BARELY 10 months in cyberspace, ustexchange.com, a website created for Thomasians, has reaped distinction from the country’s premier award-giving body for the local Internet.
Popularly called “Ustex” by Thomasians, the website received the much-coveted People’s Choice Award for the Best Community Site during the Fifth Webby Awards last Nov. 25 at the Grand Ballroom of the Dusit Hotel.
Launched last February, Ustex was conceptualized and created by Dr. Noel Martin Bautista, a professor at the UST Faculty of Medicine and Surgery.
“My interest in a truly Thomasian online community was stoked when I stumbled upon several local message boards and noticed that Thomasians would always converge together and form a thread (series of messages along a topic) that discussed UST and national issues,” Bautista said.
The former Varsitarian editor in chief then created a free message board system on the web called Tomasino Exchange (TEx) by tapping a free web host. After several months, the growing community could no longer hold the number of its dedicated page visits and posts, so it had to transfer to a larger web-hosting server, the bulletin board system (vbulletin).
Prior to the award, the website was nominated for the Best Community website award and was chosen as semi-finalist by a panel of information technology (IT) professionals, writers, journalists, programmers, and web developers from leading institutions in the country. It bested last year’s award winner and popular Filipino cyber-hangout, pinoyexchange.com.
According to Jeffrey Castillo, Ustex co-administrator and College of Science alumnus, the award exalted UST’s message board over more popular and established message boards of other universities.
“Ustex may be the youngest, but we are certainly one of the best,” he said.
The site is expected to reach a total of 3,000 members.
Aside from its forum section, the site has various features such as news and weather, picture gallery, downloads and links, events calendar, and free classifieds. It also contains communication tools such as articles and news uploads, private messaging, mailing list, shoutbox, e-mail gateway and a chatroom. The site receives more than 1,000 posts and 10,000 page views daily.
