What am I up to now?!

I’ve been seeing the ad of this website for quite sometime and I didn’t really pay much attention. Don’t know why all of the sudden I decided to check it out.

The concept is intriguing enough that after a quick read, I wanted to be a part of it! The idea is to collect a list of 1 million blogs. It is an experiment knowing that according to Technorati, there are 70,000,000 blogs in existence and growing every day, perhaps every minute!

The real challenge for this website however is HOW LONG IT WILL TAKE them to reach the 1 millionth blog! I just finished listed mine and I’m on number 1,838. It seems they are a ways to go but my guess is that it would take them years and years to reach the million blog mark.

The website was conceived April 10th, 2008. It took me over two months to find it. If they average out about a thousand mark every month, then it will only be 12,000 blogs in one year. A million divided by 12,000- you get an outrageous time frame and we’ll all probably be dead to see it reach the millionth mark basing it on their current rate!

Nonetheless, given that right now there are millions of blogs on the internet, if they could double or triple their goal every month, maybe we can see the day they reach 1 million blogs. I’m listing my other blogs to it so that should help ad up.

Are you up for the ‘game’ or you think this is too impossible to accomplish that it’s futile to join? What’s your take?

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!

It’s official as announced on the Journey website, Filipino Arnel Pineda is the new lead singer of Journey! Journey is the world famous American rock band from the 80’s. Thanks to cover bands all over the world and the internet, their most popular songs “Open Arms”, “Faithfully”, “Don’t Stop Believing”, “Anyway You Want it”, “Wheels in the Sky” among others are still alive as it was over 2 decades ago.

The group saw many changes over the years, with different band members leaving and returning but the biggest was when original and popular lead singer, Steve Perry left in the 90’s because of an injury.

Since then original member lead & rhythm guitarist and at one point lead vocalist, Neal Schon, has been looking for a new lead singer to revive the group. In his frustration, he sough the internet and spent days looking at videos in YouTube until he came across a video of the Zoo, a Philippine band popular in the club scenes in Manila and Olongapo. Schon couldn’t believe what he was hearing when he saw the group’s video with Arnel Pineda on lead vocals giving his own rendition of Journey’s songs. He said that Pineda’s voice was just too good to be true! He knew then that Journey found their new voice in Arnel Pineda! The rest as they say is history, or in this case- still a history in the making for the new Journey. In Pineda’s case, his “journey” to real stardom is only beginning…

Who is Arnel Pineda?

To be honest, I’ve never heard of him until the official news that he is Journey’s newest member (and lead vocalist at that)! Born and raised in the Philippines, 40 year old Arnel Pineda is a singer-songwriter with a successful steady musical career in Asia spanning 25 years performing mostly in Hong Kong. He belonged to numerous bands over the course of his career and has released a self-titled album in 1999. Before Journey, he was with the band called the Zoo. The Zoo recently released its first album “Zoology” in the Philippines, in September 2007 under MCA Universal records with 13 original tracks, most of which are written by Pineda.

I must also admit I’m not a Journey fan but this great news caught my eye! The internet has done it again! In the US, MySpace paved way for Colbie Caillat to be discovered and get the much deserved worldwide recognition! Her song “Bubbly” was played over 30 million times in MySpace before she even officially recorded the song so that record companies were the ones coming to get her and practically swooning over her for a record contract and not the other way around! Last December 2007, it was 15 year-old Filipina Charice Pempengco wowing the US audience by guesting in Ellen de Generes Show. Charice was “discovered” by the Ellen crew in YouTube! Now, it’s Arnel Pineda preparing to take the US market and the world by storm! See this short news clip from CNN on Arnel Pineda’s discovery lifted from Youtube and uploaded by user ndgomez777. It gave me goosebumps!

Truly, he is under a lot of pressure to show to the world what he can do especially to loyal Journey fans. This early on, he already has received a lot of negativity from the die hard fans. He will most likely be compared to the original Steve Perry. C’mmon you guys, give this guy a break! Let him live his dream! Let’s all wish Arnel Pineda the best of luck and hope that the audience will see what Neal Schon and the rest of Journey and their producers saw in him- a great, fine talent!

His first public appearance with Journey is slated on February 21, 2008 at the Festival de Viña del Mar at Quinta Vergara Arena in Chile. More tours are scheduled and a new recording album for Journey with Arnel Pineda is set for release in Spring/Summer of 2008.

Find our more about him and his Philippine Band, the Zoo in Friendster! The photos in this blog were lifted from the band’s profile pics in Friendster.

Welcome to WordPress.

Ah, I’m finally moving in- permanently I hope….

Call me sentimental but I couldn’t delete this default page created by Wordpress that says “Hello World!”; maybe because I want to mark this day as THE day I actually switched! I’m not quite sure about this template I’m currently using. I might change it again! There are so many possibilities! Below is my old theme with Blogger.

Farewell my old Blogger blog. Farewell my old Blogger template. Hello Wordpress. Hello World!

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