Daniela’s family, at that time, was living in David’s house after years of domestic abuse prompted her to take her kids and divorce her husband.

The appeal was pretty straightforward: Using ChipIn.com, David intended to raise $5,000 for Daniela and her family to get a decent roof over their heads without worrying about deposit or rent for a while.

To say that the community response was significant would be an insulting understatement. In fact, a mere 24 hours after the appeal was posted, David was able to raise over $15,000 for Daniela and her family.

One only needs to look at the deluge of twitter responses and media coverage (most notably from Business Week and The Vancouver Sun) to see how quickly and phenomenally the virus spread.

After everything settled down, I realized a couple of things: First, the #daniela campaign has got to be one of the most noble ways I’ve seen anybody put their social authority to use in recent memory and second, the campaign is a gleaming example of how a community’s altruism and willingness to extend a helping hand does not get watered down even if its members are connected only by mere wires and fiber optics.

Also, after the proof of concept on how authority can be leveraged to raise funds for a good cause was laid out, I got to thinking about my own authority in the local blogosphere and how I could leverage it, being one of the country’s most prominent bloggers, to pull off my own #daniela.

And so here we are with a little experiment…

Ready?

Wait for it…

And here it goes…

I think you should totally give me money

No, don’t go just yet and hear me out. I know I’m being a douche and you’ve probably decided in your narrow minds that I am, indeed, a douche but that’s not what’s important.

What’s important, bro, is that I’ve written an assload of posts in this blog (and here) since June of 2005 and while you’ve consistently consumed the high art that are my blog posts, I have never really asked you for anything in return. Until now.

To put things into perspective, I am going to run some numbers by you:

• I have written over 400 posts between this blog and my old one
• The average length of a Mike “Fucking” Villar blog post is 800 words.
• Now, using the magic of math, I can safely estimate that I have, in my career as a blogger, written well over 320,000 words
• On the average, a book is about 70,000 words long (I totally made this up. Sorry.)
• Again using the voodoo that is math, assuming that you’ve read every single blog post I churned out, you’ve read the equivalent of 4 books! Written by me!
• A cursory look at Amazon tells me that a new book costs around 7-8 USD but since I am only a “semi-published” writer, I am willing to slash the prices of the 4 “books” you’ve read to $5 each.
• Now do you know why you owe me $20 ?

(Wait, even if you didn’t read all of my posts, you still owe me a little money.)

Let it go on record that I do NOT earn anything from advertising through this site and I am, in fact, hemorrhaging thousands of Pesos yearly because of web hosting bills and my being obdurate.

For those of you who haven’t yet realized the gravity of this, just think of it this way: The thousands of Pesos I blow annually on Web Hosting is money better spent on alcohol–specifically those swanky cocktails I’ve been addicted to lately or on generously helping the local prostitution industry prosper.

If you’re one of those people who like really love this blog and consider yourself affluent, we can make it more “interesting” depending on the amount you are willing to donate:

• For $500 I will give you total access to my hamper and keep 1 (one) article of clothing I recently wore (No underwear. Come on, that’s just creepy)
• For $1,000 I will have an hour’s worth of phone sex with you
• For $5,000 I will buy a Macbook Pro and print a thank you card to be sent to you using it (could be worth a lot of money after I die 3 years from now)
• And for $20,000 Me and my entire family can be your slaves. Forever.

And there we have it my humble plea for a little money. Your donation would be a clear sign that you care for me and appreciate the entertainment I’ve been providing you for four years now.

Remember: Your appreciation makes me all warm and fuzzy inside and your cash, it keeps me drunk. Which is awesome.

Thank you for your time, and below is the ChipIn widget you could use to give me monies!

Facebook

…If I was the CEO of my own company. But for now I have to live with the fact that I am but a program manager encumbered with the fact that I live in a country where most system administrators have a reactive thought process in dealing with IT-related problems.

What do you mean you can’t access your email? Oh I know, let’s reformat your hard drive and do a fresh Windows XP install! Bam! Problem solved!

A virus threat?! OMG! Let’s disable WiFi access on all laptops in the network! THEN do a fresh Windows XP install! Bam! Probllem solved!

Is the Internet slow during office hours? Why, let’s indiscriminately block half of the sites our employees access! Bam! Problem solved!

Twitter

The usual IT scapegoats in almost all network congestion problems seem to be social sites like Facebook, MySpace and their ilk. This is fine–In an assembly line. What IT departments in most companies, especially those who are marketing-driven, fail to take into consideration when doing their capacity planning is that the underpinnings of successful employees are creativity and innovation–hallmarks which a restrictive IT environment fails to and will fail to cultivate.

Some system administrators and upper management types might argue that creating a restrictive IT environment is necessary to sustain productivity.

Well guess what, You’re wrong.

According to a recent report, an employee’s inability to access these same websites you block could also lead to a drop in productivity.

a takeaway from the report:

The report concludes with a note of caution and some practical advice with regards to developing a frame work for a responsible and prosperous network. This should be a group in which its citizens respect the power and realise the mutual benefit of giving and taking. Businesses should consider the following guidelines when auditing and analysing their own networks:

1. Do not separate ’social’ networking from ‘professional’ networking. Attempts to control employees’ use of social networking software in the office may end up damaging the organization in the long run by depleting its network capital

2. There should be value placed on networks with people outside the firm. Too often, it is only senior staff who are encouraged to build relationships with people outside the organization. The power of horizontal networks across organisational boundaries is clear, and growing

3. Keep in touch with employees that have left the organisation. The temptation during a difficult economic climate is to hunker down; but this risks cutting off flows of network capital. Companies should consider how to keep former employees in the network

4. Do not police networks but consider how they operate and what could be improved. This should be a first step towards collective conversations about the ‘rules of the game’ when it comes to operating within networks

These are things the most successful marketing-driven companies like Zappos (who list Creating Fun and A Little Weirdness and Being Passionate and Determined as two of their core values) realize.

Also, In an HR-retention perspective, keeping top talent means giving them the easel and the canvas to tap into their creativity; an effort which would ultimately translate into new business opportunities.

I for one wouldn’t be too happy if I have spent months researching on how Twitter, Facebook or social media in general could be leveraged as a PR/Marketing tool for the company and one day I come in and see that my access to these sites has been blocked.

So yes Mr. IT Administrator/Upper Management guy, if you’re even thinking of blocking access to social sites, I suggest you think about getting more bandwidth first. Or hire robots.

–

Mikey does Marketing for US Auto Parts, a publicly-traded, Internet 500 top retailer. He is NOT a robot. nor are his brilliant coworkers.

Without an authoritarian, normative system of quality control in place like that of the blogosphere’s, a microblogging personality is allowed to flutter about in spaces wherever his deluded brain would take him.

Microblogging personalities, as I see them, is much like the offspring of two celebrities–they are beautifully unmoderated, and are allowed to say anything without being afraid of criticism or reprisal.

So, are you ready to transition into a brainless fame only people who live uninteresting lives like you deserve? Are you interested in enlisting yourself into the cadre of new media hippies who garner less respect than bloggers? Well allow me to hold your hand with a guide specifically structured to send you on your first glorious steps towards polluting the internet with your asininity 140 characters at a time!

Do you want to be…

The guy who still thinks speaking in LOLcat is cool?

The difference between how people think in real life and over the internet is that in real life, people actually know and accept that they might actually be painfully unfunny. After all, there must be a reason why these people have boring desk jobs instead of bringing comedy clubs down with their golden gifts of funny!

On the internet, this perception is skewed horribly that EVERYONE actually believes they are all engineers of an unstoppable LOLcomotive.

I mean seriously, LOLcat speak had a great run but nowadays, it feels as if the joke is being gangraped by thousands of casual, wannabe internet humorists and plurk and twitter are NOT spared from this.

A normal person would have let out a chuckle or two at the joke and moved on but these people must’ve thought “CATS! THAT CAN SPEAK! AND THE JOKES ARE INTENTIONALLY MISSPELLED! I MUST INTERSPERSE EVERYTHING I SAY ONLINE WITH THIS BECAUSE IT’S JUST SO GODDAMN FUNNY! HAHA HAHA HAHA!” And so it’s not uncommon to see plurk or twitter users broadcast fuckingly annoying messages like:

• “o hai gais!”
• “o bai gais! my karma is nutrishoos!”
• “I cant say anything that’s worth your attention, but I bet you want moar. Get it? More? but I typed “moar” Oh shit this is more than 140 characters, what can I delete? I have to leave “moar” there because that’s my comedic coup de grace!”

Messages like these are spread across this digital land of LOL so the uninitiated can laugh next time they see this kind of plagiarized humor printed in big bold letters on some T-shirt in a Greenhills stall.

So yes, fuck you. You’re unfunny and so is your retarded ching-chong language nobody really gives a fuck about.

Or maybe you want to be the guy who follows 24,088 friends and is just all over the fucking place?

For this kind of Twitter-user/Plurker, the compulsion to click that “follow” button in hopes that the user would reciprocate and therefore become someone he could whore his own unoriginal, unamusing thoughts to is so great that he dreams of colorful “follow” buttons in his sleep and has a condition where his index finger involuntarily twitches as if clicking a mouse button.

For these kinds of users, whoring and getting their names out there is the name of the game. So notice how they’re on. every. fucking. thread?! When replying to a plurk or twitter message such as “I feel so sad. my grandmother whom I loved dearly passed away this morning”, it’s typical for them to churn out brilliant ripostes like

• “why?” or
• “yay!”

One theory is that users like these have like REALLY small penises which they compensate for by pumping their Karmas up and unlocking smileys because really, smileys are just so awezoms!

How about the guy who doesn’t make sense nor stays on topic that didn’t make sense in the first place for more than 10 seconds

For these types of people, logic and continuity are sworn enemies. They are in a perpetual badminton match with logic and continuity and everytime they start posting tweets or plurks that make sense, logic and continuity score a point and sends the shuttlecock flying behind a huge locker and these people have to spend a good amount of time trying to move the locker and when they do finally find the shuttlecock, it’s all dusty and they have to wipe it with their white badminton shorts. What a hassle.

So, they make a point never to let logic and continuity score. These people are going to post a tweet or plurk that goes something like “What do you gais think about the president’s System of the Nation Address?”

To which, naturally, somebody would reply “You mean STATE of the Nation Address right?”

The thread ends with this type of user saying “Anyone seen The Dark Knight Yet? I like Jack Nicklaus as the joker moar than Heath!”

Oh, I know! How about the guy who says something racist every once in a while and you couldn’t really tell whether or not they’re joking?

Users like these understand that microblogging is about pushing the envelope and diversifying the mind. Unlike those tacky bloggers who all sound alike, microblogging allows users like these to broadcast plurks or tweets about how towelheads are exploiting our educational system and how those yellow chinks are virtually running our economy.

When questioned, they hit back with sarcastic replies claiming that those who disagree with them don’t have a sense of humor and how mainstream media has eroded their ability to understand satire. Then they call you a “fucking bisaya”