Tagalog Trail: Curation for Filipino Works

@tagalogtrail is born out of love for Filipino works. There are already thousands of Steemit authors from the Philippines, but undeniably, the majority choose to write in English for the upvote and viewership. Posts written in the local Philippine language are quite rare, but this rarity makes the hunt for such little gems all the more exciting.

@tagalogtrail exclusively curates posts that are written in Filipino. This is the primary driving force of this account. But we’re doing this customary IntroduceYourself post in English to connect to the larger community. The audience of this trail may be too niche, the minority of the minority, but we hope that the love for one’s culture, heritage and literature resonates with you all.

Meet Toto

Toto, in the most basic description, is the love of Filipino literature personified. He’s the persona of @tagalogtrail - young, playful and sees SteemitLand with wide eyes filled with awe. And the authors truly love him! He always leaves thoughtful comments and likes to playfully banter with everyone. Okay … non-Filipinos won’t understand a thing he says, but trust me on this, Toto really brings the joy in the comments section. The trail’s upvote is worth meager cents so he works doubly hard to show appreciation through engagement 😉

True and Original Content Only

Might it be too presumptuous to say @tagalogtrail aims to be like @curie, @ocd, and @promo-mentors? Well, not in terms of the upvote power of course but in how these three amazing curation guilds operate. These groups put quality and originality at the forefront when curating posts. The big votes are always human-reviewed and mostly go to very unrewarded authors. @tagalogtrail have been carefully curating posts for over a month with “True and Original Content Only” in mind. This means that there would be NO SPAM, NO PLAGIARIZATION of any form tolerated.

Fair and Transparent Curation

One other thing that sets Curie, OCD, and Promo-Mentors apart from all the other curation guilds is its transparency. No organization is perfect but these guilds have always tried their best to distribute their upvotes fairly. @tagalogtrail shares the same value, and despite being small, would also strive to make operations transparent through weekly reports starting this week. Upholding this value is truly fitting in this platform as we’re built on top of a blockchain where everything one does is etched forever in the blocks, and is open for anyone to scrutinize.

Showcasing Filipino Works

@tagalogtrail has already pioneered several small projects to support and boost engagement across the Filipino writers’ community.

Daily Author Engagement and Showcase

Toto scours Steemit for unrewarded posts written in Filipino and always make sure to leave either a funny or heartwarming comment depending on his mood. He also tries to spread out the upvotes as much as he can. And for those posts that he finds truly excellent, it gets featured in @tagalogtrail’s daily author showcase and gets a resteem.

Facebook Presence and Promotion

Toto is on Facebook too! Here’s the official FB page for @tagalogtrail: https://www.facebook.com/tagalogtrail. Toto shares some of the Steemit posts in Facebook to generate more views and find more readers for these wonderful authors, with their permission of course.

Collaborative and Derivative Works Contest

One other project that @tagalogtrail is truly proud of is our daily Derivative Works Contest. With author’s permission, we pick one Filipino work and feature it for the contest. Entrants would have to create their own original works inspired by the featured post. More than the prize and recognition, this contest provides an avenue for authors to interact and collaborate on a more intimate level.

Weekly Stats

@tagalogtrail, from here on, will publish weekly reports on Sundays covering statistics of the trail’s vote distribution to promote transparency and fairness.

April 08 - April 14, 2018: Vote Distribution
63 posts with 38 Unique Authors Upvoted

April 08 - April 14, 2018: Post Payout Stats
Majority of upvoted posts fall below $3 post value (87.3%)

Our Gratitude to Our Early Supporters

@tagalogtrail has only been operating for over a month but we are very grateful and quite humbled by the amount of support we garnered thus far.

Our deepest gratitude to the following for the donations (totaling 8 SBD):
@steemph.antipolo
@shirleynpenalosa
@fherdz
@xorexman

Thank you for all those following our vote trail:
@smafey
@masterbot
@xorexman
@jazzhero
@ortorres1123
@racheleecious

Thank you to Ms. Dayanara @dyinkfinity for creating our awesome banner.

Lastly, a special thanks to @futurethinker for the vote of confidence. We really appreciate the support especially since @promo-mentors is one of the groups we really look up to. We’re far from being like you guys but I hope we are on the right track.

And We’d Happily Welcome More Support

If you would like to support Filipino works and if you have upvotes to spare, you can follow our SteemAuto trail: https://steemauto.com/

You can also opt to delegate some Steem Power to @tagalogtrail too. We are not really aiming for a high upvote value specifically, but we just think it would be nice if we could at least push the unrewarded posts above $1 value 😋

Oh, if you have a few slots left among your 30 witness votes, please support our idol guilds by voting them as witnesses. Just go to this page: https://steemit.com/~witnesses and click curie and ocd-witness to vote.

And for the massive amount of goodwill from @surpassinggoogle’s constant support to the Filipino community, we hope you would consider voting for steemgigs as a witness too.

Let’s support True and Original Filipino Works! Mabuhay po kayong lahat!