Our fearless forecast is that kids will be blogging at an early age. One doesn’t even have to be familiar with the more complex workings of PHP and WordPress; there are still the standard one-click publishing systems like Blogger and blog-friendly tools in everyday gadgets like cellphones which makes it as easy as ABC to make blog posts with just one ‘Press’ (as what we have seen with the Technews’ editor’s moblog). And from the present youngsters who blog just to be ‘in,’ we can be assured of  some who can rise to be future Robert Scobles or Sergey Brins, simply because there is no choice but to make technology a career or life choice if your growing-up environment revolves on such.

Kids will be blogging at an earlier age and in the future, they will no longer be a novelty but the norm. In the meantime, we can only wonder in disbelief or amazement at teeners like Carl Ocab  who, at 14 years old, have made waves as the author behind a money-making site named after himself. The perennial question: is he or is he not the ‘writer’ behind the blog? Things even got more curiouser because the father, Alan Ocab, has a blog with the same marketing concept. Child welfare advocates expressed concern at a possible misrepresentation and exploitation of the young Ocab and what kind of values he’s being taught at this delicate stage in his life.

While some of the points raised were valid, this columnist took the time to meet and talk with the Ocabs themselves and found out there has been much ado about the whole controversy. My conclusion is that there should have been sufficient basis first before ‘misgivings’ about Carl were aired online. The  comments received afterwards showed how vicious, merciless and whimsical some bloggers were towards Carl, in reaction to the same baseless accusations. I did have BIG doubts but kept this to myself , being a staunch subscriber to the philosophy that if I easily jump into conclusions, am better off being a horse or a rabbit, lol.

Carl was game enough to accept Blog-O-Rama’s challenge for some liveblogging to shatter speculations that he’s not the author of his blog. We did this in an internet café in Glorietta where yours truly acted as a “proctor.” Carl went through the usual motions of doing a blog post such as making an outline and pausing between sentences to find the right word.

My impression is that Carl Ocab  is not as brilliant a writer as Lauren  Dado who was the youngest Filipino blogger in her prime. He is awfully shy and is probably incapacitated by his inability to express himself well in the spoken word.  He is more of a techie than a writer and uploads his sites  either from scratch or by revising the templates. He has in fact successfully engineered an “Alexa train redirect” a few months back. However, the most important thing is that Carl LOVES  blogging and I don’t see any reason why not having an impeccable grammar should dissuade him from pursuing this passion.

The Ocabs passion, it must be pointed out, is internet marketing and they exemplify this in their blogs. I thought  this was one pragmatic family who didn’t believe in blogging for the sake of art. The elder Ocab noted that a person thinking of starting a blog should ask oneself first his or her purpose in blogging, “because otherwise you can enslave or kill yourself just blogging.” In their case, he said, the secret was choosing a niche and that was about how to make money online.

Spoken like a true internet marketer, the young Carl said he harbors no ill will or feelings to his detractors unlike his parents who feel they really have to explain his side. “In fact I thank them (detractors)  for bringing more buzz to my blog.” Asked about his plans five years from now, he sees himself the proud owner of a blog network.

 “Why a network?” we ask. “So I can delegate some of the work  and spend my time towards other internet ventures,” he answered.

(For comments and inquiries, email  annalyn.jusay@gmail.com)