Topic: Writing for the Web: The Do’s and Don’ts of Web Writing

Speaker: Kristine Mandigma, Editorial Director of Vibal Foundation

Date and Time: July 1, 2008, 2:15 PM – 2:45 PM

Venue: DOLE Ople Hall, Intramuros, Manila

“Readers on the web don’t read. They only scan. Also, they don’t read pages in sequence,” stated Ms. Kristine Mandigma as she began her lecture. First of all, she said, it’s tiring to read onscreen, so users tend to just scan the material and see what’s interesting. They then tend to download long articles or documents for printing and read the hardcopy. Also, users don’t read web pages in sequence the way books are read from the first to the last page. Because of hyperlinks, users tend to jump between pages depending on what they’re interested in. Also, users tend to read only 20% of the text in a webpage, and they place importance on credibility. Ms. Mandigma reminded the audience that the web is a user-driven medium and each page has to compete with a million other websites.

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Topic: Googling for Research

Speaker: Aileen Apolo, Google Country Consultant for the Philippines

Date and Time: July 1, 2008, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM

Venue: DOLE Ople Hall, Intramuros, Manila

The world’s biggest search engine started as a school project at Stanford University– for indexing books and documents on its website, according to Ms. Aileen Apolo. She said that the next thing the creators of Google thought was” “Let’s try to index the web!” And they did!

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