Iran already has a record for imprisoning bloggers who challenges the government. It would seem that this move is the logical step up.

Those convicted of these crimes “should be punished as ‘mohareb’ (enemy of God) and ‘corrupt on the earth’,” the text says.

Under Iranian law the standard punishments for these two crimes are “hanging, amputation of the right hand and then the left foot as well as exile”.

The bill — which is yet to be debated by lawmakers — also stipulates that the punishment handed out in these cases “cannot be commuted, suspended or changed”. {source}

Scary, huh? But any criminal should be. That’s the purpose of the death penalty law.

In the Philippines, the worst an erring blogger could face is a criminal charge for libel (or enticing to sedition, perhaps?). Good thing the death penalty in the Philippines has been abolished by GMA. *heh*

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• Eric Salas has a blog project — it’s a literary blog called The Blog Awards Challenge. Check it out at www.theblogawardchallenge.com, a blog competition combining literary skills, interactivity and peer polling!
• Intel Philippines will launch the Neo Explore this Friday. It’s the retail version of Intel’s renowned Classmate PC. Yes, another Asus Eee PC competitor.
• There’s an upcoming 3-day New Media Conference on April 10 – 12, 2008. Visit www.theedgeradio.net or email love@theedgeradio.net or call 339.0140 for reservations and inquiries. PTB Contributor Arnold Gamboa will talk about podcasting.
• Jomar and author Bo Sanchez are organizing an Internet Marketing Workshop on March 28 and 29, 2008 (that’s this week-end). You can email beaconlightevents@gmail.com for details.
• Our readers here from Accenture will be proud to know that they’ve won Philippines ‘BPO Employer of the Year‘ Award at International ICT Awards. Total worldwide head count to date is 15,000. I wonder how many of them are Filipinos.
• There’s also the Nokia N82 Wireless Adventure 2 launch party this April 8. The Wireless Adventure is akin to the amazing race and is held all around South East Asia by Nokia. Saw the line-up of contest participants last week and I think regular people like us would have a hard time getting into that list (half of them are celebs!).

Of course, do check out the latest about the blog awards and the iBlog Summit on April 26.

Ah, also check out my recent entry at Pinoy Tech Blog about this new ad-supported WiFi service that’s sprouting all over Makati. It’s called WiGO (Wifi on the GO?) and users get unlimited internet connection by downloading and install an ad toolbar. Take that San Francisco (okay, we’re not close to that yet).

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1. PopDev Media Awards to cite Bloggers For the last two years, I’ve been invited by the...

He lists down 4 things that bloggers should avoid writing about on their blogs:

1) Self Promotional Posts – isn’t blogging also about promoting oneself?

2) Copying Trademarked Content – obviously, no argument there.

3) Negative Posts – err… blogging is not always goodie-good all the time. It’s like the real world too. Just look at the Senate.

4) Legal Advice – this is the one that got my attention. But I often see people on TV and on radio giving legal advice, why not on blogs? I know legal matters are a sensitive topic and giving out advice publicly on a blog can spell trouble to those who take them to heart.

In that case, there are other things that bloggers should try to avoid writing about:

Advice on Health & Medicine. Unless you’re the attending physician or know the medical records of a person, blogging about drugs & medicine could get people searching online into health problems.

Advice on Accounting & Taxation. Unless you’re a licensed CPA or something but… it could still get someone into trouble with the BIR.

. And I’m not just talking about that controversial blog about the Gucci Gang. I have read of stories before of people committing suicide because their secret private lives were exposed online.

What do you think? Are these really no-no topics on blogging?

Well, of course there’s the stuff about violence, racism, discrimination, terrorism, etc.

Which brings me, what if Malu Fernandez would start a blog and put all her columns there?

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In the local scene, some linky goodness:

• Join the WikiPilipinas Filipina Story Contest being sponsored by WikiPilipinas and supported Noemi and Dine.
• If you’d like to get a fresh and premium WordPress theme, McBilly is giving away a free Revolution Theme by Brian Gardner. Premium means it will cost you $79.95 to buy the license from Brian.
• Lufthansa is discontinuing their flights from Manila to Frankfurt. Took this flight last December and was hoping I’ll be taking the same route this year when I get back to Cologne, Germany. Looks like I’m taking KLM via Amsterdam this time. I just wish I could try that new Airbus A380.
• Looks like some avid HappySlip fans are going to stage a rally or something. What’s worse is that they’re blaming the bloggers who made it to the list for the confusion.
• Ely asks why people hate “make money” blogs and websites. I agree that it boils down to usability and conflicts of interest. It kinda feels like MLM.

In foreign news, there’s some stuff I wasn’t able to cover last week but still worth the discussion:

• Sun Microsystems announced the acquisition of mySQL. All along I thought mySQL is open-source! *heh*
• Amazon will buy Audible Inc. (company that sells audio books and other digital content) for a reported $300 Million. After AmazonMP3, now this. Amazon is gearing up against Apple iTunes; and it’s getting a lot of support from the recording industry.
• Shoemoney says “There is no customer loyalty in online commerce“. It shouldn’t be but current trends looks like it. Case in point: there’s just too many people jumping from NameCheap to GoDaddy to LiquidWeb to DreamHost to HostGator to 1and1 to PowWeb and back (whichever gives the best deals) — and it’s a proven marketing model online.
• Netscape browser gets another month of lease in life. Why bother? My RIP still says 1994 – 2008.
• After the 2007 4th quarter earnings report, Wall Street is unimpressed at Google’s performance. Stocks drop 8% and it’s now down to around $516 from $750 just a couple months ago. That has got to hurt. Yahoo! on the other hand is close to slashing over a thousand employees. Exciting times ahead. *heh*
• Motorola has announced its intention of selling its mobile phone division. Farewell to the Razr!

It’s the month of February once again — time to put all those affiliates for flowers and chocolates out! IslandRose, where art thou?!

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• Last day for people to win the Auction.PH e-Money Giveaway. Will send out list of additional winners by end of office hours today. That’s around 14 additional winners of Php300 e-Money from Auction.PH. Another contest/giveaway is in the making. Watch for it tonight.
• Facebook is so last year? The Guardian predicts hot new websites for 2008. List includes the familiar Twitter service.
• Google is in for a triple-whammy this Christmas. Lots of goof-offs — first, it retracted an earlier unsavory feature which prohibits people from putting in their own custom url/blog address (on BlogSpot comments); then, Google Reader shares private data and is getting a lot of flak for it; lastly, Google has rolled out the inline ads for YouTube which practically blocks a portion of the video, thereby ruining the viewing experience.
• On the bright side, Gmail is now at 6GB, up from 5GB just 5 weeks ago.
• Rico suggests 5 price-worthy gadgets for Christmas. Jozzua has two must-buy recommendations while Riz has a rather pinky wish-list. The Apple MacBook is the No. 1 top-selling computer in Amazon. No surprise there.
• RWW’s Web Predictions for 2008 is pretty interesting. Wired publishes its Top 10 StartUps Worth Watching in 2008. My bet is on Adroll and AdMob. Duncan asks “Will Web 2.0 die in 2008 because of lack of advertising?”

And lastly, a really cool Digg-inspired song:

“Gotta Digg” bu Kina Grannis

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The first one is about 3 months old now. Guitar Tutee is a video blog on (what else) guitar tutorials. Fairly simple yet novel idea tapping on local string and voice talents. The author of the blog does a weekly recording of at least 10 of their favorite songs, along with a friend who plays the guitar and another who sings alongside him. This blog is all about the passion for music and the desire to share some guitar skills.

The latest is the official Blog ni Inday, ang sosyal na katulong. Her name and reputation is all over — from Bubble Gang on TV, to forums, text messages, mailing lists and emails. Inday’s manager contacted me to help them out bring the blog to the next level. So now, you can refer to me as Publisher ni Inday and we might already have Inday’s first product endorsement coming up soon. *hehehe*

In more recent news, there’s a rumor around that Automattic is under talks of being acquired by still an unknown company.

There’s GMail 2.0 in the works. It’s about time. Yahoo’s way ahead already.

Several confirmations are pointing to “paid links” as the major focus of the recent PR updates. So, this is just the beginning. More and more sites will get the new PR treatment if they sell links? But will publishers stop doing the link buying? So what’s the use of say a PR6 blog if you can’t make money out of it?

Allergyboy has a detailed ste-by-step instruction on how to use your HSBC credit card to withdraw your Paypal account.

AdSense channels are now back and running again. They’ve been screwy for several days now where reports showing too little ad impressions.

There are also reports that AdSense Western Union payouts are delayed. Yup, mine hasn’t been confirmed yet. How about yours?

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But the news the other day was how much TC was raking in per month — $240,000 or just over Php10,000,000. Sweet.

Now that’s a lot of trailing zeros. With just 8 full-time employees, including a recently-hired CEO, that number breaks down to $30,000 per month per employee. The San Francisco Chronicle screamed the obvious — “Yes, some blogs are profitable – very profitable.”

That amount comes from the 125×125 pixel ads at the homepage – each one, $10,000 a pop per month. Add to that a $200 per job listing on their Jobs Board. That does not count other revenues TC get from their conferences and parties.

Wow, I thought you spend money to do parties, not earn from them (cool!).

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More on that next week. Here are some more side stories:

• Issai is giving away her PS2 games. Check out her blog to grab your own free copy. I would have joined if it came with a PS2. *hehe*
• Lorraine Carlos Salazar has finally released her book, entitled Getting a Dial Tone: Telecommunications Liberalisation in Malaysia and the Philippines. You can download the PDF flyer for more details about it.
• Jozzoa shares some growing problems with Union Bank’s EON Card with Paypal. Looks like it’s not as easy or as quick others initially thought it was.
• Text Links Ads announces a new program — ShoppingAds, very similar to their recently acquired AuctionAds but this time you get paid per click, not per sale. Better! {via Arnold}
• Happy Slip on a Xoom Infommercial. Funny. {hat tip: Basapa}
• My entry over at PTB last week: Mobile Web Metrics. Interesting info — confirms my bet on the mobile web in the Philippines in the next 3 to 5 years. Hint: new niche!
• Macuha.com shares a video on How Not to Use PowerPoint. *phew, good thing my PPTs aren’t like those*
• J Angelo launched a new social blog news service (okay, Digg-like if you will) — Blogosphere News.

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Most of those I’ve talked says yes, especially those who are widely known in their respective offices as a blogger. It’s not really a management issue but more about office politics.

Over two years ago, when I was still doing 8-5, my blogging was an issue. I’d tell my officemates that if they have coffee breaks or “yosi breaks”, I have my “blog break” too. Same time-killing relaxation exercise.

Best way to get into their good side is to actually convince them to blog too. If everyone in your team is blogging, then it becomes a non-issue.

How any you? Anybody else getting into some kind of trouble or unwanted attention at the office because of blogging?

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I know we’ve talked about this topic before. What’s your take on this? As a blogger, do you consider yourself as a journalist? (If so, at what point did you feel you’re doing journalism already?)

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See, before bloggers would usually give out links because they want to give traffic, however big,small or non-existent their traffic count is. Now, most would do it to give link juice. Besides, we realized a link costs a lot now than before.

Before, people loved to do link exchanges. Now, they call it link love. Then, just a year ago, bait’s are mostly for fish. Now, calling out somebody on your blog is considered link bait.

Ok, I digress. Let’s move along and share some tidbits.

Atty. Punzi gives us a blog lecture on Exemptions from Competitive Bidding in relation to the NBN fiasco. In the news, Pres. Arroyo has just ordered the indefinite suspension of the contract.

According to Erwin, the iPod Touch will be available in the Philippines next month for P19,090 for the 8GB and P25,490 for the 16GB. My conversation with the sales ladies at the Apple store puts the prices at a lower range of Php16k and Php19k, respectively. I remember the iPod Video 60GB retailed for Php32,000+ when it first came out locally.

Join the Survey on Filipino Bloggers here and help kids pass their Psychology 118 class. You need to be a resident Filipino (by blood or citizenship) and you must own and write your own blog.

Karl asks why aren’t there any other Filipino bloggers included in the Top 50 Most Influential Bloggers List (well, except maybe for Filipina blogger Michelle Malkin). Methinks to have at least one there (Malkin) is good enough. Singapore’s Xiaxue didn’t make it nor the most popular blogger in China, Xu Jing Lei, both of which are on Technorati’s Popular 100.

In news abroad, Virgin mobile was sued by a teenager for using her Flickr picture in an ad. To add insult to injury, the ad had the caption “Free virgin to virgin”.

Mint is a huge winner of the TechCrunch40 Conference. Mint is a data normalization service which tracks all your finances by consolidating all your credit accounts, billing cycles and earning/spending history. Neat tool. Now, this is one service we need a good clone of.

You think you and your friend can build a rocket ship and fly to the moon? Why not try it out and get to win $30 Million from Google. Hmm, maybe just a remote controlled robot would do.

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• The guys in-charge of the Canon brand emailed me with the Suggested Retail Price of the EOS 40D: Php62,950 for the body only, Php66,950 with the 18-55mm kit and Php85,000 for the 17-85mm kit. Also interesting to note that the digital camera gray market is hurting Canon’s business in the Philippines. That doesn’t include Hidalgo in Quiapo, right?
• William Yu has successfully unlocked the iPhone to work with Smart and Globe SIM cards. He brought it earlier during our JesCom Convention and showed it to me. T’was a real beauty. However, I might just go for the iPod Touch instead.
• Arnold shares 5 tips for a successful paid blogging gig. He blogs for one of my favorite SEO blog, the Search Engine Journal.
• Lawrence Casiraya of Inquirer.net blogs about the Smart Bro killer. He was the one who tipped me about this ZTE HSDPA modem Globe is releasing soon during the last Press Con we attended. Incidentally, the guys from Globe went here yesterday to do some signal testing. Will do a separate post on that later.
• The Jester-in-Exile writes about the Cris Mendez issue and adds that UP Students do not have the right to be apathetic, pointing to a certain blogger named Ria who publicly admitted she had no remorse over the death of her batch mate Cris Mendez. Another sensitive issue about freedom of expression? But what if the UP system made her that way? As one commenter says, it has become the norm in UP that a lot of students have gone numbed about it.
• The 2007 SEMCON is fast approaching but the Php8,500 price tag for the two day conference might be expensive for bloggers. Here’s one way to get 2 FREE passes to the conference this October. Grab it why it’s hot!
• Luis discovers that when a commenter says “Good work. Nice site.”, it must be spam.
• Eugene thinks that The Deck Ad Network is the best advertising platform as it provides the most focused service to advertisers while publishers get premium fees. But what if you’re TechCrunch that has an asking price of $10,000 for a 125×125 banner ad per month? Sometimes the price of the ad is not proportional to the amount of traffic you have but the quality and influence of the audience you attract.

Another tech blogger has left the block.

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Most people would. This one guy didn’t bite it.

This 25 year old guy from the St. Louis was offered a cool $18,000 plus 10% commission for the first year revenues of an upcoming book with the same title as his blog – One Man’s Goal. The publishing house that represented the book author wanted to buy his domain, onemansgoal.com, to promote the book’s launching.

Bryan Clark registered the domain last July 2 and just barely 3 months into the blog this incidental offer was made. He thought about it hard at first but later one decided not to sell. Here are his reasons for not selling the domain.

Do you agree with him? Would you have sold it if it were you?

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See more tidbits after the jump.

• Evan Hamilton, Flock Community Ambassador, left a comment asking how they can make the new Flock 0.9 better interact with the user. I had a minor issue with the orange media bar popping all the time. Anybody has a better idea? Leave a comment here or email him directly (he left his email address in the comments).
• An unknown book author wanted to market his upcoming book. It’s his first book so he wanted some viral ways to generate leads up until the launch date. I said a blog will showcase his talents as a fiction writer. Tickle the readers’ imagination to convince them to get more of the juicy stories in the book. If the book is really good, it should sell by itself.
• A full-time System Administrator emailed me asking for advise on doing online freelance jobs to earn on the side while he’s doing nothing slacking at work. He inquires about problogging but any other stints would do. I wrote some quick tips before on other ways to make money online. Worth revisiting the whole idea of e-Lance.
• Anybody on Yahoo! Hosting will agree with me that their hosting environment is just a pain in the butt especially if you’re running WordPress. They even give you a customized plugin just so the pretty permalinks would work. Problem is, it makes the RSS feed go whack and disappear. A reader asks if anybody has a similar experience.
• A reader left a comment and asks why hasn’t Paypal opened its full features for its Philippine userbase. And it’s already past the second quarter of 2007! I’m still using Xoom to do transactions with other Paypal users though.
• Yahoo! Publishers Network is still emailing me about their YPN program. Thanks but no thanks! I still can’t get in! Go international please, and real soon.
• Noemi got disgusted when she realized that a young and very promising Filipino blogger is being “coached” by his dad. And that’s using the word “coach” mildly.
• The Anointed CEO asks what do you guys thinks of this souped-up commenting system — Intense Debate. Haven’t tried it yet but looks like the feature set rocks — threaded comments, reputation, tracking and stats. However, several existing WP plugins combined might also achieve the same results thru the legacy comment system. I use the Better Comments Manager plugin.
• Hezron Mariano is doing a small SEO contest for Filipino bloggers. Free multiple domains for the top 3 winners. Check it out.
• Verizon gets 10 Billion SMS messages per month. In the Philippines, we get 1 Billion a day. ‘Nuf said.

Some more interesting links — Funniest Geek Quotes by Jaypee; t-shirt ideas dude! Drew released Daily Top 10 Posts Improvements; loved seeing some of my ideas lift the ground. An iPod on the Nintendo DS Lite; the more reason I want one.

Marc is in a pickle. He got a 1GB DDR2 RAM for Php1,500. Turns out the Php1,500 is for 512MB only. The store wants him to choke up another grand. It’s their mistake, obviously, but should he?

Microtel, the chain of hotels, invited a bunch of travel and photo bloggers to a dinner last floody Wednesday. During dinner, we discussed with the management about blog disclosures and they were happy to oblige. ReadWriteWeb explains it’s not whether you should or shouldn’t but when and what. I say before it happens, not after.

Nokia is launching a new line of mobile phones and introducing some new bleeding-edge mobile games as well. I will be attending this launch this August 29-31 in Singapore (insert disclosure here: all expenses paid by the company). Watch out for my coverage of the event here.

And here’s to all my friends who badly need some financial coaching.

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As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. All the fun, humor and mystery will cease to exist for readers of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs now that he’s been outed.

The man behind the parody blog is Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes.

Well it had to happen. Honestly I can’t believe it’s taken this long. But as you may have heard, I’ve been busted by a newspaper reporter. My cover has been blown. Guy named Brad Stone, who works for the New York Times. Have you heard of him? Well, tip of the hat to you, Brad Stone. You did the sleuthing. You put the pieces of the puzzle together. You went through my trash, hacked into my computer, and put listening devices in my home. Now you’ve ruined the mystery of Fake Steve, robbing thousands of people around the world of their sense of childlike wonder. Hope you feel good about yourself, you mangina. One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag. I really, really enjoyed seeing those guys keep guessing wrong. For six months Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth put their big brains together and couldn’t come up with the answer. Guy from the Times did it in a week. So much for the trope about smarty-pants bloggers disrupting old media. Brilliant. My only regret is that we didn’t get a chance to see Bigglesworth take a few more swings and misses.

Well, it took the New York Times 13 months (depending on how you look at it) to unearth and man behind the blog. Why the NYT had to spoil the fun is still a puzzle to me. I was actually thinking of outing myself and declare that I’m the Real Fake Steve Jobs just for the fun of it. But no, my writing style will be a dead giveaway that it ain’t me by a hundred miles. Well,, that’s how the NYT reporter was able to discover him.

What’s next for Fake Steve Jobs? Maybe a long awaited retirement. Readers will be moving on to the next Fake Steve Ballmer, Fake Bill Gates, Fake Michael Dell or Fake Larry Ellison.

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However, I believe that (just like my archives which are full of grammatical errors and typos) they should be left published for posterity sake. I don’t subscribe to the practice of taking down posts unless they pose a security threat to me or to someone else, the court of law orders me to do so, or if it violates privacy statutes.

I believe the best way is to update the post at the end and explain the revision. That way, readers will know the original story, the alpha and the beta version and then the final version. *heh*

So, what’s your take? Do you just update or you take down posts?

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Lots of interesting news and updates going around (some coming from the emails), let me share some of them with you.

• Fixya.com – Rony Farkash emailed me about their new social tech support website. The site provides tons of support information about consumer products via post messages or live chat. This is one web 2.0 site I regret I didn’t thought of before.
• Hans Koch of Syndeo Media sent me a link to their Manila OpenCoffee Club. This is a networking night of coffee, exchanging ideas with entrepreneurs, developers and investors.
• Google finally confirms buyout of Feedburner and yet another computer server startup, PeakStream. Methinks Google bought Feedburner for more AdWords/AdSense space and to get that much needed feed subscriber count for better Blog Search ranking.
• While we’re on the topic of acquisitions, CBS also bought Last.fm for a reported $280 Million.
• The 11th Webby Award winners have been announced. Winners include Ask A Ninja (Webby Film & Video Awards Best Actor), Jessica Lee Rose a.k.a. Lonelygirl15 (Webby Film & Video Awards Best Actress), and Steve Chen & Chad Hurley, Co-Founders, YouTube (as Webby Person of The Year). See full list of winners here.
• Since Google AdWords is also doing radio campaigns nowadays, you can get a $400 promotional credit if you decide to run one. Yup, that’s $400 big bucks towards your first ad campaign if you sign up with AdWords and run a radio ad. See more details here.
• Google AdSense updates policy and increases the use of Link Ad units from one to 3. Do we really need more Ad Link units? They do look like navigations and if you run all 3, that makes 4 navigation look-alike in your page. There goes site usability down the drain.
• Migs asked a question: “How do you build an about me page?” I say build it in such a way that you start with the most important vocation that you do. Write it in such a way that it will be (or you want it to be) more or less the same in the next 3 to 5 years.
• Marc fights the FUD and have gone to the dark side as well. He shares 4 more tips on how to maximize your TLA inventory. Also read my previous “5 Tips to get more TLA Ad Placements” if you missed it.
• Jayvee wonders where the car bloggers are? Simple answer — there aren’t any many. Name 5 popular car blogs you know in the entire blogosphere? Heck, I can only even name two — Autoblog of AOL (formerly Weblogs Inc.) and Paul Tan (of Malaysia). How much more in the Philippines?
• A regular reader (who still wants to remain anonymous) shares a link of stunning pictures of Grand Prismatic Springs at Midway Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park, State of Wyoming.

Btw, Blogger (or the domain Blogspot.com) has been unblocked in Pakistan already (I read as earlier as 2 or 3 months ago). I guess pressure from different sectors and various pressure groups convinced their Supreme Court to lift the ban. I still used WordPress.com in all my workshops there though.

Still tired. Back to sleep.

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