The 2010 elections is coming. With that, and other issues concerning the looming elections, people need to have maximum awareness on the candidates, their platforms, their track record and their personality. Because every vote counts, that is.

A lot of voters, just like me, are first time voters. Thus we have the need to “know” who they (the candidates) are and what they can do to stop our country from its eventual downfall. But how? The media can be jaded and has the tendency to do sweet talking. Some, I believe, even don’t know who’s running and who’s not. So what we need is a centralized area where everything will be about the coming elections, the presidentiables, the other candidates, and an open forum for healthy exchange of political ideas. We need an online political arena. And fortunately, we have that.

PoliticalArena.com is Philippines’ first soci0-political networking site. Basically, what it aims to do is to educate first-time voters and to promote awareness to the society about the elections to come this 2010 and the political issues that surround it. It also encourages participation in the 2010 national elections. PoliticalArena.com is in partnership with COMELEC, PPCRV and Youth Vote Philippines. It also operates under the network of 88DB.com, the Philippines’ first rich media service portal. It has online features that will highly promote voter education. To entice the people to use it, it has acqired the social media networking look with tools such as blog, chat, political forum and other multimedia portals. PoliticalArena.com is also one way for us to get up close and personal with presidential candidates and learn more about their principles, views and goals. This will in turn provide us with sufficient information about them which we can then use as basis as who to vote.

Personally, I could say that PoliticalArena.com is a very useful site for me. I’d point out that the word that centers on this networking site is “awareness”. Bloggers (or basically everyone) here in the Visayas don’t really get much exposure on the candidates and their personalities. They do visit here sometimes but in Manila I believe, they are widely much exposed. So having PoliticalArena.com increases the candidate’s visibility even here in the Visayas and probably in Mindanao too. I signed up on the site. There are some really good features like the “Ask Question” area and the polls too. The forums are great too, where one can express his thoughts regarding an issue. I’ve voted on a poll, supported Gibo Teodoro (though that’s changeable and see screenshot of my profile below) and asked a question.

I have a question too but it isn’t approved yet. I will update this post as soon as it gets published in the site. It is a question addressed to the presidential candidates and it says: How do you think the tragic incident in Maguindanao would affect the coming elections? Will you tackle this incident in your campaigns too? What can you say about what happened to the innocent people killed in the said incident? I am really concerned with what happened down south and I’m wondering how our national politicians react to it.

So to all voters out there, head on to PoliticalArena.com now to get an insight of the coming 2010 elections.