The Philippine blogosphere mourns the loss of Alecks Pabico, who was considered as a pioneering journalist and blogger in the country. Alecks passed away last Wednesday, October 7, 2009, due to complications from a serious illness.

To many, he was the kind and gentle–and sometimes singular–journalist who always had an eye out for truth. I say singular, because you can usually notice him from afar. He always wore ethnic-inspired clothing, and had Bob Marley-esque hairdo, which sets him apart from the crowd. In fact, that was how I discovered he had passed away. I saw his picture framed by his wake at the Parish mortuary just recently after I attended mass. I was surprised to learn that a fellow blogger (and a prominent one in our sphere, at that) had passed on. read more

Like the title of my column implies, I do a lot of SEO work – both for clients and my own sites.  However, I’ve recently started getting into PPC, or pay per click, marketing.  This has been a great education.

One of the things that I’ve learned is the importance of testing.  The fundamental principle in PPC seems to be to test every variable you can think of so your campaign is as efficient as it can be.  PPC is the fastest way to drive targeted traffic to your site.  However, if you’re not constantly testing in order to improve your campaign, you can quickly lose a lot of money.  We as humans are not perfect, so your first ads and keywords will have to tweaked as you gain data from your testing.

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The Philippines celebrated its first leg of the third Philippine Blog Awards last year. As the country is physically divided due to the nature of its terrain (7,000+ islands) the awards was split into three regions to give context to cultural influences of every region. Radio host and an advocate for youth volunteer efforts, Gang Badoy was invited to deliver the keynote for this year. The past two months in Manila have been emotional for most, with murders, epic floods and typhoons and the upcoming elections turning bloggers more and more vigilant.

What an honor and a frustration to be given ten minutes to address, perhaps (arguably) the most eloquent group of people ever gathered in 2009. But here I am, so here I go.

I cannot discuss any other ‘angle on blogging’ tonight except my gratitude to bloggers. During a crisis- you have kept many of us informed, during darker times – you, blogger have inspired, during births – you spread the joy and during death – many of you have rendered those who have gone before us immortal. There is no single phenomenon that has done all those in such a level.

Your personal thoughts, observations, factual research even urgent yet seemingly trivial emotions have contributed greatly to us who read you. Imagine how wide the understanding of the next generation will be of us who have gone before them -because of your blogs. Mas maiintindihan nila kung saan tayo nanggaling (They will be able to better understand where we came from). For me the best description of one who loves his country is someone who is interested in where we came from, where we are today – and where we want the country to go. Imagine the advantage the next generation has because they have our blogs to refer to. read more

After a brief hiatus due to the big migration from Drupal to WordPress, the Performancing team is announcing that the Performancing Jobs board is now back online.

Performancing Jobs is a great resource for any freelance blogger or network blogger for looking for great opportunities. It’s also a good place where blog networks, corporate communications departments and blog owners can look for talented writers to fill in their rosters. The job board features both want ads and service offers.

Posting a job listing is free, and listings remain visible for seven days each. The board also offers premium listings at $20 apiece, which will stay at the top of the list for 30 days as a highlighted item.

Have a job opening? Are you looking for a blogging-related job? Post a listing now at Performancing Jobs.

When I heard about the launch of Tweetie 2 on TechCrunch I immediately fired up the app store and downloaded this for the expensive price of 299 pennies.

After hearing glorious praise regarding Tweetie 2 I decided to play around with the app to see whether or not it would replace my current favorite tweet app of choice, Twittelator Pro.

After 10 minuets of exploration I quickly came to the conclusion that Tweetie 2 was the app for me—well, almost. read more

The FTC has finally dropped the hammer on paid reviews. This finally settles the long debate about blogging and ethics. Whereas before it was all about your moral code, today it is now a legal mandate. Bloggers, according to the Federal Trade Commission should have full disclosure for doing paid reviews, or suffer consequences.

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.

Interestingly enough, the “consequences” may actually be paid by the advertiser:

To placate such fears, Cleland said the FTC will more likely go after an advertiser instead of a blogger for violations. The exception would be a blogger who runs a “substantial” operation that violates FTC rules and already received a warning, he said.

So what this really means: there’s nothing to be worried about if you’ve been a good boy.

Yesterday saw the People’s Republic of China celebrate it’s 60th anniversary with one ginormous birthday bash. The entire military arsenal plus a few kitchen sinks were rolled out in front of the Forbidden City, and like most of these commie marchin’ parties it made for quite a spectacle.

Leading up to the party, however, we saw some controversy from angered Americans, specifically about whether or not the Empire State Building should or should not have been lit up red and yellow to mark the occasion. Here’s a sample of messages that surfaced on Twitter:

AmericanMind: Add ESB (Empire State Bldg) to NSL (No Shame List) for honoring 60th B-Day of ChiComms who rep only 5% of China pop but oppress other 95%.

wa4zko: #ESB Empire State Bldg lit up in red/yellow to honor 60th bday of the ChiComs. You gotta be $%itting me…pardon me while I go barf….

rabair82: Red-yellow Empire State Building for China’s 60th http://tinyurl.com/yawmgvg Hard to blame Obama, but can you imagine this happening before?

rwdias: Empire State Building turns red-yellow for China’s 60th: http://bit.ly/gPD6d #tcot #communismfail #obamafail #liberalsfail

purrfectpurrz: it’s a sad day in America when the Empire State Building is lit in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Communist take-over of China

wooandy87: Dear Evil Empire, happy 60th birthday: http://tinyurl.com/yafgjel

wooandy87: wait, scratch that. calling them “empire” makes them giddy. Dear Evil Oppressive Regime, happy 60th birthday: http://tinyurl.com/yafgjel

Annie_He: “Empire State Building is lit with colored lights 2 mark China’s 60th Bday”.what can I say abt it? evry1 kno what drivin force is behind this

ATC_EyeOnTibet: #fridayfoto @sfthq excellent projection protest in New York (NYC turned the Empire State Building red for Oct 1 PRC 60th http://bit.ly/ZLdV4

Beautyon_: NYC lights up the Empire State in Red and Yellow to honor COMMUNIST Chinas 60th birthday. Are you freaking kidding me? http://bit.ly/keCGL

via twitblog

And it goes on… While I’m no fan of the Chinese government, I’m of the mind that if regular Chinese people see a gesture like this from the US, they might be a little touched. Is that ‘open hand vs a closed fist’ philosophy a little too ‘kumbaya’ for all y’all?

Meh…

Meanwhile back in the PRC, Chinese netizens now in the middle of their post-party recap, are equally pissed with CCTV’s lousy coverage of the event. Apparently camera number 2 couldn’t seem to stay clear of camera number 1:

Check out the ChinaHush for a bunch of other shots like this one.

But the final nail in the camel’s back came during Hu Jintao’s inspection of the troops. A shot of the Chinese president in his China-mobile was tainted by an Toshiba billboard in the background. Yes, an ad for a Japanese company during China’s 60th anniversary parade.  CCTV just can’t win. Put the firecrackers on ice boys and start preparing for 2019…

But when all was said and done, you gotta admit that it was one hell of a show, regardless of where your politics are. Sure, it’s damn awful that the government flipped the switch on Xinjiang‘s internet, and it’s ridiculous that they’re sendin’ out malicious mail to everyone and their dog. But there’s over 1.3 billion people in China, and most of ‘em have seen a century’s worth of change in a fraction of the time.

Why don’t we all just sit back and chill for a bit and enjoy the show:

China’s 60th National Day Parade

Lead photo: Boston.com

PicApp is a service that lets you embed legal images on your site, and now you can do it with a shortcode on WordPress.com as well. There’s a demo video in the WordPress.com announcement post, and another one on the PicApp blog. There’s also a plugin for stand-alone WordPress users, which is nice obviously.

Oh, and while we’re at it, WordPress.com got a revamped theme viewer as well. You might want to check that out too.

Search Engine Land reports that Yahoo have stopped supporting the meta keywords tag. It seems they did that months ago, which means that neither Google nor Yahoo or Bing supports it. Sounds good, let’s focus on the actual content in our search results instead…

Facebook now analyzes the status updates from Americans to see how collectively happy the nation is. They call it the Gross National Happiness Index and it builds on positive and negative words in the updates. In other words, it might not the most exact way to see if Americans are happy or not, but it is something. It is also interesting to see how people reacted to world events. The day Michael Jackson died was a sad one in the nation’s mind, for example.