(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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Hey, thanks for the linik and writeup, Abe!
Cheers.
Angelo
http://jangelo.i.ph
http://jangelo.racoma.net
I’m guessing Calliope is an in-house publishing software?
*wanderin if i can implement WP on i.PH*
Vern, yes, Calliope is in-house developed. Actually, we built Calliope on BLOG:CMS, a Nucleus variant. Calliope can be considered the front-end.
Mr. Nice Ash, i.PH is a hosted blogging solution. We’re running Blog:CMS, but the possibility of having a port to WP cannot be discounted, especially if the situation calls for it. Calliope was actually designed to be platform-agnostic from the start, so a WP edition is theoretically possible (as with all things, right?).
Cheers.
Angelo
http://jangelo.i.ph
http://jangelo.racoma.net
thanks for that info jangelo. actually, im not planning of having WP at i.PH. I know it from the start that i should acknowledge their blogging solution and as well a sign of respect.
Cheers back.
It’s not really free. It costs P1.00 for the SMS text that you have to send.
Nice review there, Mannuel. I guess the SMS is for account verification to avoid automatic signups (much like capcha).
> Let me get an account and do a more thorough review.
hehe. that’s on my to do list too. So far, I’ve reviewed i.ph from the “outside looking in“.
ka edong
Hi everyone! Please be informed we had increased the disc space and bandwidth allocation for all accounts.
The free blog.starter accounts have 100MB disc spcace and 1 Gigabyte of monthly transfers.
Cheers!
Angelo
http://jangelo.i.ph
http://jangelo.racoma.net
I tried iPH and I don’t like it much. The service is slow and the interface is very cluttered. Free? Thanks, but no thanks. Nice try though.
i signed up for an i.ph account before and i didn’t like it actually. i mean, if ever i’d get a free blog that has ads on them, i’d rather have blogger or wordpress. but anyway, i still prefer having a blog with my own ads rather than other’s ads.