I was all set to attend yesterday’s iBlog2 summit. I’m here in Manila for the Free Expression in Asian Cyberspace conference organized by the Southeast Asian Press Alliance and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

I was scheduled to arrive before noon yesterday but the flight I took got delayed. I arrived at the hotel at past 1:00 p.m., went through my to-do lists items of things that needed to be done by then and the next thing I knew, it was already past 2:00 p.m. It would have been great to finally meet bloggers I only knew online. It would have been great to revisit the school where I spent some of my best adolescent years in. Meeting an “old flame” and finding out you can connect to the Internet in the hotel room I’m staying in saved my day.

The Free Expression in Asian Cyberspace is a very informative conference. You can download the presentations at the WordPress blog opened by Alecks Pabico last night. I also got to meet Dean Jorge Bocobo. Some of the Pinoy journalist bloggers attending it are Manolo Quezon, John Nery, Erwin Oliva and of course the members of PCIJ.

Listening to some of the speakers brings me back to a familiar line of thought that keeps coming back to me during Martial Law and Edsa 1 anniversaries, and like Jacopo Belbo in Foucault’s Pendulum—I keep asking myself whether I’d have the courage to defy fascism.

This afternoon, Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices and Manolo Quezon will be speaking. Manolo is scheduled to talk on “Tag-teaming against the President: Philippine case study on how bloggers and mainstream media kept a “banned” conversation going and online.”

Note to self: schedule installing of this great WordPress plugin later tonight.