighted to be working with the AP and thrilled that blogger voices will now be heard in several hundred local on-line news organizations across the USA. I believe that this is a deep validation of the power of citizen media and how each person is gaining more power - power to have their opinions and thoughts heard, in a truly democratic process.
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