(From J Spot) Did I hear that right? i.PH, the local blog service is now offering their uber-cool blogging tool for free. Well, it’s about time, though it should have been done earlier this year (to get a head start).
In this day and age that almost anything and everything can be had from the internet is free, a paid service that does not have a very compeling and unique offering will someday become either obsolete or turn to the free service model. Blogger is free. WordPress.com is also free and will soon take a (huge) bite at TypePad’s market. i.Ph did just that, turning a locally developed paid blog service to something every blogger can now have for free. 
I’ve seen how much they’ve invested in customizing and improving Calliope and they deserve much credit for that. Revenue can be taken from other sources other than the users themselves. Gmail went from zero to 2.5GB of free email just to boost their ad exposure without asking a single penny from any Tom, Dick and Harry.
They now have AdSense ads displayed in the gallery section of each blog account. A nice move and a wise one, I might add. I’m not saying that income from these ads can compensate for the lost in revenue due to the move but it is a start. How about co-branding with local corporate sponsors? Or maybe Run-of-Network ads. There are a lot of other possibilities to recoup the investments here. One just have to look a bit further.
Let me get an account and do a more thorough review. 
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A few days ago, I wondered how many blogs out there were using WordPress and MovableType. I reckon WP would have more installations than MovableType.
I checked the WordPress downloads counter and it already registered 538,540 downloads. Half a million downloads is a huge number already but considering there could have been repeat downloads for one blog installation, we could be looking at about 3:1 download-to-install ratio.
A few minutes ago, I read about Mike Little’s post in the WP Dashboard about his blog ranking number 1 at Technorati. Since his blog is automatically linked to every fresh install of WP, he gets over 50,000 links in his credit.
That gave me the idea to do the same search for WP and MT thru Technorati. That’s 169,391 for WordPress and 67,593 for MovableType.
The count might have excluded multiple sub-domain WP blogs though. It’s not an exact number but given a 5-10% margin of error, we are looking at about 150K WP blogs alive and active out there in the blogosphere.
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A fairly new blog with a unique, informative and sometimes insanely humorous podcast by two Pinoys — one blogging from New York and the other in Manila.
The authors — “Manong Guard and Kid Flash X talk from Manila and New York City about topics concerning Filipinos all around the globe.”
I’ve already listened to a couple of their podcasts, especially the one about PinoyCook and PTB, and it has revived my interest at podcasting. They discuss anything and everything about Filipino and Filipino-related issues and subjects. This one is just 3 months old but well worth the bookmark.
Check it out: Live from USA.Philippines
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Been blogging for almost 5 years now. (In internet years, that’s almost half a century.) A lot of things have been blogged. A lot of memes have been passed around. Despite all that, one thing remains the same — we never ran out of it and we still endlessly blog about all our wish lists.
So here’s a list of all wish lists bloggers never fail to blog about. It’s also a good resource as future blog ideas.
I call it the Mother of All Wish Lists:
- On top of the list is the venerable Amazon Wishlist
- Every geek and no-so-geek has at one time or another posted about their Digital Wishlist
- Let us not forget the girls and their Shopping Wishlist
- The adventurer and photoblogger is not left behind with his Travel Wishlist
- Every kiddo in town is excited about their Christmas Wishlist
- How about the voracious reader and his “Must-Have Book List“?
- And like every other blogger, we all have our own “Blogger’s Wish List“.
What good is it, eh? The wish list allows your visitors, friends, collegues and just about everyone else to get to choose from the “listed items” to send you for your birthday, or you’re cute or just for the heck of it.
I’d sure love to get one off of my Digital WishList.
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MovableType 3.2 has been released yesterday without much funfare. It has been over a year since I last used MovableType and moved to WordPress. I checked the announcement and it listed the new improvements and features of the latest version to find this:
Vastly improved installation and upgrade
Unlimited blogs for all
Special $30 discount for Personal Edition
All your blogs in one place
The best community management
Find what you need
Smart new styles
A new generation of plugins
The best support in the business
Professional backing
I won’t be picky but I don’t think the new features listed above are that compeling. (and this is not a flamebait, ok?)
Anyway, I’m wondering if there are any stats that would show how many users of WP and MT are there today. I’m leaning on WP considering that it’s free and just about anyone can download and use it. Besides, MT is more geraed towards the corporate market.
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Published by: yuga under: AdSense.
posted:
August 27th, 2005
Duncan of Blog Herald wonders if anyone else is experiencing an increase in AdSense hits lately. There are some speculations that Google might have increased ad returns to publishers in response to Yahoo’s Publisher Network program. This could have been lifted from the recent report that Y!PN is doing better in terms of returns compared to AdSense. (related entry here)
I checked my AdSense trends for the past week and also noticed about 25 - 50% in revenue for the last 5 days but the clicks have also gone up as well so we can’t draw up any conclusive evidence. In any case, a more clicks means more revenues — that’s the better part of it all.
Likewise, while thinking about doing some small SEO experiments, I realized that my entry about Sey on Pinoy Big Brother has already made it to the top of Google’s 1st page in less than a week. My stats have shown about double the hits since yesterday.
Now, think of a way to convert those hits into clicks.
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Been seeing a lot of pinoy blogs lately that have almost converted their blogs into a virtual billboard for ads. (Reminds me of the sprawling billboards along EDSA.) Believe me, it’s such a pain in the eyes. Three full ads, 2 ad links, affiliate banners, alternate ads covering almost all corners of the page– and for what, a couple more cents a day? Now, that’s not ethical blogging at all.
Yes, it does not hurt to put up an ad or two, but when you see a blog where it has a paragraph or two of content (and sometimes, mostly cut & paste or quoted) having 5 full ads taking up 75% of the page, that’s not just overkill — it’s blog suicide. You’ve just turned your blog to scraps. Or maybe you just forgot what blogging is all about? Still, you’re proud to call yourself a blogger and not a bloggeteer (blog racketeer).
Moderation, look it up in the dictionary.
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BlogAds is urgently looking for a new logo to replace the old one on their site. A really simple challenge that only requires skills and talent, I might add.
If the USD $1,000 prize is not enough inspiration, I don’t know what else.
Some helpful tips in making your entries:
your submission should be maximum 200 pixels wide X 200 pixels deep, max 5k jpeg or gif, with larger file to follow, if we request it.
while we like “blogads,” some journalists seem to like writing “BlogAds.” And neophytes sometimes pronounce blogads as “Blow-Gads.” So, I’m biased to BlogAds.
your call whether or not to include our tag line “for opinion makers” below BlogAds.
great if you can work the “.com” into the logo.
Go ahead and submit as many as you can (maximum of 10)! Join here. Deadline is on September 9.
P.S.
Don’t forget, you read it here first. The blogger who inspires (referrer) the winning logo also gets $300. *sweet*
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Published by: yuga under: Adwords.
posted:
August 25th, 2005
This is a series of tips I meant to send to Darren of ProBlogger for his “31 Days to Building a Better Blog” series.
Another way to get traffic to your blog is to advertise. If you earn a couple of bucks from AdSense, what better way to spend it back but via AdWords? You can advertise your entire blog thru AdWords or maybe just a section or a post.
I do this once in a while with several sections of my blog, like the “Pinoy Top Blogs” and the “Online Button Maker“. Both of which are earning a several bucks from AdSense daily, so in return I spend a dollar or two a day advertising it via AdWords.
Likewise, your blog can also benefit from seasonal fads that tend to generate a lot of buzz and searches in Google. The blog entries that I’ve spent on AdWords were the Gloriagate downloads, HongKong Disneyland pictures (in the Gallery) and the Pinoy Big Brother post. This gets you enough traffic especially if a lot of other sites in the search results are on top of you. A few days ago, my blog was nowhere near the first page of Google and Yahoo for Pinoy Big Brothers but a recent check in in the search results show my blog either on the first or second page.
The catch here is to spend no more than what you earn in AdSense. Set a daily quota like a dollar or two a day. In the long run, the unique hits and additional traffic will pay itself.
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Don’t let your blog’s AdSense ad space go to waste by letting Public Service Ads take some of the airtime. Why not make your own ads for special entries or other sites you own? This can be achieved by using the optional Alternate URL feature in your AdSense code.
google_alternate_ad_url = “http://”
What you need to do is create a new HTML page in your site where you place your own ads. This new page will be bare except for your own image ad or text ads (with links of course). Make sure that the ads on this page will use the same size and layout as the one your use for AdSense.
Now you can include this inside your AdSense codes:
google_alternate_ad_url = “http://domain.com/alternate.html”
Now, everytime a PSA would have to appear in your ads, this alternate URL will display instead. You can create an ad to direct traffic to another section of your blog or to an entirely new blog you want to promote. That’s another click or two towards your blog which could translate to yet another potential AdSense click.
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Rumors abound that Google is gunning for the Instant Messenger market, dubbed Google Talk. I won’t be surprised if the rumors are true. Google’s market share is so large that they can penetrate just about anything related (sometimes even remotely related) to the internet quite easily.
The bigger question here is how IM users would welcome this new service? There are quite a lot of them already — ICQ, AOL IM, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN. There are also 3rd-party clients (multi-protocol) which supports mulitple sessions of these IMs — Jabber, Trillian, and Gaim are the more prominent ones.
The very first IM I used was ICQ back in the late 1990’s. Then, I moved to YM and MSN, both of which I simultaneously use now. What will make me move to Google Talk or open up a 3rd IM on my task bar? What other new features are we looking for?
We’ll see how this goes when it launches this Thursday (Wednesday in the US) as speculated.
On a related note, Google Sidebar is out and available with Google Desktop. Complete review here by Technoogle.
Update: And so the rumors were true! Full review with screenshots can be found at Download Squad.
GoogleTalk now Live!
P.S.
Add me to your GTalk: abeolandres
P.P.S.
Please add my friend to your Gtalk: teweesa
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I read from Darren’s post that JenSense compared Yahoo! Publishers Network and Google AdSense during her radio appearance last week.
Jen summarized Paul Scrivens indicated that his YPN earnings in the last few months have gone to almost 10 times that of his AdSense earnings before the move. A 1,112% increase for the month of August has convinced him to move all contextual ads on all his blogs to YPN. A wise move if you’re getting that much difference anyway.
My only concern here is that a lot of other factors have contributed to the staggerring results that favored YPN.
- There were only a few selected (by invitation) publishers which could skew ad delivery density.
- Fewer publishers mean less impressions and clicks which may result to higher eCPM.
- Higher click-throughs compared to AdSense. YPN ads uses Verdana font (as against Arial for AdSense) which blends well with the rest of the blog.
Trader Mike thinks “Hmm, makes me wonder if Yahoo is giving the bulk of the revenue to the publishers in order to generate buzz and then will ratchet the % down over time as they steal publishes from AdSense.”
While most would hurry and jump ship at a prospect of higher revenue, I would stay put and observe a bit for a couple more months.
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A business client sent me these pictures of the soon-to-be-opened Hong Kong Disneyland. Looks really nice. I though I’d share it with everyone here. I hope I could get to visit Hong Kong within the year and check it out. Of course, my Canon Ixus 30 will always be on my side. 
More (bigger) pictures in the Gallery.
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After almost two weeks without DSL, my hands are twitching at blogging full blast again. They say patience is one of my bets virtues but the PLDT DSL issue really tested me to the limits. Anyway, we’re off to publishing more posts and do some big time bloghopping in the next couple of days.
I just did an entry in Pinoy.Tech.Blog about my “MoBlogging Wishlist“. The mobile blogging features/enhancements that I enumerated there have been on my mind for several months now. If a content-provider or 3rd party developer could strike a deal with both Smart and Globe, I bet this service is gonna be a hit.
I am about to post yet another entry on Problogging after I read about this Malaysian blogger (quite popular in Malaysia) who just quit his job to became a fulltime Pro-Blogger. He earns at least RM1,000 a month ($265 or ~Php 15k) from his blogs. He could very well be earning up to Php 20 to Php 25K if you include his BlogAds and Amazon Associate revenues. Since he claims he’s already earning more in blogging than his regular day job, why not quit his day job and blog all day!
In the local blogosphere, although we could already consider Connie as the first-ever Filipina Pro-Blogger, I’d like to see more people get into this gig real soon. I think Markku is also on his way too (though he wouldn’t divulge to me how much he currently gets from AdSense).
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Published by: yuga under: People.
posted:
August 22nd, 2005
Last night while visiting a friend, I was surprised to hear the name “Say” as one of the housemates on Pinoy Big Brother. It immediately caught my attention and my eyes were glued to the TV for the next 8 to 10 minutes. I wasn’t really interested in Pinoy Big Brothers (PBB) even with much of the hype and buzz going around. (I seldom watch TV, much more local channels.)
Continue reading ‘Say Alonzo on Pinoy Big Brother’
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Every WordPress blogger out there must have already read about the recent news about WordPress.com’s plan to offer a blog hosting service anytime soon. (It’s all over the WP-Admin Dashboard already.) This is the same service SixApart is offering for corporate clients for TypePad. Mena and Ben will surely be getting some pretty fierce upcoming competition here.
I wasn’t really surprised about this development, considering that TypePad has been running the show for years without any very strong competition. I am sure WordPress.com will carve a big chunk of the pie once it is launched.
Ken Yarmosh of Technosight 8 sums it up pretty simply “a completely managed version of the latest stable version of WordPress, domain parking, and on the fly category creation for starters. Then add on the awesome drag-and-drop administration interface, an advanced WYSIWYG editor, and it seems too good to be true. But it gets even better, it’s free!”
Whoah! Free?! Wordpress rocks! I just hope it would be free of ads.
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