I would like to thank everyone who joined the Blog4Reviews Christmas Party last December 17, 2009 at Le Bistro. Seeing how this community has grown from 2007 to now is something that makes me truly proud.

Big thanks to:

1. Gary Viray who supported this DigitalFilipino advocacy by becoming a project collaborator. As shared during the Christmas Party, we can see major changes in the site sometime this year.
2. Bloggers who joined the community. Will definitely strive to provide more opportunities to our blog network members this year.
3. Advertisers who gave both direct and marketplace opportunities for bloggers to work on.
4. Yahoo! Meme who sponsored our food during the event and Jonas De Los Reyes gave a presentation about what the site is about. It enables users to share stories, photos, videos, sound bytes or music and let others re-blog it for viral effect. If you have a Yahoo! Meme account already, share it here and will follow you.
5. Body Flavors for their eco-friendly and virgin coconut oil-based organic soap products given to guests.
6. PAGCOR for tapping the DigitalFilipino Club network to reach out online supporting our bloggers networking events activity in Bacolod, Cebu, Davao, and Manila for the past 2 years. During the Christmas Party, I’m glad Gary joined the despite short notice. During the networking part, he shared about PAGCOR improving its traffic and online interaction with more than a million pageviews in 2009. With the PAGCOR E-city project already gaining momentum, I’m sure they have more plans this year and hope that reaching out to bloggers will continuously be part of their programs.

2009 was indeed a great year for the community and I surely hope that 2010 will be even better. Thank you everyone!

Last June 18, Blog4Reviews.com just turned one month old and have accepted more than 200 bloggers in the system to date. This brings us the challenge of finding advertisers and provide opportunities to as many bloggers as possible. We try to balance this by being gradual in our approval process of new bloggers and blogs in the system.

Being on its beta phase, we are still making enhancements to ensure that we’ll be able to cover urgent concerns of both bloggers and advertisers. Instead of being approved right away, all members go through an approval process to protect the site members from those who just dig for information. We found one lately and decided to ban that person and entity permanently from our site.

The primary basis of a blog’s approval is its original content and being up-to-date. That shall also serve as basis for maintaining one’s membership in Blog4Reviews.com. While bloggers have to fulfill their needs to generate income from their blogging endeavours, remember to take care of your blog by having more non-paid content to serve as gap on your paid content.

In addition to providing balance, it also preserves what your blog is really all about - which is you and the experiences, knowledge, and things that  you share to your readers.