Philippines Online Journal

Yesterday morning I checked the Ulitzer home page on my iPhone on my way to the office and I realized two of the top three stories were about "Typhoon Ondoy" in Philippines.

Thirty-six hours later we still have three stories filed from Manila on Ulitzer's home page. Top Ulitzer stories on Ulitzer from around the 25 distinct subject categories it covers are processed every 60 minutes and displayed by an algorithm which we believe is more sophisticated than, say, Google News algorithms.

Early this year, seasoned news man Roger Strukhoff, whose family owned and published their town newspaper in Wisconsin, launched the Ulitzer topic Philippines Online Journal. Strukhoff logged close to three million Ulitzer page views with his articles.

Inday Vinas is a struggling young writer who grew up in a very poor area of the Philippines. She started a blog this year to tell people about her story. She then syndicated her blog on Ulitzer and saw immediate traffic increase by 20 times within a couple of days.

Inday's two stories about the recent typhoon in Manila had thousands of readers overnight on Ulitzer. She received notes of concern from people who were worried about her relatives. She's been able to provide helpful information to people who have family in her neighborhood and had no other way of contacting them or knowing whether they were okay.

"I love all the great readers who have found my blog with Ulitzer this year," she said. "But now I've been able to really help people. So many people found my stories about the typhoon because of Ulitzer, and I really thank you for that!"

This is another timely story which demonstrates what Ulitzer was designed to accomplish, similar to a blog entry by Robert Demmer (From Tehran to You Live on Ulitzer: The Wind of Change is Blowing; A First Hand Observations From the Streets of Tehran) not too long ago. To date, this is still the most-read story on his author page.

From Inday's blog new post, here are places you can go to help:

www.philippineaid.org - I mentioned this one before.

www.inquirer.net - This is a newspaper website. They have a lot of information about the Ondoy Relief Drive.

www.redcross.org.ph - Yes, they are very active here just like in the US and other places.