That means any recommendations by bloggers on products/services they feature on their blogs will be scrutinized if they do not disclose compensation. The “compensation” may be in cash or in kind. The “in kind” is not specified but may include free products, free meals, trips and hotel accommodations.

Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect.

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers.

The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement – like any other advertisement – is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.

This new rule will be in effect by December 1, 2009. Though this does not involve bloggers in the Philippines, it’s not improbable that the DTI might also do the same around here anytime soon.

More about the press release here.

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Though the site is not yet open for registration and details aren’t posted yet, it’s pretty easy to imagine what this new marketplace will be:

1) Advertisers buy tweets by the thousands (CPM model) — say $200 per 1,000 tweets.

2) Pay Per Tweet (PPT) auctions the tweet ads and each tweet costs $0.10 (50-50 share).

The model is similar to Pay Per Post — someone buys a post; someone publishes it and earn a couple of bucks.

Question is — will it be just plain per-tweet or will PPT also consider the number of followers a twitterer has? We’re already seeing lots of masked affiliate links on the Twitter stream. I’m pretty sure this PPT will eventually open the floodgates for more ProTwitterers.

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TechCrunch picked up the story initially reported by Asiajin.

Paid reviews and link buying is a practice Google itself discourages so it’s a little confusing why Google would use the same tactics that it openly disapprove.

Hours after being outed, Baba Yasutsugu posted as response on the official Google Japan blog:

“Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.”

Apparently, Google is trailing behind Yahoo! in Japan — just 39%, way below Yahoo’s 51.2% market share. This paid review campaign may just be one of Google’s efforts to gain more users in Japan. Too bad they got caught.

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I never looked at it that way but it does make sense. We go thru some of the more common stuff we do everyday without knowing we’re actually doing the same. I’d be the first one to admit to some of these oversights.

• The MP3s we download, the movies and TV shows we share on torrents and P2P networks are a common form of piracy. Filipinos are very fond of sharing digital content, even way back in the days of the IRC.
• The pirated CDs and DVDs sold in Quiapo, Baclaran and other smaller malls. We either patronize them or just ignore them as if it’s normal and legit in our society. We never cried foul because we know we benefit from it (not until it’s own work that’s being peddled and used without compensation or attribution).
• The softwares we use on our PCs and laptops — Windows XP, MS Office, Adobe PhotoShop, WinZip/WinRar, Nero CD/DVD Burner, Kaspersky Anti-Virus are just some of the more commonly pirated softwares a lot of people use.
• People flock Cartimar to buy fake branded shoes, hand bags and clothes.

There are a lot more actually — inks, batteries, cellphones, perfumes, jewelries, etc.

But what can we do — either we accept that we’re a country full of freeloaders/cheapskates or we start paying for those software licenses and buy only originals. I’d prefer we do the latter.

I believe piracy did some good to a lot of people (especially those who don’t have the capacity to afford some of the more expensive licenses). I personally benefited from it too — learning how to use PhotoShop, Flash, DreamWeaver and Premiere as well as program in VB and .NET.

I would be hard-pressed to stand in court, point to someone who infringed on my copyright and not admit I do the same thing myself.

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In a short email to Pownce users, it looks like the userbase was bought by SixApart:

We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15, 2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new pro accounts.

To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export. Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not be accessible after this date.

Please visit our new home to find out more: http://www.sixapart.com/pownce

Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,

The Pownce Crew

Pownce is co-owned by Digg founder Kevin Rose who started the service to compete against Twitter. Despite Rose’s popularity, the service didn’t picked up much users. By Kevin’s last mention, the numbers were just around 100k worldwide.

The first sign of its impending doom was when Kevin Rose opened up a Twitter account and was pimping it during their Diggnation show instead of his own service. According to Twitterholic, Kevin is on top of the list at 75,718 followers.

It’s possible Jaiku will be next in line, an acquisition made by Google back in October 2007 that has not made any much noise since then.

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The bill which has been filed as early as April 2008 states that:

… all persons who are accused directly or indirectly of any crime or offense or are criticized by innuendo, suggestion or rumor for any lapse in behavior in public or private life shall have the right to reply to the charges published in newspapers and other publications or to criticisms aired over radio, television, website or through any electrical device.

In essence, this bill could also include blogs (websites). That means if you accuse an individual or entity in your blog, you will be required by this bill to publish their reply in the same space where you first published your entry. It’s not clear if the “space” means the “same entry/webpage” or just the “same website/blog”.

Likewise, if the accused leaves a comment on the blog entry, the blogger will be required to approve the comment (regardless of the tone and language of the content?). At least that’s how I read it.

The Senate version was authored by Senators Aquilino Pimente, Jr., Ramon Revilla, Jr., and Chiz Escudero. The House version was filed by Bacolod Rep. Monico Puentevella.

Fines and penalties prescribed are as follows (for the House Bill):

- Php10,000 for the 1st offense
- Php30,000 for the 2nd offense
- Php50,000 and imprisonment for not more than 30 days for the 3rd offense
- Php100,000 and imprisonment for not more than 30 days for the 4th offense

Then, a Php200,000 fine and imprisonment for not more than 30 days and the closure/suspension of the franchise of the publication or broadcast media outlet or station for 30 days for the 5th and succeeding offenses.

If the bill passes and becomes a law, I’m not sure how they will handle this. What if Malu Fernandez wrote something nasty about the 8 million OFWs worldwide — should all 8 million be given space on the publication to reply? The printing cost alone will bankrupt the publication.

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Yes, Blogger is also widely used as a blogging platform by a lot of Filipinos but it did not generate the same level of popularity as YouTube in the country. This is primarily because of other competing platforms:

• While Blogger had the first mover advantage, it did not enjoy as much popularity in the early 2000 as LiveJournal (DiaryLand, Pitas, Blogger and LiveJournal were all launched in 1999). The Philippines is on the Top 10 LiveJournal users worldwide, at #8 with 60,961 users. In terms of search volume, Philippines is at #5 for LiveJournal.com
• According to Google Trends, Multiply has 200,000 daily unique visitors from the Philippines, twice as many from a year ago. In Alexa, the Philippines ranked #5 for Multiply’s traffic origins contributing to an estimated 13.4% of its total users. With Google Insights, Philippines is #1 for Multiply searches. (Read my related story on ABS-CBN and Multiply deal.)
• According to Google Insights, the Philippines is in the Top 5 for Xanga.
• Friendster also enjoys the #1 spot for the Philippines worldwide. Google trends estimate 1 Million daily unique visitors to the site. There’s an estimated 10 Million Filipinos having a Friendster account. If just 1% of them opens a Friendster blog, that’s already 100,000 users.

On the other hand, Blogger.com isn’t even on the Top 25 of countries by usage according to Alexa. I can’t get any more traffic details since Google Trends don’t show data from Blogger.com. However, Google Insights rank the Philippines #5 for blogger.com searches.

And almost everybody knows that BlogSpot is the #1 host for spammers. Last year, a study found out that 75% of all blogspot.com accounts are spam blogs. Even antivirus and security company Sophos noted that the number one host for malware on the web is Blogger, with blogspot.com accounts contributing to at least 2% of total malware webpages globally.

There’s also the growth of an alternative (and ad free) platform in i.PH, WordPress.com as well as the self-hosted WordPress.org application. Even offline support is present, credited to the two upcoming WordCamp Philippines. We’re not even counting the local Drupal and Joomla community as well as alternative platforms such as TextPattern, Expression Engine, and MovableType.

Unlike YouTube, Blogger has so many other popular competing platforms being used in the Philippines that it failed to dominate the market despite the surge of blogging in the country.

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The site will become part of Conde Nast’s Wired Digital Group, the same company that earlier bought Reddit.

The sale priced wasn’t revealed but it’s rumored to be within the vicinity of $25 Million. This is the same amount Wired.com as sold for back in 2006 as well as Jason Calacani’s 80-plus strong WeblogsInc blog network back in 2005.

For a single website attracting about 3 million readers a month generating close to 19 million pageviews, $25 Million is a steal. Ars is like the Methuselah of blogs — it’s already a decade old.

I have had a couple of offers before for several of my blogs and I know that feeling of getting to that level when others are willing to put a price (and shell out the cash) to the value of your blog. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on where you stand), I didn’t sell. The guys over at Ars Technica can now comfortably retire.

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While the results of the survey are pretty interesting, I find some of them almost unbelievable (at least the ones that involved the Philippines). Take note however, that the sample population included in this research only involved people who used the internet daily or every other day aged between 16-54 years old. That means, the figures are skewed towards the hard core or heavy users.

McCann puts the Philippines’ Internet Penetration at 15.4% (based from InternetWorldStats.com).

• 90.3% of the respondents from the Philippines said they’ve read a blog at least once, ranking 2nd to South Korea at 92.1%. China came in 3rd at 88.1% while Global average is 77%.
• The Philippines ranked 4th (65.8%) on the respondents have started or created a blog. South Korea topped the list at 71.7%, followed by Taiwan (70.9%) and China (70.3%). Japan is No. 9 at only 47.3% which is strange since according to Technorati, Japanese is the #1 language in the blogosphere. Global average is 44.8%.
• The Philippines ranked #1 in joining a new social network sites (83.1%). Friendster rulez! hehehe
• Again, the Philippines ranked #1 on uploading photos on photo sharing sites with 86.4% of the respondents. Friendster rulez x 2!
• With online video, the Philippines (60.5%) is second to Brazil (68.3) on uploading videos to a video sharing site. YouTube Philippines should be in Tagalog so we can beat Brazil! Chinese came in 3rd at 58.1%.
• Filipinos are No. 1 viewers of online videos at 98.6%! iyotTube rocks! Oops, Youtube rocks!
• 61.8% of the respondents form the Philippines says they’ve downloaded a podcast. That’s 5th from the list after China, Mexico, Romania and Brazil.
• The Philippines ranked #6 in RSS subscribers at 45.2%, beating the Japanese (31.4%), Germans (27%), French (25.7%), Brits (24.9%), Canadians (18%), Australians (24.6%) and Americans (18.6%). Now that’s unbelievable.

The reason behind the skewed figures on the last item, RSS, is that the average Filipino “active” internet user is more tech-savvy than the average internet user in most western countries. Active means daily use or at least every other day. That means “active” internet use in the Philippines isn’t that mainstream yet. But that’s already evident from the internet usage penetration stats above.

Update: Copy of the research study can be downloaded here {PDF, 26MB}.

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Yoani’s blog, Generation Y, was awarded by “Ortega y Gasset Prize” in Digital Journalism (named after a Spanish philosopher). Sanchez was however unable to leave Cuba to go to Spain and personally received the award herself.

This is a huge feat for a one year old blog and it clearly shows that you don’t need to be a western blogger to get as much recognition in the field of journalism. Yoani, though, is one in a million.

On another front, that New York Time’s article about blogging as a health risk is just pure bull. In this and age, anything can kill you. In the Philippines, there’s a much higher risk of dying from singing in a karaoke along street bars than blogging 24/7 in the confines of your own room.

However, this video below may shed some light on this issue:

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Hidden content injected in the blog templates with links to each other in order to push the rankings in the SERPs. Blog monitoring services like TailRank, which tracks interlinking content, obviously showed those spammy content.

I’ve seen and have had experience with such types of blog hacking:

• Modifying “header.php” or “footer.php” and inserting links to spammy sites. These text links are enclosed in DIV tags so they can be positioned way off of the screen.
• Popular and free themes are modified and inserted with obfuscated PHP scripts to be injected remotely. The themes are then repackaged and re-distributed to the public. These scripts can then be manipulated later to inject spammy content and text links to any targeted sites. Much like a zombie blog.
• Uploading CGI scripts into the “cgi-bin” directory via unrestricted folders. The CGI scripts can then be accessed and used to run whatever command lines the hacker wants.
• SQL injections. Older and vulnerable versions of WordPress can be attacked via SQL injections to add content to existing/archived blog posts/entries with links to spammy sites.
• Modifying .htaccess files to redirect (301) certain popular or high rankings pages to other spammy or affiliate-filled sites.
• Directly modifying unrestricted pages to insert AdSense codes or modify existing AdSense Publisher ID to that of the hacker.
• I’ve also seen blogs being sabotaged by creating empty folders that follow the same permalink structure as some of the pages of the blog. This, in effect, overrides the custom permalinks and disables the affected pages.

What’s surprising is that most of the hacks that I encountered were deployed by Filipinos too. Here are some snippets of their codes:

if ($epwd ne $npwd) {
$msg = “<br /><h1>Mukha Mo!</h1>
“;
}

print header( -COOKIE=>$cid ), start_html(”BUTAS”);

Either they coded the hack themselves or got the script somewhere else and modified it to their own liking. It was obvious because some of the coding (commands and variables) used in the script are in Tagalog.

Tony adds some advise on how to prevent this. I’ve written an more general blog post about security and contingency plans here as well.

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Anybody who’s been following his blog knows the scandalous posts and pictures will only attract libel suits. Lawyer’s of the parties involved have made their moves so far, though nothing concrete has been done. Google, the owner of Blogger.com where the BlogSpot blog is being hosted, has been sent a letter of request to take down the blog as well (not sure if it’s a C&D though).

What other bloggers who have been religiously covering this issue is that they might be also accountable about the spread of such libelous acts and can be held liable in Philippine courts. That’s according to Atty. JJ Disini who was also one of the resource speakers of ANC. Even JV Rufino, EIC of Inquirer.net, said he made sure all their articles (9 so far and counting) steer clear of identifying names, linking or publishing URLs.

Here’s what bloggers might be doing that could get them into trouble if they’re covering the issue.

• Publicly mentioning names of people being exposed in the blog.
• Posting pictures of the people being named by Brian Gorrell in his blog.
• Publishing the URL of the blog or linking to the blog.
• Quoting a libelous sentence on the blog or re-publishing/summarizing allegations thereof.

The personalities and families of the people being exposed in the blog are desperate to end this and looks like they’re doing everything they can to stop people from talking about it and they will include bloggers too.

Watch Media in Focus on ANC this Thursday to learn more about this issue. We tried real hard not to name names or mention the blog. The only name we can really talk about in the segment was Brian Gorrell himself.

Updated: To those who are unfamiliar with my previous battles with libel cases in the Philippines, please refer to this, this and this. In fact, I still have another one right now in Civil Court.

Please read them first so you’ll know where I’m coming from and how ridiculous our system is.

[tags]brian gorell, brian gorrell blog blogger[/tags]

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In the case of Malu Fernandez’s recent article in Manila Standard {via Connie}, I think because of her previous experience with the alleged “internet mob”, she knows controversy can draw a lot of traffic.

The difference between a journalist and a blogger is that journalists have to adhere to certain guidelines that govern the freedom of speech. And whatever a journalist chooses to write about—be it popular or unpopular—we do not hide behind an anonymous name and are resigned to the fact that we have to take as much as we dish out.

You have to give it to her. She knows this piece with get some tons of flak. What’s a single article in exchange for hundreds of raw back links and millions of page views? ShoeMoney and Jason Calacanis became top bloggers and master link baiters because of their controversial stance on sensitive issues.

And, for an online commercial publication like the Manila Standard, that traffic can be converted to ad revenues.

So, as early as now, I’d like to nominate Malu Fernandez as the 2008 Master Link Baiter. Let’s see how much raw links and pageviews MST will draw in after all these pans out. Besides, her previous scorching encounters didn’t leave her with 3rd-degree burns — she’s still writing for the newspaper, right?

And I’m even beginning to think she’s secretly doing freelance SEO for the publication.

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Apparently, there’s a huge spike in the number of spammers that even the blog search engine Technorati is swarmed by them. More than 99% of all pings and updates to the search engines are spam. {source: BW}

Despite the over-all count of 112.8 Million blogs on Technorati’s index, only 11% of them are active (have had any blog updates in the last 60 days). However, new bogs have grown three-folds from 40,000 new ones each day back in 2005 to over 120,000 each day now. And yes, that does not count the splogs.

What interests me the most is the 89% inactivity rate. Almost 9 out of 10 bloggers are inactive or stopped blogging altogether, and that percentage can be applied to any sub-niche or region. It seems to be a pretty high number though.

My other concern is spam. At 99+%, this could be a much, much bigger problem in the future. It could crash systems and make blog services bow down on its knees. Will spam kill blogging eventually? Well, parasites cannot live without its host but it can transfer to another host too.

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The debate shifted from being a funny prank to a word-fight between bloggers and legitimate media people. The video was funny the first few seconds.

This prank stirs big debate among bloggers as well as mainstream media to the point that it has turned into bloggers versus journalist (again!). Brian Lam, Editor in Chief of Gizmodo, finished it off with a recent lash against their critics:

Many of our harshest critics have done far worse than clicking off a few TVs. I’m talking about ethical lapses such as accepting paid junkets to Japan by Nikon, or free trips to Korea by Samsung. Turning a blind eye to Apple’s mistakes when they didn’t make an iPhone SDK and sought to lock down the handset. Stock prices torn downward by publishing incorrect leaked info. Writing about companies that also pay you for advertorial podcast work.

And I consider those offenses far worse than our prank, because it ultimately it puts the perpetrators on the wrong team. Every tech journalist has to decide whether or not he’s writing for companies or for readers. When they start writing for the companies, covering all their press releases and regurgitating marketing jargon, you do no one any favors (not even the companies, which already hire press release machines).

Brian makes a valid argument, but I think that’s beside the point. I don’t think he and his team planned out the prank to pay homage to the notion of independence and independent reporting. He’s just officially escalated the debate from a simple question of ethics when pulling a prank to issues of personal credibility, journalistic integrity and independence.

Does Giz deserve their punishment? Rightfully so. If they thought the CES was boring, why cover it? Try pulling the same stunt at MacWorld.

Is Brian Lam justified to pull the “He who hath not sinned cast the first stone” card? I think he’s got balls. But he’s also throwing the same stones back at him and his team.

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1. At least one Yet another blogger will get published. It will be a book about a blog, not a book about blogging. And no, it’s not me.
2. More bloggers with bow down to Google’s wrath, drop TLA and all other link ads. Matt Cutts will personally see to it that those who put out links because of any form of sponsorship will get their day in Google hell.
3. Mobile Advertising will significantly rise. And no it’s not AdSense for Mobile but AdMob. The iPod Touch, iPhone, N95 and upcoming Nokia Touchscreen S60 devices will push this. The web will slowly move on to the mobile phone.
4. Facebook will be the next Friendster. Everyone will be on Facebook that it won’t be that cool anymore. It will fade away, in favor of a newer fad.
5. Bloggers will blog less and flock more on Twitter. It needs to get bought though in order to survive. Maybe by Yahoo. Google already went with Jaiku 3 months ago.
6. More bloggers will join main stream media. It will more likely be broadcast media rather than print.
7. Adsense will lose its age-old glory, thanks to prediction #2 and the fall of the US dollar.
8. A 2010 Presidential candidate will blog, and will actually write it himself/herself.
9. Podcasting will continue to fade. Unless, there’s a good model that presents itself, it will be hard to continue producing podcasts. Just look at what happened to PodTech (a podcast network) in the US.
10. Local e-commerce will finally take a huge leap forward, thanks in part to Paypal. Let’s just hope that this doesn’t make the hackers/crackers/phishers work double-time.

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I may have over half a dozen trolls linger on this blog for months, sometimes even years. I even got a blog once dedicated just to mock me. Oftentimes, I’d ignore them; other times I’d try to engage their good side (hoping they do have one) before I take evasive actions.

What strikes my curiosity is why would these people keep on trolling your blog:

• They hate your guts, big time.
• Crab mentality?
• Jealousy.
• They have a lot of time on their hands.
• They’re just plain psycho.

I wrote something similar (Acknowledging Blog Critics) to this over 2 years ago when I had my first critic on this blog. Critics are sometimes good, but trolls?

Several other bloggers have asked me how to permanently block trolls from their blogs so I suggested the ff. — How to permanently block someone from your blog? — with additional suggestions from the commenters.

So, what’s your troll story and how did you deal with it?

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More and more bloggers are pimping the “Subscribe to my feeds via Email” banner knowing that this is where a huge portion of the subscribers come from. This is more evident with blogs that are not tech-related as the target readers may not be familiar with feed readers, thus email subscription takes the center stage.

The problem though is that these visitors may not really wanted to get email alerts from your blog on a regular basis. There are several cases I’ve encountered this:

• A casual visitor subscribes to your RSS-2-Email feeds because a specific post attracted them. I got a lot of this when visitors subscribing to my email alerts after visiting my “Mel & Joey” post about making money blogging. They would then expect that all succeeding posts would be about problogging or making money online.
• Some visitors just cannot cope up with daily updates from this blog. If a visitor subscribes via email, he or she will get emails from YugaTech on a daily basis since I’m updating everyday. For a casual email user, this may be too much to fill their inbox.
• Others are just oblivious about email subscriptions. They’d reply back to an email feed delivery asking why they’re getting such emails from me. I really wonder how they’d end up in my subscription so I always tell them that email subscriptions are not effected unless they actually activate and verify it from their email.

When a subscriber emails asking why they get emails from me, wanted updates about a specific topic only or asking why on hell they’re getting updates they aren’t interested, I always do any of the ff.:

• Apologize and explain how email subscription works. Also explain to them how my updates may have reached their inbox or that they may have accidentally activated the subscriptions.
• Point out the disclaimer at the bottom/footer of each email delivery and direct them to a link there where they are asked to click if they want to unsubscribe.
• Manually un-subscribe them from email delivery and clarify that the entire email subscription cycle was done by them and this should not happen if they’d read the fine print before typing in their email address inside the blank box.

In hindsight, these type of incidents only shows that some people don’t really read stuff on the internet carefully. What’s more surprising is that they easily give away their email address without knowing what’s in store for them. Guess that’s why email spam is still a huge problem.

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