Over the weekend, the streets of Manila were pretty much empty. Which is a rare case to consider. The malls had no people. Sunday lunch out was pretty much dead — a whole nation was glued to the television watching the Pacquiao vs. Hatton fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. With 8 seconds to spare in the second round, Pacquiao landed a stunning left blow into Hatton’s lower jaw sending him to sleep, and a TKO.

But Pacquiao wasn’t the only winner that evening — dozens of Filipino bloggers cashed in from page views netting thousands of dollars from the search engines:
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Folks who own a Web site know how difficult it is to find that perfect name. While a great .com moniker does not guarantee success – it certainly doesn’t hurt.

So isn’t it a shame when you search for your dream domain only to find that it’s already owned. Worse yet, you visit the site only to find out that the owner is not utilizing the name well…or at all! read more

It often takes time to see the results of link building in terms of traffic.  Compare this to social media marketing.  With social media, you can see traffic spikes right away whenever you get stumbles, diggs, and retweets.

On the other hand, link building doesn’t send as much as direct traffic as you might imagine.  In the short term, social media will usually send much more traffic to your site than link building.  read more

I’m reading that Valleywag ring leader Owen Thomas is leaving the site, which is really nothing more than a column on Gawker these days, to work at NBC. Ryan Tate, the now former night editor, is taking Thomas’ place, and Duncan Riley thinks he’ll do OK. Best of luck to everyone involved.

Drum roll, please.

And the worst places to be a blogger are…

Burma and Iran.

No surprise there, eh?

The results are from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

With only about 1% of its population achieving private access to the Internet, if you’re gonna blog in Burma, you’re going to have to do it at a public cafe. Of course, those spots are policed, and with every post, you take your “freedom” into your own hands.

You might recall Iranian blogger Omidreza who died while in prison.

Rounding out the top 10 of the worst places to blog: Syria, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Tunisia, China, Turkmenistan and Egypt. Read the details here.

According to the CPJ…

In compiling this list, CPJ studied conditions for bloggers in countries around the world. CPJ staff consulted with Internet experts to develop eight criteria that included governments’ use of filtering, monitoring, and regulation; authorities’ use of imprisonments and other forms of legal harassment to deter critical blogging; and the extent and openness of Internet access.

World Press Freedom Day is May 3. Learn more.

Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has officially joined the ranks of Twitter addicts. The Alaska governor has so far amassed 12,096 followers (as of this writing).

“This is my official Twitter feed – from here I’ll provide updates on issues concerning Alaskans. Learn more about AK at www.alaska.gov,” the governor said in her first post.

Yesterday, she also posted her take on Swine Flu. “We still have no reported cases of swine flu. Be vigilant, AK! Wash hands & watch for flu-like symptoms. Go to http://tinyurl.com/c2avc4.”

Palin is following, among others, Bill O’reilly, David Gregory, Mike Huckabee, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Karl Rove and of course… John McCain. She is not currently following @BarakObama and me.

I dropped the ball.

When an unexpected family situation kept me from blogging for several weeks, I learned a valuable lesson: ALWAYS BE PREPARED.

By the time I realized I was unprepared, it was too late. The days mounted, the ideas retreated and time evaporated. Every day without an update on my primary blogs were steps backwards. And as all bloggers know, it’s so difficult to gain traction…giving it back is a cardinal sin!

Since life is unpredictable and you never know when it will get in the way of your blogging duties, here are several suggestions that can help you weather the storm. read more

Google has announced that it’s to hold a series of AdSense training webinars, based on feedback received from publishers. They’ll be interactive, allowing attendees to ask questions of AdSense professionals, and focused on improving revenue.

Topics covered will include using custom search engines with AdSense, using AdSense effectively (optimisation), a general product overview with focus on product updates that have been rolled out over the last three months, and two webinars about Google Ad Manager.

There is limited space on these so interested publishers need to sign up quickly via the AdSense help centre.

Every day now I am hearing about the latest “revolutionary, automated, turn Twitter into an ATM cash machine autopilot make money in your underpants system” and it is making me sick. What can we do about it? read more

Curios about what the Twitter office looks like? Then this PR profile article by Apple features both a slideshow video, a small photo gallery, and a bunch of Mac-centric text. The latter is really a bit over the top, with whoever did this article going out of his or her way to focus everything on the Mac brand and how important it is to Twitter. That being said, the video and photo gallery is worth a look if you’re into that sort of thing.