THE COMMUNITY RELATIONS COMMISSION of New South Wales recently launched the 2008 National Multicultural Marketing Awards at the Westin Hotel Sydney calling for nominations in seven categories.

The seven categories for the 2008 awards are CMC Markets Commercial Big Business Award, Commercial Small Business Award, Integral Energy Community Award, Export Award, Government Award, Integral Energy Community Award, and Advertising Award.

Nominations close on 29 August 2008 and the awards winnners will be presented on 25 November 2008.

The Awards began in 1990 and since then has awarded more than 100 businesses and organisations who are regarded as leaders in the industry and role models in seizing business opportunities through marketing in a society of 420 languages and 265 cultural backgrounds.

In 2000, emanila.com became the first organisation to receive the Technology Award. During the recent launch, a special video highlighting the achievements of previous awardees was played.

Together with the Awards 1990 Inaugural Winner, the Sydney Opera House, emanila.com was highlighted as being the inaugural recipient of the Technology Award and the largest Philippine-related portal website in Australia.

The Census, taken in 2006, also reported that of the 18.9 million respondents, 15% or 2,853,851 reported as speaking a non-English in their homes.

The seven other non-English languages are Italian (12.4%), Greek (9.2%), Cantonese (7.9%), Arabic (7.3%), Vietnamese (6.1%), Mandarin (4.9%) and Spanish (3.3%).

Tagalog (Filipino) accounted for 2.8% of the relevant respondents group. German ranked number nine followed with a close 2.7% of the respondents group.

By region, Blacktown has reported to have the highest concentration of Census respondents speaking Tagalog (Filipino). The ABS statistics revealed that 5.7% of the people in the region speak the language at home. Arabic followed a distant 3.2% second non-English language spoken in the region.

The reported ranking of Tagalog (Filipino) as a non-English language spoken in Australia compares favourably with that in the United States.

According to the 1990 and 2000 United States Census, Tagalog is the sixth non-English language spoken in America, and the second most commonly-spoken Asian language (after Chinese) in the United States. #

“We are slowly reaping the benefits of migrating our site to WordPress,” says emanila publisher, Romy Cayabyab.

“The WP PDA is just one of the many plugins ~ developed by the WP community ~ that we have installed in the poetry site.  The current site is definitely more flexible and writer-friendly that it was last year.

“The WP install was the overwhelming favorite of our Writers Group members when asked  during a targeted online survey in July 2007.”

emanilapoetry started using WordPress last September 2007 after Compucentric / emanila selected WP from among other blogging applications based on a survey among members who gave WP an overwhelming thumbs-up.

emanilapoetry would now be counting more than 8,000 entries in its library of Filipino, English, Bicol, Pampango and Ilocano poems.

emanilapoetry launched on 19 June 2005 on the occasion of the 144th birth anniversary of the Philippines national hero, Dr Jose P. Rizal.