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.