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Philippines, Technology News & Reviews

Archive for February, 2007

Bloggers/Forum Owners Immune against Commenters

Published by: yuga under: The Internet. 8 replies

posted: February 28th, 2007 (Visited 1501 times)

I wish we had something similar to this here in the Philippines:

In Universal Communication Systems v. Lycos, a company who had allegedly been victimized by defamatory statements on a message board regarding the value of its stock sued Lycos, which operated the board. The message board allowed users to post comments with minimal moderation, and no one from Lycos was responsible for the allegedly defamatory statements.

Examining the impact of Sec. 230 on this case, the court noted that “Congress intended that, within broad limits, message board operators would not be held responsible for the postings made by others on that board,” adding that allowing bloggers and message board operators to be sued for the statements of commenters on their sites would have an “obvious chilling effect” on speech. Accordingly, the court dismissed the complaint against Lycos.

Then my life would have been much, much less chaotic and exasperating. I wouldn’t have also dug deeper into my pocket.

Credits to ACSBlog, via Andy Beal.

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SEO Clinic: Free SEO Advice

Published by: yuga under: SEO. 1 reply

posted: February 28th, 2007 (Visited 1480 times)

Now, this is something you’d like to get if you’re running a huge site or an online business — some free SEO advice from several of them kick-ass SEO professionals in the industry:

SEO Clinic is a new project we are now offering on Search Engine Journal for webmasters and site owners which are not experiencing their desired or potential Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and MSN rankings.

Every week our group of SEO experts will band together and lend our expertise to help one lucky selected site with their SEO. We will publish our tips for your site on each Tuesday.

SEO Clinic is a free service and our recommendations will include ideas and tips on link building, site navigation, usability, copywriting, social media optimization and other techniques which help web sites rank higher for desired terms in search engines. {Search Engine Journal}

Head on over there and have your site diagnosed.

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How to reject a ReviewMe request?

Published by: yuga under: Problogging. 4 replies

posted: February 28th, 2007 (Visited 4089 times)

The other day, I just got an email from ReviewMe that there is a pending request for review for one of my blogs. When I login back to their site, I discovered that my blog rank was updated from $100 per review to $250 which is the max rate for a request. With a take home of 50%, that’s $125 already.

ReviewMe

The review was for a data recovery software designed to restore accidentally lost files and was assigned to PTB. So, I stared at it real hard and instead of clicking the decline button, waited it out until the request expires (maybe next time buddy). Still, it’s nice to know a company would shell out $250 for a blog post.

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Of Blog Networks and MP3s

Published by: yuga under: Problogging. 5 replies

posted: February 27th, 2007 (Visited 1760 times)

I realize that sometimes, there are topics which are better published on other blogs than your own. Either the topic is more in tuned with the theme or the regular audience may respond more depending on where the topic was posted.

When I first wrote at the Blog Herald, it took me ages to make up my first post. It was because I know the audience there is totally different than my audience here at YugaTech or at Pinoy.Tech.Blog. So, I tried to change the tone and the style of writing (although the grammatical errors are still consistent :D) and hope I’d grab attention as well as the other A-List bloggers writing there. Now I realize it takes time and a hell lot more patience. So, i’ll take my time then. ;)

Over at PTB, I wondered if the recent Alcatel-Lucent suit against Microsoft marks the beginning of MP3’s demise as a popular/universal audio format.

At Blog Herald, I wrote a fairly lengthy explanation on what might be a perfect payout structure for network bloggers. Go get blog hopping in there. ;)

Paki Digg nyo naman para me $50 ako! *hahaha*

[tags]problogging, blog networks, mp3[/tags]

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How to improve Technorati rank?

Published by: yuga under: Blogosphere. 13 replies

posted: February 27th, 2007 (Visited 2960 times)

TechnoratiI have not been able to update the list of Top 100 Philippine Blogs on Technorati until recently when I getting too many requests to do so. I was actually doing a script before which will do this ranking automatically on a regular weekly basis but forgot all about it. (Again, to those who’ve only discovered that page only recently, it’s manually updated so there’s a huge chance I overlooked a couple of blogs. The biggest challenge there actually was to discover which blogs are written by Filipinos.)

So, there goes the question, how to increase your Technorati rank? (First, go back and read my earlier explanation about Technorati ranking before we move on.) So, it’s either you gain more blog links faster or other blogs higher than you lose their links.

Here are some quick tips on how to improve your Technorati rank:

  • Create really beautiful blog themes (WordPress & BlogSpot ones are hot). Just look at Gail and Beng’s free WordPress themes and how much links they got for it.
  • Develop awesome blog tools and plugins (again, mostly for WordPress). Andrew and Marc’s WP plugins have been harvesting scores of links in the blogosphere.
  • Come up with timely contests. Remember the free tickets to the World Pyro Olympics? Both blogs garnered a combined 277 comments & 108 trackbacks.
  • Join contests. Aside from the one mentioned above, there’s the recently concluded Ituloy Angsulong contest as well as the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards.
  • Attend events. There’s more to what *Jozzua posted about why you should network. Bloggers will talk/write about you and more likely, link to you. The Blog Parteeh! has bare witness to how bloggers benefited from the event especially those who really went around and got to know their fellow bloggers.
  • Sponsor an event or contest. If you can’t make one or attend one, why not sponsor one instead? Just ask how many new blog links our sponsors got from the Blog Parteeh. (It’s somewhere in excess of 110.)
  • Focus on your niche. Remember, more bloggers will tend to add you to their blog roll if you’re blog is related to their niche.
  • Be the first to blog about it. You know what they say how the early bird gets the fat worm first. You’re more likely to be linked to when you write about a hot issue first.
  • Make good use of Technorati tags. A lot of people are watching and using Technorati and by using the tags, you have more chances of being seen or discovered.
  • Technorati Link Optimization. If you already got the link but it’s not showing on Technorati, you can ping on behalf of the blogger.

Oh, let’s not mention the link baits anymore. As long as you write original and compelling content, the links will follow. The ones I highlighted above just gets you there faster. ;)

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Apple’s iPhone Commercial at the Oscars

Published by: yuga under: Apples and iPods. 3 replies

posted: February 26th, 2007 (Visited 1598 times)

Can you say “Hello?”

That’s it?

[tags]iphone sales, iphone activation, iphone reviews, iphone sold out, iphone lines, iphone news, [/tags]

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Canon EOS-1D Mark III: World’s fastest camera?

Published by: yuga under: Photography. 1 reply

posted: February 26th, 2007 (Visited 2161 times)

Is there any other digital SLR out there that can shoot at 10 fps?

Canon EOS-1D Mark III

My Canon Rebel XT (350D) shoots at 3fps, very far down the food chain. ‘Nuf of this. Elber has the complete specs here.

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Is that a 160GB Flash Drive?

Published by: yuga under: Personal Computing. 4 replies

posted: February 26th, 2007 (Visited 1681 times)

Adtron Corporation recently announced a whooping 160GB Solid State Flash Disk. “The products in this announcement include the industry’s highest capacity 2.5″ SLC NAND flash disk drives at 160 GBytes.” Wow, as in wow!

160GB Flash Disk

And I thought Apple iPod’s 4GB & 8GB were the current industry sizes with the 16GB & 32GB being introduced by Samsung as a laptop’s HDD replacement.

This seems to be a huge leap from the existing capacities that we see now. Are we looking at laptops running on flash drives by the end of the year?

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Moblabber Philippines launched

Published by: yuga under: Web 2.0. 5 replies

posted: February 25th, 2007 (Visited 1297 times)

Here’s a new local networking service which ties both web interaction and mobile connection - Moblabber.

Basically, the service allows you to interact among peers and people with the same interests via the web or your cellphone. Think YahooGroups or GoogleGroups for the cellphone. The only difference is that you can manage everything on either the website of your mobile phone. The web is free but any outgoing messages you send via your phone will be charged Php2.50. Registration is confirmed/verified via your inputted mobile number. You can call this Twitter on steroids although blog/step integration is still in the drawing board.

The highlights of the service allows you to send a text message to your group via the web or via your cellphone, so you’re only charged for one message. However, those who will receive the messages via their phone will carry the charges (again at Php2.50) instead.

Disclosure: Moblabber PH was developed by the same company (FeedText) (which granted license to Axis Global) that sponsored the last Blog Parteeh and BBN partner Sasha also works for them.

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Adsense Beautifier violates Adsense TOS

Published by: yuga under: AdSense. 3 replies

posted: February 25th, 2007 (Visited 1306 times)

I’ve posted here before that your Adsense beautifier *might* violate Google Adsense’s TOS. It wasn’t a straight clarification so some people removed them while others (like me) retained them thinking that as long as the images are not related to the ads, it won’t be a problem.

Noemi emailed me saying she got a notice for Adsense Support Team asking her to remove the plugin:

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as …..

Publishers may not implement Google ads in a manner that disguises the ads in any way, for instance, by formatting neighboring content to look similar to the ads, or by making ads look like games or forum threads. Additionally, publishers may not attempt to associate specific images with the individual ads appearing on their sites. Such an implementation may confuse users who assume that the image is directly related to the advertiser’s offerings.

Please make any necessary changes to your web pages in the next 3 business days. We also suggest that you take the time to review our program policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) to ensure that all of your other pages are in compliance.

Once you update your site, we will automatically detect the changes and ad serving will not be affected. If you choose not to make the changes to your account within the next three days, your account will remain active but you will no longer be able to display ads on the site. Please note, however, that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.

Thank you for your cooperation.

I actually got a similar email days ago but totally forgot about it after complying with the Adsense team. We’re just glad they informed us and told us explicitly about it. So, if you have the same plugin in your blog, you can act now before they email you. ;)

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Rickey’s $100-a-day Adsense Challenge

Published by: yuga under: ProBloggers. 22 replies

posted: February 24th, 2007 (Visited 2099 times)

For a couple of days now, I’ve been chatting with Rickey and helping him optimize his Adsense ads on his main blog. With over 100,000 page views on a hot day, he reckons he could have lost thousands of problogging dollars last year for an under-optimized ad layout.

My approach is simple. Set a target based on your existing stats and plug in your ideal figures to see how much you ought to be earning from your blog.

Total Monthly Revenue = total daily page views x CTR x CPC x 30 days

* CTR - click through rate
* CPC - cost per click

So, in his case, our target is a CTR of 1% and a CPC of $0.10 (all figures here are hypothetical and does not reflect any of Rickey’s actual Adsense stats). That gives us 100,000 x 1% x $0.10 or $100/day which gives us $3,000 a month. (Note to Rickey: Sorry my original computation was wrong when I said it was $900/day. My math failed me there.)

How to increase CTR?

1) Ad-blending
2) Increase ad relevance by using section targeting
3) Changing ad layouts or positioning
4) Using ad channels for tracking

These are very basic methods but if you use them very well and by tracking your ad performance, you could hit that good mix which will yield you the highest possible CTR. After just a day of tweaking (if you have 100k page views, a 24-hour experiment is enough), we increased his eCPM by 50% and his CTR by close to 90%.

How to increase CPC?

1) Reducing total number of ads
2) Positioning the first ad to get the highest CTR
3) Targeting higher paying but relevant keywords

This is a bit tricky and more risky to experiment with but once you hit the sweet spot, the returns could be two or three-folds.

So, when Rickey mentioned that we probloggers don’t share the secret sauce like them SEO guys (put name here), I’d like to prove him wrong by inviting bloggers to send in their blog for an AdSense Makeover. Of course, I will not guarantee that I could increase your earnings but I will try my best. Again, I think it’s easier to do this if you have a sizable traffic already (say 1,000 pageviews or higher). And yes, we will also discuss here how we did it and what changes we’ve made and how much we gained from the make-over. Anybody up for it?

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Discovering new links

Published by: yuga under: Daily Blogs. 10 replies

posted: February 24th, 2007 (Visited 1236 times)

Several days ago, a Multiply account linked to our Travel Blog that brought in a rush of readers. The traffic went four-folds that day:

Travel

Total number of direct referrals as of date is around 1,366 but after that initial link, the surge in traffic (pageviews) still continues. I believe this is because everyone who saw that link have never seen the blog before and got really interested in the volume of content we have there. So, they kept coming back each and every day for the past 5 days now, continue reading where they left off the night before. And because of that, I also receive a bunch of emails from people wanting to contribute to the blog.

Special thanks to kooki for the link. ;)

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Globe is co-presenting the Phil. Blog Awards

Published by: yuga under: Events. 10 replies

posted: February 23rd, 2007 (Visited 1532 times)

Thanks to the people from Globe Telecoms and Globe Innove has agreed to become Co-Presentors for this year’s Philippine Blog Awards.

We’re all gearing to a huge, huge event this March 31. Oops, did I just said the date?

Thanks to everyone for the support. Now, I’m off to the event’s committee meeting.

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More ways to make money online

Published by: yuga under: Netrepreneur. 18 replies

posted: February 23rd, 2007 (Visited 4755 times)

Over at Web Worker Daily, Anne Zelenka writes about 10 New Ways to Make Money Online. Some of the items she mentioned have already been around for sometime while others have become too saturated as well.

I’m now thinking of ways to make money online that’s more relevant to our region (or specifically in the Philippines):

  • Buy & Sell items in TipidPC. I look at TipidPC as somewhat like the eBay for the Philippines, even before eBay.ph came into the scene.
  • Work as a Proxy Player. Some games require you to play a certain amount of time before you reach a level or number of points. I have been told by a friend that these players (students and office workers alike) would pay other people just to continue their game play (proxy-play) while they’re away. Rates go as low as Php20 per hour and the player also pays for the net cafe rent. Others do it from home too.
  • Sell mobile wallpapers and ringtones. The telcos and CPs have already dominated this space but as an individual with talents, time and enough resources, this can be done. Here’s how I would do it. Create all your original mobile wallpapers and ringtones from scratch. Set up a small website to upload screenshots or demos of the products you created. Setup an SMS server on your PC (software costs as low as Php5,000 and all you need is a mobile phone and the cable). Start receiving request for downloads and get paid via Smart Money or Globe G Cash.
  • Proxy blogger. I know some network bloggers are doing this. They have too many blogs to write for that they could not maximize their output for a day. So, if they’re being paid $5 per post, they would look for someone else to blog for them and pay them $2 or $3. They reach their daily quota and they still get a cut.

Lots of other niche industries not yet tapped around here.

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One sure way to get banned from MyBlogLog

Published by: yuga under: Web 2.0. 5 replies

posted: February 23rd, 2007 (Visited 1680 times)

Do it the ShoeMoney way. MyBlogLog has been recently acquired by Yahoo! and since then, a lot of people have been closely watching out for this unique Web 2.0 social networking service and others like ShoeMoney, keeps on looking blogging on the weaknesses and bugs in their system.

Surprisingly, Yahoo! answered back to Jeremy by banning him and his account from MyBlogLog:

To be clear — we did not ban shoemoney for posting about exploits. Although we would certainly have appreciated that he email us first, it’s his decision where he would like to publish them. We banned him for publishing other people’s data on the site and urging readers to spoof them. On what planet is that not a bannable offense? - Eric Marcoullier of MyBlogLog

I don’t see any critical personal information that are being exposed by publishing about these MBL bugs. So instead of focusing their time fixing the holes, they find it more convenient to ban the person who exposes them. Nice piece of work, Yahoo!.

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Oh no, not again!

Published by: yuga under: Daily Dose. 56 replies

posted: February 22nd, 2007 (Visited 3265 times)

Ayayay, it’s that day of the year again when you don’t know if you’d be happy or sulky. I remember I used to love this date, but that was decades ago. So, I have resolved that I will treat this day like any other day (except maybe for Christmas or New Year). No nothing — zero, none, nada, nil, zilch, 404.

I actually stopped counting the digits when I was 25 and that was four years ago. The worst part is, I will have to edit that paragraph-long tag line on my blog masthead that says “in his mid-twenties“. *hehe* My mom’s story about how I should have been named after George Washington (born: February 22, 1732) instead of Abraham Lincoln (born: February 12, 1809) is still fresh in my head.

Several people have texted me earlier with greetings, as well sa YM messages, Friendster messages and emails. But then again, we’ll have to greet the good ole’ Abe Lincoln George Washington a happy birthday.

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Asus Vento Gaming Case and a Dead PC

Published by: yuga under: Personal Computing. 9 replies

posted: February 22nd, 2007 (Visited 3472 times)

I was at PC Express in Pasong Tamo late afternoon having one of my desktop PCs checked and repaired. At first, I thought it was just the power supply which causes the PC to die down whenever all peripherals are plugged in. Turns out a faulty (or shorted?) HDD is causing all the mess. I never thought a shorted HDD could cause the PSU not to power up. I ended up buying a new HDD (why do I keep on replacing a new HDD every year?). I thought Seagate HDDs are one of the toughest around?

While waiting for the techs to install the new HDD, I walked around inspecting some of the newer cases on display. This one got my full attention — an Asus Vento 3600 Gaming Case.

Asus Vento 3600

First time in ages I’ve seen a beautiful chassis. Where are those guys selling expensive PC casing in Greenhills? The Asus Vento 3600 comes in four colors — green, blue, red and black — though I only saw the last two in the shelves. They really look like shiny brand new Ferraris (the paints they used looks like ones for cars). I asked the sales guy and he said it costs a whooping Php10,000 ($200). Now that’s already the same price as a Pentium 3.4 GHz Dual Core CPU.

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The Blog Herald & ClickTheCity sponsors the PBA07

Published by: yuga under: Events. 6 replies

posted: February 21st, 2007 (Visited 2159 times)

We’re really glad to receive more and more support for the Philippine Blog Awards and yes, we can never stop saying thank you. Today, we signed up The Blog Herald and Click the City among the newest major sponsors for the event. Of course, we also have Pinoy Money Talk, My Journal Philippines and Ad Max Asia as major sponsors. More inquiries are coming in and we’re hoping to snag that co-presentor deal with a telco I can’t divulge at the moment. :)

We’ve also been blessed with a very supportive blogging community who are willing to take time off from their busy work schedule and help organize the event. Thank you, thank you!

So, the more sponsors we get, the more prizes, raffles, food and stuff to giveaway. Yes, the iPod is on its way.

If you think you and some blog you read everyday is worthy to be called one of the best in the Philippines, go nominate them now.

A partial list of nominees are listed here.

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