Ang Peregrino Recommends

1) I have found that I get very few hits on week­ends. Most of the blog read­ers here read my Sat­ur­day and Sun­day posts on Mon­day. If they have the time to read it. That’s just too many posts to be read in a sin­gle day. So I’ve decided to just do away with week­end posts altogether.

2) I can actu­ally make much bet­ter use of my time on week­ends by going around the net and look­ing for other(aside from this one. Hehe.) great web­sites to rec­om­mend to my readers.

Start­ing next Mon­day, and (hope­fully) every Mon­day there­after, I will be rec­om­mend­ing web­sites to my read­ers. So in lieu of three posts to read every Mon­day (the week­end post plus the Mon­day post), you get just one post—the blog/service/freeware/website of the week.

I wanna keep the whole thing free, so Ang Pere­grino Rec­om­mends posts will not be paid posts. These will just sim­ply be about blogs/websites/cool stuff I pick up on the road called life—or in this case, on the road called the INTERNET.

The vague cri­te­ria that I have (for now) for choos­ing blogs/websites are the following:

1) The blog/website has to be interesting–it has to offer some­thing that piques my inter­est — a prod­uct, story, video, free­ware, ser­vice, etc.

2) The blog/website has to give an add-on value to the read­ers. It can be the fact that the whole web­site is full of pos­i­tive val­ues and is out there to help peo­ple; or it can be because it offers a prod­uct that makes life so much eas­ier for us who are in the blo­gos­phere. Or it might be because the arti­cles writ­ten there are full of hope.

3) It has to have what I call the “oomph fac­tor”. I watched America’s Next Top Model the other day, and Tyra Banks was say­ing that a model needs to be NOTICED. That is one of the model’s main job–to be noticed: with the clothes she’s wear­ing, with the prod­uct she’s sell­ing, or sim­ply by stand­ing. I call that the “oomph fac­tor”. You notice peo­ple who have oomph. For a web­site or blog to make it to Ang Pere­grino Rec­om­mends, I have to notice it.

4) The blog/website has to be cool. The sub­ti­tle of this sec­tion was some­thing I got from an episode in The Simp­sons called Home­r­palooza. It is a con­ver­sa­tion among Homer, Bart and Liza, and Marge.

The dilemma of COOL: from The Simp­sons. Episode: Homerpalooza.

Homer: So, I real­ized that being with my fam­ily is more impor­tant than being cool.

Bart: Dad, what you just said was pow­er­fully uncool.

Homer: You know what the song says: “It’s hip to be square”.

Lisa: That song is so lame.

Homer: So lame that it’s… cool?

Bart+Lisa: No.

Marge: Am I cool, kids?

Bart+Lisa: No.

Marge: Good. I’m glad. And that’s what makes me cool–not car­ing–right?

Bart+Lisa: No.

Marge: Well, how the hell do you know you’re cool? I feel like we’ve tried every­thing here.

Homer: Wait, Marge. Maybe if you’re truly cool, you don’t need to be told you’re cool.

Bart: Well, sure you do.

Lisa: How else would you know?

The dilemma of “cool” is that when you’re told about it, and the “mob” knows it already, it ceases to be cool. On the other hand, how will you know, if nobody tells you about it? Any­way, the sub­ti­tle is really just a take on the dilemma. You can take it as it is, or maybe you can take it as my attempt at irony. Either way, I’m cool with that. :-)

I will be writ­ing an arti­cle about being cool one of these days, so watch out for that.