Filipino Australian community blogs

For those who have been following me on this site, I know I have been guilty of not updating this page for almost a month now. I do apologise for that.

Without offering any excuse, I guess I was just pretty well tied up with other web-related projects which included setting up a community blogs at The Filipino Australian Blogs as well as “renovating” and optimising our poetry website plus other myriad of web-related tasks.

I will write about emanilapoetry in my next entry. On The Filipino Australian community blogs, I am quite happy to report that we re-launched the blogs site about two weeks ago. We have a starting seven bloggers which we thought was a very good number. Our starting bloggers are well-known Filipino Australian community leaders, journalists and media people headed by Jimmy Pimentel. Admittedly and expectedly, our starting writers are Sydney-based. We hope to hear from our friends who are based in other Australian capital cities in the not-too-distant future.

Jimmy is joined by Mitchell Badelles, Michelle Baltazar, Kristyn Maslog-Levis, Nonoy Perdon, and Bless Salonga. For our initial pages, we are also happy to open the initial pages of Jess Diaz’ The Basic Facts column.

At The Filipino Australian Blogs, I sketched some background information about our starting 7 bloggers. At the risk of being called repetitive or “makulit”, I would like to re-post that intro here:

Mitchell Badelles is an active community leader and an exponent of Philippine heritage including Philippine martial arts. He runs his own business under Cosmo Stellar, an environmental sustainability company. His operating philosophy includes: “… learning/education – a must for an individual or community to be at peace with oneself and others.”

Michelle Baltazar is a Sydney-based writer. It is to Michelle’s credit that last year she had the opportunity to visit the Philippines as a source of material for her upcoming coffee-table book about Manila. Her initial blog? I now call Australia home.

Kristyn Maslog-Levis is a Sydney-based freelance writer/photographer. She wrote for the old The Filipino Australian some years. Her blog entry in this site therefore is a comeback, and a fitting one at that as she shares her thoughts about driving, speeding, and ‘glassing’.

Nonoy Perdon is publisher of Sydney-based community newspaper, Bayanihan News (The Philippines in Australia). For his initial blog, he writes about Filpress which is showing the community that an organisation could run as well – if not better – even without the formal trappings of a hierarchical structure.

Bless Salonga is a Sydney-based creative writer whose passion includes business management & coaching, choreography and music. Last year, we had the opportunity to write about Sweet Mojo, a fast-rising three-piece band that toured the Philippines last year to help in raising funds for the Ondoy victims.

Jaime K. Pimentel. In addition to having the passion to helping community associations on how to use media to advance their mission, and to helping his fellow media practitioners, Jimmy was also an amateur boxer (in his younger days). He also currently dabbles in photography, cartooning, and social media. He is a journalist by profession and is associated as a section editor with one of Australia’s largest newspapers publishing networks.

The last one (but definitely not the least) I would like to introduce is Jess Diaz who is re-starting his column of many years back, “The Basic Facts.” Jess holds the distinction of being the first Filipino to be admitted as a barrister in Australia in 1984, and also the first Philippine-born and first Asian elected Councillor of Blacktown City. Elected in 2008, Jess sits as one of three Ward 3 councillors. Blacktown is home to over 280,000 people and is considered one of Australia’s largest local governments.

With regard to Jess Diaz’ column, I must point out that whilst the main thread of his column may appear like a platform for an electoral campaign (which of course is not necessarily endorsed by this website or its staff), nevertheless we thought that this blogs site would be an appropriate forum on the issues raised by Jess. I encourage everyone to have their voices heard by way of commenting. Likewise, I invite all those who have other views, opposing or otherwise, and those who desire to air their views on this site to contact us so we can provide them a similar space.

You can read all their entries here.