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Archive for March, 2006

My Top 5 Tech Podcasts

Published by: yuga under: Podcasting. 2 replies

posted: March 31st, 2006 (Visited 2366 times)

I don’t often listen to podcasts the way I used to a few months back. However, I try to find time (although delayed by 2 or 3 episodes) to listen to the top 5 on my iTunes.

Amber MacArthur

At #5 is Mac Break. This one is a video podcast hosted by Leo Laporte of TechTV fame, Alex Lindsay of PixelCore, Emery Wells and the beautiful Amber MacArthur from Call for Help. This one is for the Mac addicts… very informative and entertaining.

At #4 is SEO RockStars. If you want to learn more about SEO and some of the current SEM news, this one is for you. I know whitepapers and ebooks about SEO could be very tiring to read with the volumes and volumes of PDFs. This one, you just pop out your iPod and you get the latest updates in the industry.

At #3 is Diggnation. Hosted by Kevin Rose and Alex Albretch, Diggnation discusses the latest updates from the social news and bookmarking site Digg.com. Digg gets almost 1,200 submissions each day with 500,000 visitors and close to 6 million pageviews/day.

At #2 is the Daily Giz Wiz. Leo Laporte teams up with Mad Magazine’s Dick DeBartolo and came up with a daily 5 to 10-minute podcasts about every weird and ingenius gadget Dick has been storing in his warehouse for almost 20 years.

At #1 is This Week in Tech (TWiT). Again Leo Laporte tops my list of favorite podcasts. He is joined by Patrick Norton, John C. Dvorack, Roger Chang (sometimes with Amber, Kevin and Apple inventor Steve Wozniak) for a commentary of the recent news and issues in the IT industry.

Ok, ok, I used to be TechTV’s Screensaver and Call for Help fan.

[tags]tech podcasts, techtv, twit, diggnation, apple, itunes[/tags]

2nd Largest Destination on the Web

Published by: yuga under: The Internet. 4 replies

posted: March 31st, 2006 (Visited 1428 times)

We know Yahoo is No. 1 and been leading the pack for years (in terms of pageviews).

Steve Rubel posted some interesting stats about MySpace:

It is the largest online social networking portal on the web.

It has 61 + million registered users with 21+ million unique visitors (Media Metrix).

It’s the second largest destination on the web, by page views.

It splits 50.2% male, 49.8% female.

They reach more men online than ESPN.com. They reach more females online than iVillage.

The primary age demo is 16-34.

They have 1.4 million registered bands, 350,000 band blogs.

The site attracts 220,000 new registrants daily.

There are 50,000 groups including fashion, health, wellness & fitness, sports and recreation, music, film, TV, etc.

No wonder everyone wants to have a bite of the so-called online social networking. It’s huge!

On the other hand, Rich Ziade of basement.org writes about “Reality Check 2.0“.

More Podcasts than Radio Worldwide

Published by: yuga under: Podcasting. 1 reply

posted: March 30th, 2006 (Visited 2336 times)

While listening to The Liberal Times Manila podcast, one of the hosts, Dr. Meinardus, was discussing about the growth of podcasting as an alternative to radio.

Stats-wise, podcasts has now outnumbered radio stations all over the world. Podcast Like A Champ quotes SiliconRepublic which pegs the total number of radio stations worldwide to 36,000.

While the iTunes website only has a figure of 35,000 podcasts , Feedburner is serving around 44,099 podcasts as of today.

The figure could be much higher than that. Will podcasting replace radio? Maybe not (yet), but it sure eats away some of the airtime.

[tags]podcast stats, radio stations, radion shows, podcasting[/tags]

Google’s ad-supported free wifi

Published by: yuga under: WiFi. 3 replies

posted: March 30th, 2006 (Visited 2008 times)

CNN reports that Google has recently applied for patents on delivering free wifi and ads. SEORoundTable explains the 3 Wireless Advertising Patent Applications.

Imagine the whole of United States being blanketed by free wifi running Adsense? Pretty neat. If I remember right, their test wifi network in San Francisco runs on 386Kbps — decent enough.

But patenting ad delivery on free wifi? I’ve seen similar strategies with Airborne Access actually. Whenever you login to an AA hotspot, a pop-up window appears showing you’re logged in and times your connection. At the same time, that pop-up window would show up varying image ads depending on which AA hotspot you hook up.

They are basically internal ads — AA at The Shang, AA at GB3 or AA in Boracay.

With geo-targetting, Google could serve up location specific Adsense ads as well. Picture this — you’re hanging out in Starbucks at GB3 using the ad-supported free wifi and you get a swarm of ads from neighboring Seattle’s Best and Figaro. *heh*

12 Years of Internet in the Philippines

Published by: yuga under: Telecoms. 11 replies

posted: March 29th, 2006 (Visited 4723 times)

12 years of intenet in the Philippines and a lot has changed since then…

Might first encounter with the internet was in my freshmen years in Ateneo. Students are issued their own university emails in the form of 950854@balut.admu.edu.ph. We use pine to access our emails and we were given computer cards worth around 50 hours of internet use in the Faura computer labs.

Google wasn’t born yet so I guess I was more familiar with the likes of Yahoo & MSN. Hence my oldest existing email was from Yahoo and I started to using emails to reach my high school friends.

In the following years, fewer and fewer mails arrive in the mail box and most of the birthday greetings I get are thru my email already. I thought that was the end of the pen and paper.

While Migs reminisce “Blast from the 2000 Past” and the Filipino millionaires of Web 1.0, Marc is currently at PICS party talking about SEM.

Alexa vs. Netcraft

Published by: yuga under: The Internet. 7 replies

posted: March 29th, 2006 (Visited 2819 times)

In one of my old entries about “Top Philippine News Sites“, I was discussing with Marites Johns of newsBalita about the effectivity of Netcraft and Alexa in ranking website popularity.

From my quick search on Google, all I get is that both Alexa and Netcraft uses their own proprietary browser-installed toolbars to measure surfing activities.

Since there are no exact number of toolbars installed for each of them, we can’t really tell which is more reliable.

However, I think we can verify this by comparing both rankings agaist the site’s published traffic.

Under Netcraft, we have the top 6 below:

1. Sun.Star - 2,518
2. Daily Inquirer/GMA - 3,320
3. newsBALITA - 4,989
4. Philippine Star - 5,580
5. ABS-CBN - 10,029
6. Manila Bulletin - 11,549

With Alexa, we get another set:

1. Daily Inquirer/GMA - 3,179
2. Philippine Star - 8,645
3. Manila Bulletin - 21,670
4. ABS-CBN - 22,247
5. Sun.Star - 38,562
6. Abante Tonite - 46,993

From what I know, Inq7.net should lead the pack with a total monthly pageviews of 41 Million. Marites adds that newsBalita gets 2 Million pageviews/month. Maybe Max will share how many pageviews Sun.Star gets.

Again, I will go back with another info about MySpace having more pageviews than Google. In that list, Yahoo leads the pack at 43.7 Billion pageviews and Alexa correctly ranks it at #1 while Netcraft puts it at #2. Google is #2 on Alexa but #1 on Netcraft. While both Netcraft and Alexa was not close to Google’s actual ranking in terms of pageviews, Netcraft overly underrated MySpace to #85 as compared to Alexa’s #8.

From the figures above we can tell that Alexa is more accurate in predicting rankings. Yes, both may be unreliable but both have a good sample size (in the millions) of the total population.

For a global perspective check out State of the News Media for 2006.

Bring out the Pinoy Probloggers!

Published by: yuga under: Problogging. 6 replies

posted: March 29th, 2006 (Visited 2977 times)

In connection with my talk on Problogging at the 2nd Phil. Blogging Summit this April 18, we’re going to hook up with over a dozen Filipino probloggers both locally and abroad.

It will be a short interview which I will post here as we draw near to the said date and which I will present during the summit.

I hope them probloggers will indulge me and share with us their path to problogging. Maybe some additional tips for everyone as well. Of course, a lot of us will be curious how much they really earn (as long as their NDA allows it).

There are already about a dozen or so Pinoy probloggers on my list so we’ll have enough to fill the slots before April 18.:)

Any additional/specific questions you want me to throw at them?

Dear Sun Cellular

Published by: yuga under: Daily Dose. 19 replies

posted: March 28th, 2006 (Visited 4193 times)

An old friend asked me to post this on my blog, hoping Sun Cellular would listen and read:

Opening a New Sun Cellular Account

To Whom It May Concern:

Last 18MAR06 I applied for a new Sun Cellular account. I have passed
the necessary requirements as stated in your website.

1. Completely filled-up application form.

2. Valid ID - SSS ID.

3. A. Proof of Billing

- Electricity Bill
- Water Bill

I live in a condominium where the electric and water bills do not bear
the names Meralco or MWSS.

B. Proof of Income - Form 2316 and last 2 payslips.

I vividly remember the lady attending my application informing me to expect 2-3 days processing time. Great!

After 1 week I receive a call requesting for additional statements. Recalling that the statements I provided (water and electricity bills) might not be acceptable, I decided to forward my last 2 credit card statements. I intentionally crossed out my credit card numbers.

Today (28 of March ‘06) I receive a call informing me to submit another creditcard statement with my credit card numbers revealed. I will do no such thing and I demand a valid explanation. Anybody in their right mind will not disclose their credit card information to anyone who already has one’s personal information.

I believe I have submitted the necessary requirements. Either you approve my application or not, I don’t really care anymore. I’m no longer excited.

This will definitely fall on deaf ears. Prove me wrong by giving me a response. You know how to reach me.

Regards,
Chester Cheng
9 years Globe subscriber

The last line reads “9 years Globe subscriber”. If you can’t accomodate this switcher, I don’t think you deserve to have loyal subscribers.

If you can’t write, don’t?

Published by: yuga under: Blogosphere. 9 replies

posted: March 27th, 2006 (Visited 2362 times)

Marc opens up the question: “Blogging is Not for Everyone.”

I beg to disagree.

Problogging, maybe. Andy Hagans even brought it down to your ability to write.

First, I believe that blogging, though still in its infancy, can be considered within the level of emails and even texting (SMS).

If you compose and email and click on that “Send to All” button, that same act is akin to clicking the Publish button on your blog. Sometimes, the contents of that email may only contain a single line of “Hello!”, a quote or passage you’d like to share to friends and officemates, or even a link to a recent news you’ve just read. You may get a reply, you may not. Your friends/officemates may also forward your email to others.

Like texting, when you forward a quote or a joke to someone (or a set of friends), you share something by communicating it to them. Again, you may get a reply or not at all. The sms message may be forwarded to others as well.

See, it doesn’t mean that if you can’t correctly spell the line “tnx 2 u!”, you don’t have to go along the SMS bandwagon and call the other party just to tell them “Thank you” instead of texting them. These txtmates had the airwaves as their internet and their Message Box as their feed aggregator.

When the “email” became commercially available, people and businesses claim they don’t need it because they want to “personally connect”. Now, emails have become one of the cheapest ways to communicate with as many people as you can.

And I believe that blogging is just sending an open email to as many people who wants to read that email.

P.S.“I had this old friend who kept on sending forwarded messages almost everyday it got so annoying I really hoped I could un-subscribe to her feeds.”

Blog Summit 2 slated on April 18

Published by: yuga under: Events. 9 replies

posted: March 26th, 2006 (Visited 2373 times)

The 2nd Philippine Blog Summit is now officially slated on April the 18th at the U.P. College of Law, U.P. Diliman, Quezon City from 9 am to 5 pm.

Check out the latest update on their site.

There are several speakers already scheduled there including JJ Disini, Dean Alfar and Manolo Quezon.

I will give a talk about ProBlogging in the afternoon so I hope to see some of you there.

Registration is free.

From Blog to TV?

Published by: yuga under: Blogosphere. 4 replies

posted: March 26th, 2006 (Visited 1382 times)

We’ve already seen the first ever “Blog to Newspaper” transition of Connie.

Now, what I’m eagerly waiting is a transition from blogging to television. Wishful thinking? Maybe.

But I have been privy to several plans of bringing blogging to MSM. Definitely exciting plans. One of them unfortunately fell thru but another one is in talks about a possible weekly segment.

Ahh, yes, and it’s about politics. How I wish it’s about tech, huh? Your guess is as good as mine.

More on this when I am really allowed to talk about it. *hehe*

Claim your Link Credit

Published by: yuga under: Blogosphere. 1 reply

posted: March 26th, 2006 (Visited 1738 times)

Do you notice that sometimes another blog just linked to you or sent you a trackback yet you don’t find them in your Technorati’s sites linking in?

Sites Linking In

You can still claim your link credit for it.

To do this, go to Ping-o-Matic, fill out the Blog Name, Blog Home Page URL, and RSS (optional). Don’t forget to click on the Technorati checkbox before submitting.

Wait a while then check on your Technorati’s sites linking in and you should be able to see the additional link credits.

You can discover new blogs linking to you by monitoring your referral stats or by using the Firefox Extension: Blogger Web Comments. Only only were you able to get your link credit, you also helped the blog get indexed.

Startups relying on Google Adsense

Published by: yuga under: Netrepreneur. 3 replies

posted: March 25th, 2006 (Visited 2386 times)

And I thought only bloggers were the ones relying on Adsense for revenues.

Forbes published an article about several startup companies that are growing and survived the business by solely relying on Google Adsense:

Case 1: Dogster.com and Catster.com is owned by Ted W.N. Rheingold who started it 2 years ago. Both sites are like Friendster, a social networking site– but with fur — and 211,000 member animals. His site grew and solely depended on Google Adsense for revenues. Now that his site is big enough, he has hiw own set of direct advertisers which hopefull could get him $1 Million in sales this year.

Case 2: Digg.com — founded by former TechTV personalities like Kevin Rose and Keith Harrison. I think everyone already knows about this social news and bookmarking site. And before they got some funding of $2.8 million from Greylock Partners, their operations depended on revenues from Google Adsense. (500,000 visitors and 5 Million pageviews a day)

Add to that list Wink, Browster, Become.com and Kaboodle able to survive by suction-cupping, like remora fish, to the back of Google’s AdSense program. Success stories or not, these people may have never gotten their 15 minutes of limelight had they not taken the risk and trusted Google to help them get thru it.

{ full story here. }

What IS valid traffic?

Published by: yuga under: The Internet. 7 replies

posted: March 25th, 2006 (Visited 1812 times)

{ …. in context of the Pinoy Top Blogs Project. }

Valid traffic should be organic. They could come search engines, referral links, features, newsletter/email footer links, etc. They are organic because it requires the visitors to initiate an event — click on your link from some other site, search thru the search engines and found your blog, subscribed to your RSS feeds or newsletter or typed-in your URL on a browser.

These visitors should not have been fooled into visiting your site/blog (thru spamming or phishing) or be compensated to do the same (StudioTraffic, Blog Explosion, BlogMad). These methods do not constitute valid traffic because they do not directly add value to your blog nor they represent organic behavior of visitors.

As a matter of fact, I’d consider it cheating (in the context of PinoyTopBlogs) because the amount of traffic you get from it does not reflect the quality and the performance of your blog. (A quality blog attracts repeat visitors and referrals from other sites while a performing blog fetches good placements in the search engines). The visitors you get from it are merely a product of your diligence in visiting other people’s blog in the hopes that others will visit yours thru the same system. It’s almost the same as you yourself repeatedly refreshing your browser to pad your own blog’s pageviews.

But isn’t going to blogs and leaving a comment in the hopes that people will click on your link practically the same? Not exactly. Leaving comments on blogs do not neccesitate traffic. You may get tons of it, you may get none. There is no guarantee of traffic there. Likewise, it requires a conscious and direct action from the visitor as a result of their curiousity or interest.

How about advertising? Programs such as Google Adwords are a good source of targetted traffic. However, if we go back to our definition of a valid traffic, direct advertising can still be considered a valid traffic because they are targetted and the visitor is required to execute an event (click on your ad) without expecting compensation for it.

How about aggregators or portals like PinoyBlog? Again, basically the same as bove. Only this time, it’s free advertising.

At the end of the day, it’s a simple matter of asking ourselves if the actual traffic we say we got from our blogs is really worth it.

Ok, why do I need to bring up this issue?

The very first line of text above explains it all. I suspended over a dozen of blogs listed in PinoyTopBlogs because they do not represent what I would call “valid traffic”. (Besides, it’s part of the rules when signing up.) I know I will get emails from them anytime soon so I prepared this explanation ahead of time.

My PC History

Published by: yuga under: Personal Computing. 13 replies

posted: March 24th, 2006 (Visited 2655 times)

In the early days of my internet years when I was still learning how to code HTML (circa 1999), one of the many infos I put up on my personal website was my PC history. I believe that being introduced to the personal computer at a young age was instrumental to what I am doing today.

The summer before high school back in 1991, my cousin urged me to take computer classes at STI (Lotus 1-2-3 and Sidekick). Despite my hesitations (I’d rather go to Nintendo computer shops and play Battle City or Super Mario) I obliged knowing I couldn’t get them to back out of the idea even if I wanted to.

After the summer classes, my uncle brought home an IBM 5151 with him (I think he was working with Texas Instrument in Washington then). It had 2 floppy 5 1/4″ diskettes, green screen monitor which runs on an Intel 8088 4.77 MHz with 64KB of RAM. (That’s the first commercial PC from IBM right?)

It was followed (in 1993) by another IBM PC/AT x286 with 20MB of HDD from Priam, CGA monitor from Packard Bell, a 5 1/4″ floppy drive (640KB) and 3 1/2″ diskette drive (1.44MB). I crashed the hard drive while playing with Stacker which (I didn’t knew) was a compression-drive utility for MS DOS. I used that to do my high school thesis paper while most of my classmates were still using a typewriter. (Wordstar is the best!)

In college (1996), my parents managed to get me an Acer laptop running on a Cyrix 486 DX4 100MHz with 8MB RAM, B&W 640×480 LCD screen and 320HDD. I was able to run MS Windows 95 there although it would hang if I upgraded to Windows Plus!. (RAM Double solved the problem.) I spilt rubbing alcohol on the keyboard so I had to plug an external one to be able use it.

Right after my 1st graduation, my aunt got me a desktop PC as a gift. I still have another year for my other degree so it still proved quite usefull. The Pentium was so popular then that you only buy an AMD if you don’t have enough money. The rig was a Pentium II 350MHz with 6GB HDD, 64MB RAM, 16X CDROM and an S3 Savage 3D 8MB.

From then on, it was just a matter of upgrading each part one at a time — Pentium III 450MHz (2000), AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2003), AMD Sempron 3100 (2006).

All these time, 15 years after I first encountered a personal computer, I can still remember the excitement I felt when I’m was using Wordstar 6.0 and memorizing all the control shortcuts.

Why the “Beta” fad?

Published by: yuga under: Web 2.0. 3 replies

posted: March 24th, 2006 (Visited 1532 times)

Google has not only managed to be a market leader in almost anything it puts its eyes into but it has unwittingly created a whole lot of “coolness” and raves for the viral marketing strategy of beta releases.

Gmail went on beta. Google Desktop came out on beta. GTalk came out as a beta. And a whole slew of other Google services as well. The “on invite only” strategy made things more creative and got some buzz (imagine seeing Gmail invites for sale on eBay when it first came out).

The rest came in and followed suit with their beta (Measuremap was in Alpha) services and products. Despite the trend, people label them that way just to cover up for obvious inadequacies:

Now beta means:

It’s not really working.
We can’t afford to get a QA team so we’ll let the users look for bugs instead. It’s free/cheaper.
Half a dozen other companies are doing almost the same thing so we want to release it to the public before it’s even finished. We want to be first to market you know.
We haven’t really tested the system for scalability so we can only allow a maximum of 50 people at a time to use it.
We’re running on a single dedicated server so we can’t really provide the “unlimited” resources we promised.
We’re not sure what people really want so we thought we’d ask them first before completing the development.
We’re hoping Google or Yahoo might take notice and buy us before we use up all our savings.

Some are good at it, others just fail miserably.

Blog [!] Influence

Published by: yuga under: Blogosphere. 2 replies

posted: March 24th, 2006 (Visited 1407 times)

{from BlogHerald}… it says Rate your influence in the blogosphere.

Like egoSurf and the “How much is your blog worth?” meme, Blog[!]Influence releases a new formula.

Computation is as follows: [(blogs linking + posts linking + web links) + (bloglines subscribers * 2)] * { 1 + (Pagerank/10) }

Interesting formula, I might add. The multiplier 1 + PR/10 is a nice one.

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