I have decided to make September 28 my blogversary. This was the date I bravely shifted from Friendster blog into Blogger blog exactly a year ago (I went live on September 30th). At that time, I knew nothing about real blogging even though I was already into it early 2005 via my Friendster account.

Since this is my first SOBA, I wish to give a background on the simple steps I did to get me started into blogging in my niche and my current position and state. I don’t have bragging rights- I’m not claiming to be anything. I don’t have any official blog awards. I don’t get a thousand or more views a day, I don’t earn much from it and I’m not trying to be the best blogger.

What I do have is decent and consistent traffic and page views. There’s something to be said there. Blogging shouldn’t be complicated. Blog happy and simply! This is dedicated to all newbies- what I was a year ago!

First step: Blog hopping and Finding your niche

For the most part blog hopping helped me a great deal while starting! It’s the best teaching tool for any newbie wanting to start their own blogs. It’s like window shopping for a website with live working themes and plugins and sidebars. As I navigate from one blog to the next, I learned what could work for me or not! There are some really sleek, neat looking blogs out there but there are also tons of crappy, sloppy ones! Sifting each, taking the best and discarding the rest- I was able to formulate what I want in my website.

I wanted a personal mixed bag for this site, allowing me the flexibility to talk on any subjects from family, travels, music, media, entertainment, opinion, photography, TV, the internet, technology, love/dislike of country, etc. I wanted a simple theme layout with black as the main background.

I followed up this site with a hobby blog, showcasing my interest in postcard collecting and then later on with a blog for a restobar I co-own in the Philippines, and then a Filipino Quotes blog to post quotations related to anything Filipino or the Philippines either by Filipinos or foreigners.

The best learning experience is going out there and blog hop! Call it lurking, spying, checking out, snooping- the only way to discover what you want in your blog is by learning from others. That’s what I would call it.

Read More »

As if I don’t have enough widgets on my blog, I found another handy blog tool that I couldn’t resist having. The name is ROMlet.

ROMlet is a three in one widget: a brag badge, bookmarking tool and stats counter- for now. Who knows what other cool features this fresh website has yet to add since starting only a year ago? At a glance it looks as though it is just another blog social networking copycat but wait, there’s much more to it!

*Romlet is useful to both a blogger and their blog readers in multiple ways, despite the deceptive simplicity of the widget itself. Romlet helps a blogger quickly assess their own daily statistics and see their refering sources without logging into an analytics account. In turn, Romlet shows a blog’s reader the best buttons for bookmarking and supporting a blog. It also encourages readers to return to a site, out of curiosity bout refering sources.*

On its website, you can see “Currently Popular Articles on Romlet User Sites” which attracts you to click and read more- (like the Blogrush widget or Entrecard). It offers incentives to users by getting and giving referrals. It displays current and on-site information to you and your readers. It allows bookmarking of blog posts like Addthis; but unlike Addthis, *ROMlet automatically provides buttons that are up-to-date and relevant each time a visitor sees it. Like a FeedBurner readership badge, Romlet shows information about incoming visitors but is limited to one kind of statistic: number of feed readers. Romlet shows off the best statistics by displaying top referers at any given time.*

The process of registration and putting the widget on my blog was hassle-free! It took me about a minute to set everything up.

You’ll find yourself comparing it with a lot more blog resources available but you can’t deny it’s uniqueness. To go on, it works very much like MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog, Bumpzee, FuelmyBlog, RSS readers, Feedjit it, Stats counter among others but rolled into one, making it really another useful, relevant widget to have.

See the widget live on my right sidebar! Get your own and boost and boast your blog popularity!

* Information Source

Jim Killeen, Executive Producer/Director
Google Me, The Movie

We’ve all done it! Admittedly, I do. It’s among my fave pastimes in the internet: Googling my name, my family’s or somebody else’s name. It’s always interesting what one can find by Googling a familiar name. It’s even more surprising to find a name exactly the same as ours.

For Filipinos and I guess for people with Spanish lineage, it is very rare to find names that’s exactly theirs. Blame it on our parents who seemed to find pleasure in blessing us with 2 or more! I have 4 names (including my middle name, which is actually my mother’s maiden name) with Maria as the first name. My three other sisters have Maria for their first names as well and they have at least 2 more excluding our last name.

In America and most parts of the world, people have only one first name, a middle name (that is actually just any other name-not from their mother’s maiden name!) and a last name (which could be taken from the father’s or the mother’s). Most often, they would drop the middle name altogether and just use a first and last name as in James Smith, Charles Davis, or Jennifer Taylor. Much easier to Google and finding a match, isn’t it? Sure beats finding the exact person with the 4 names I have!

This guy from Los Angeles, Jim Killeen takes Googling his own name to the next level! He made it into a movie! It’s the latest buzzword now here in America, “Google Me”! Like you and me, he Googled his name and found a list of his namesakes. This lead to an idea of what if I track and meet these people? He did and thus transformed his remarkable journey from different parts of the world into a documentary-movie that premiered in YouTube last Friday entitled Google Me.

“What do a cop, a swinger, an Irish priest, an engineer, a father of eight, an Aussie and a gambler have in common?” says the YouTube description. The documentary of course, stars 7 guys named Jim Killeen.

I was really impressed with the whole concept! Considering that we all have done it: Googling, that is. Yet, this guy thinks, what’s really in a name? what could I possibly have in common with these guys who have the same name as I have? Is it just the name? By realizing the idea, he met, connected and bonded with 6 other Jim Killeen and you know they each have found a friend in each other for life. This is another one of those, if you have an idea- do something about it! Follow where your heart takes you! The result may pleasantly surprise you and impact your life forever!

The 90-minute film is still available in YouTube for FREE for a limited time. The official website sells the Google Me DVD for $29.85 including shipping throughout the United States.

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ON THE SIDE: I am back from a long, very satisfying vacation in the Philippines! I am back to reality!

I chanced upon the term “do follow” about a month ago (November 2007) and I’m quite surprised that it hasn’t really taken off when I found the whole idea ‘nonconforming’ and even defiant of Google! I embraced the concept instantaneously!

My previous post here has been about my growing discontent with Google in general and Blogger in particular. The change Google made a few weeks ago included a permanent rel=”nofollow” attribute in its comments page. Since it is a separate page from the main blog, there is no way to manipulate its template making it impossible to remove the tag. Regardless of whether you want to be a Do Follow blogger or not, you can’t make the choice because there’s no way for one to remove the simple yet powerful tag. Your hands are suddenly tied in that regard.

Google launched the “rel=nofollow” attribute in early 2005 to combat spamming in blogs. Major search engines like Yahoo and MSN liked the bit so they followed suit. It was initially seen as a great idea because really, spamming has become uncontrollable at that time.

What is the rel=nofollow tag?

Rel=nofollow according to wikipedia, “is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.” Simply put, the rel=nofollow tag aims to blacklist spam comments left on message boards, forums and blogs. Spam comments are comments with no relevance to what the post is all about and is usually just a link URL pointing you to a site selling or promoting something- unfortunately, most sites are of obscene nature. Spammers come in huge numbers and it is a pain to remove the comments one by one when they come by the hundreds in your various posts. Blogs where the comment moderation is turned off are the ones mainly targeted.

Why do spammers love to spam blogs?

The reason is simple. Blogs have a wide, diverse audience and usually has huge content. Most blogs also have strong PageRanks (another Google owned trademark!) and spammers want to benefit from that. When you link with a blog, search engines crawl that link and will consider that link almost as important when attached to a page that has a PageRank. So then when one is searching for something and that blog shows up, most likely that spam comment will show up in search engines as well.

With the rel=nofollow tag attached to a template by default, spam comments WILL NOT be indexed by Google or other search engines thereby will be ignored by the search engines and will have no value at all whatsoever. It render the comments totally useless from a search engine’s point of view.

Now you see where I am driving at here.

While the objective is firstly seen as a deterrent for spamming, it is not totally beneficial to any blogger who cares about its readers and its blog’s ranking because the search engines CAN NOT determine what a spam comment is from a legitimate comment. What it does is totally ignore all comments- legit or not!

With the rel=nofollow tag on, the reader’s comments are never included when search engines rank a page’s importance. So from the standpoint of PageRanking, the blogger gets nothing from the comment and the commenter gets nothing back. It’s a dead end for both.

Is Do Follow the answer to rel=nofollow?

I strongly believe it is! Do Follow, writes a supporter, “is an action or a step a blogger initiates to remove the attribute rel=”nofollow” in its blog codes, either by installing a plug-in: Wordpress plugin or this Wordpress plugin, or manually for blogspot and for movable type. Most bloggers would refer to it as a campaign or a movement against rel=nofollow.”

Google does not prohibit one from removing the nofollow tag. It is therefore a choice we can make. I choose to reward my readers for taking the time to comment on my posts. Personally, I only try to leave comments now to blogs that support Do Follow. We all are busy people and there are millions of blogs out there. It’s impossible for us to visit all of these blogs so why not just visit the ones that will also benefit us in some way? I’d like to be able to give that to my readers and perhaps may encourage them to leave a comment knowing that their URL link will be counted by google and other search engines.

I’ve read that even with the rel=nofollow tag on, spammers are still out there! It doesn’t stop them from doing what they’re doing. So why not remove the nofollow tag to benefit us and our readers?

Blogs have other ways of fighting spams now like entering a word or sets of letters and numbers before submitting a comment or just having to enter information manually and clicking submit; these are moves a spam-robot can’t do automatically hence preventing the spam from occurring. One can also turn on the comments moderation to filter comments before appearing and going live on your site. I like the idea of comment moderation because it gives me control over what’s going to be attached to my site before it hits the blogosphere! I have had a small number of spam comments which I’m truly thankful moderation is on since the comments were nothing but objectionable links leading you to lewd sites!

Again, I think every blogger should make a choice and support Do Follow. It’s a win-win and the benefits definitely outweigh Google’s reason- that of punishing spammers. Why would we punish OUR readers?!

(Now is a great time to become a Do Follow blogger. Rob from Blogs that Follow whom I met on Blog Catalog and MyBloglog and whom I’ve exchanged a few emails with on the subject, is giving out Grey’s Anatomy 2008 calendars to bloggers who become Do Follow supporters! Kindly visit their website to know more about the ongoing promo.)

© 2007

HAVE YOU GOOGLED “FILIPINA” LATELY? The internet over the years has become the most powerful source of information- more than books, other print media, tv and library. It gives limitless knowledge to the point of overloading one with too much data. As such, it gives access to any unimaginable topic, issue, news, anything at your fingertips. It can also mar reputations, make you want to throw up on the sick sites you accidentally come across, ruin companies, destroy lives.

Anybody can go to any search engines to search for anything one can possibly think of. Type a word, phrase, even a question and though won’t guarantee you will find what you’re looking for, it will supply however countless websites (by the hundreds of thousands of links) more than enough to divert your attention and focus on the searches found instead.

Imagine my surprise when I typed Filipina and or Pinay in google! I found some objectionable listings there. Go see for yourselves. Even this paid google ads in adsense on Filipinas is quite annoying! But BIG Thanks to the aggressive and massive campaign of concerned Filipinas, they were able to bring their own websites and other relevant, informative, responsible, refined sites on page one of google, yahoo, msn, ask jeeves among others. It wasn’t the case 2 years ago as I further probed, when the very word Filipina or Pinay would give out totally shameless views of what a Filipina is based on the websites available at that time. Filipinas were merely porn material, flirts, sexy, horny, and mail-order-brides- just for fun, dating and amusement!

I’m joining the concerned netizens and I would like to declare, assert, proclaim that I am a Filipina and proud to be one. If you are a proud Filipina, I urge you to make some noise in the internet. If you are a Filipina wherever part of the world you are, you can do something by being responsible with your actions online. Portray a decent image of yourself because what you do affects the entire Filipinas! True, the world wide web has no barriers, freedom of speech is highly tolerated here hence you can’t censor a website. This is not an issue of censorship or morality, it is providing a balanced look of certain issues- in this case being a Filipina.

Imagine you met someone who never met a Filipina before and doesn’t know anything about our country. He/she finds you interesting and would like to know more, goes online to see what’s out there. Heck, he/she won’t search for Philippines- won’t probably even remember the word let alone spell it. He’d/she’d search for Filipina; types it on google and the first 20 results links him/her to Filipina porn sites, Filipina mail-order brides, Filipina singles, Filipina flirts, hot and sexy Filipina. What do you think that person would conclude about you and Filipinas in general?!

It’s sad enough that we had to deal and we’re still dealing with Filipina representation in the world as domestic helpers, lazy bums and thieves. Being pictured as merely for fun and pleasure is unacceptable! Let opportunistic people who prey on helpless Filipinas by operating porn and Filipina trafficking come, we can’t stop them. BUT you can do something about it. By reading this blog, you already are. Step a little further by clicking on the links I’ve provided here, join forums, make comments, start your own blog (and link them to other Philippine websites such as this) talking not necessarily just about the Philippines and being a Filipina but by speaking your mind on personal issues that matter to you. In so doing, we project a Filipina definition that we are not only beautiful people but are decent, thinking individuals as well!

By having as many websites written by Filipinas and spreading it around, making as many hits or clicks as possible to the websites- we make sure that the search engines are unprejudiced in presenting all available websites about Filipinas and that the internet does not only belong to those who can pay to advertise their (monkey) business! Be proud of your heritage. Spread the word.

Updated on November 2007:

GABRIELA

The Filipina Writing Project

Filipina Images

Filipna Women’s Network

Macalua.com

Filipinos on Wikepedia

Filipina: Isa ring Ina (A mother too)

Duyan

Filipino Librarian

Filipina is a Filipino Woman

Filipina Pride

Ang Mga Filipina ng Buhay ko

The Filipina in the Eyes of the World

Three Things You Probably Do Not Know About a Filipina

What is a Filipina?

If you know any other “clean” Filipina websites or about the Philippines/Pinays in general, kindly post them here so we can continue passing the word out!©

StumbleUpon is the new google or the new wiki that’s taking the net by storm. Already boasting over 3 million users, been featured on TV and tech magazines, this is one sure find you want to keep! I just stumbled on it a week ago and I’m hooked! This is the Myspace or Friendster of bookmarks and links. There are millions of websites on the internet. One can’t possibly explore even half of it in one’s lifetime.

This must-have helps you discover websites that are only relevant to you, according to the preferences you included.The best thing about it is, it has a toolbar add-on with Mozilla Firefox so its so easy to use. Everytime you click stumble, you’ll be in a whole new world of serendipity! It’s exciting what you can discover in every click! It’s building a community of people helping each other bump into something new and interesting.

Everytime you stumble a site, it would ask you to rate it to help the next stumbler. In that way, only relevant sites are being distributed and the rejects are well forever be buried in the bottom of the internet ocean. A very intelligent tool! The only downside is it’s addictive. I recommend stumbling only on your lazy nights or spare time– or you’ll never get other things done!

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Click here to join StumbleUpon!
See my StumbleUpon Page

Don’t have Firefox yet? It’s time to get out of the dark ages that’s Internet Explorer (IE). Firefox in my opinion is way cooler, faster, has more tools and more efficient. Although some OLD websites still don’t support it and I find myself opening up IE or I just totally skip that website, it’s still better interface than IE! I’m not sure how Firefox works in Philippine websites but it’s worth having.©