THIS is probably the best time for me to declare that I don?t have my own blog. Two of my former students did collect my Inquirer ?Pinoy Kasi? columns from 2000 and 2004 and put them on a site pinoykasi.homestead.com, while another kind soul, who I know only as ?Icarus,? put up another site, pinoykasi.blogspot.com, with columns from 2006 to 2007, stating that it was an unofficial site.

I have been asked many times, including by Inquirer staff, to put up a blog, but there are several reasons why I haven?t. First is I just don?t have the time to do blogs in addition to the twice-weekly columns, young kids, elderly parents. Second, I?ve visited many blogs and have not been too impressed, sometimes even dismayed by what?s out there. But that, of course, is a form of snobbery and doing today?s article is a kind of penitential act, to acknowledge that blogs do have value. And maybe ? just maybe ? I?ll get to doing one eventually.

Blogs are, I?ve come to realize, a restoration of a much older communications genre: the story-telling in villages that dates way back, before television, before radio, before books. You still see the face-to-face story-telling traditions in some remote places. I am reminded of the 1970s when I had to do community work in Kalinga. Every morning, I had to join the men upriver to bathe, and while we scrubbed ourselves we would exchange stories and commentaries on politics.

Some of the men would also comment on what was happening downstream, which was where the women congregated to do the laundry and bathe themselves and their children. The women, too, told stories and exchanged tips on household management, what to do with children (and husbands). Politics, too, would crop up.

At night, without radio or television, people would come together again, women and men, young and old, to talk. In today?s jargon, what we had were several chat rooms in the village. I?m not surprised to hear that some people in the Cordillera now have an ?electronic dap-ay? on the Internet, the ?dap-ay? being a communal campfire, around which people could talk.

The Pinoy blogs are actually expanded chat rooms, but with one person taking the lead, posting articles and commentaries, and then other people posting their comments, and comments on other people?s comments.

Blogs take off because they bring together people with common interests. I went into a site, TopBlogs.com.ph, to look at what those interests were in the Philippines. The site lists blogspots, with links so you can actually look at the blogs, and with statistics on how many people have visited the blogspot, for the day, the month, or even the year.

I have to qualify that for your blog site to be monitored, it has to be registered first with TopBlogs, so there may be a certain selection bias here, meaning someone may have a widely-read blog and yet not be covered by TopBlogs.

Nevertheless, my very cursory browsing of this site did give me many insights. The top site in TopBlogs was YugaTech, which has news on all kinds of electronic gadgets. The day I visited, they had 5,426 unique visitors (meaning people who went in and out repeatedly were counted only as one) and for the month, the number was a staggering 147,614.

There are other similar sites dealing with electronic gadgets, with reviews as well as listings of stores and prices. I suspect the site caters more to men with disposable incomes, considering that there are also a number of gadget-oriented magazines in the market, filled with photographs of scantily-clad women touting a laptop or a cellphone.

Some blogs seem almost esoteric, such as those dealing with Japanese manga comics, yet they?re up there with thousands of visitors. One popular blogspot is Wedding Bells Blog, a name which is self-explanatory. I was surprised by the number of blogs that post results of exams for professional licensure, as well as those of the Civil Service Commission, telling us again something about Philippine society. Not surprisingly, there are many blogs around nursing, on passing not just the local board exam but also NCLEX and CGFNS, exams needed if you intend to migrate to the States.

Predictably, other popular blogs deal with gossip on celebrities, with names like Starmometer and Cheezmizan with Chuva. Yes, that last name hints on who is doing the blog. Gay men seem to be all over the blogosphere, and I attribute this to the way blogs allow people to express themselves freely, as well as to challenge social norms. There are sites with names like ?all hot men,? featuring beefcake photos with comments, some drooling, some tacky, just like what you?d hear in the real bading world.

Surprisingly, there aren?t too many political blogs, which might be because we already have democratic space for expressing ourselves. At the same time, I did want to say that although there aren?t that many political blogs, they are quite active. In fact, I suspect the Internet ?blogs, chat rooms and other venues ? are replacing Plaza Miranda and rally sites, young people expressing and exchanging quite strong views. The debates over Reproductive Health, for example, are all over the Internet and can sometimes be quite vitriolic.

I do worry about the vitriol, including the ?trolls,? who specialize in going around the blogs just to contradict everything that?s said. (I call them ?nuno sa Internet.?)

Many blog sites do seem to take off from our tsismis sessions, with language thoughtless, unkind, even libelous. At times the postings can even endanger the people involved, as when one blog erroneously identified an Inquirer reporter as having won a huge lotto prize.

Blogs can be humorous, witty and naughty without becoming nasty. They can also encourage more critical and responsible thinking. Whichever style prevails ? the more serious and gracious, or the tacky gossipy one ? will shape, too, the way we communicate face to face. ?