Define: reciprocation

Jeepney rides, my downtown Manila equivalent of long walks, are good times to think and reflect. There's something about the time spent alone confined in my own "upong siete pesos" space that allows me to brainstorm about things I need to do ("upong siete pesos" is an expression roughly saying that one should only occupy the space paid for in public transports, which in jeepneys is 7PHP, currently.) Naturally, I was thinking about what to write about in my blog, an exercise that I only do at the back of my head when inside the office premises. By the end of the jeepney ride I had several ideas jotted down in the other part of the back of my head, meant for notes.

I had a thank you message from a guest house I stayed at in Cebu last December. I wrote a review about them in Trip Advisor relating our experience with them. The message said that the honest review helped put them back in the competition. Another traveler also liked a review about a restaurant we ate at in the same city. He didn't think the dishes in my photos were appetizing, but he appreciated how the review was written, with information and descriptions.

Yesterday I met with two good friends (make that three, including their son), the brains behind Prodigal Concepts , and shared laughs about the blogosphere clique that we move in at the moment, about the shameless posts and reposts, tweets and retweets, links and promotions we do for each other.

I guess being an active participant online is not just about knowing how to maximize your search engine and find the best deals/travel locations/reviews/movie schedules through the internet. It's also largely about giving back. In order to get content to search from, we need to throw back content out there. Through the back and forth sending of comments, tweets, links and posts, writers and authors can get feedback on their work and improve the material they produce online.

So, while I have a thousand other things I wanted to write about from my jeepney ride, I thought it's best to talk about the importance of giving back first. We post and repost partly because we want to help other active participants remain active, and partly to promote their cause, which in some cases may be difficult to attain, such as buying Meg a Jaguar, but hey dreams can come true, who am I to judge and all that blah blah.