Ok, apart from that I think the iPad is a thing of beauty. I can already see myself going to meetings and taking down notes with it. Teehehe. Not that it would happen soon as I’m about to be leaving the rat race once again. Sad but true.

But aesthetics aside, what’s really the compelling argument for wanting to have an iPad? It doesn’t multitask, doesn’t support flash, and it doesn’t have any camera for videos. Based on those alone, a lot of folks are already shouting bloody murder and proclaiming to everyone who will listen that they’re not touching the device with a 10 foot pole. Hmmm.. I think those guys were just caught in the moment. I believe it’s too early to say that.

For bookworms, this device makes Amazon’s Kindle like something from the stone age. The flipping pages, the ease of download, the bookshelf? Gad, how can one resist? There’s also the photos feature. The blazing speed with which photos are shown is awesome, plus the slideshow, and the 1024×768 resolution. Man, I could already see the iPad docked on my office table showing pictures of my hot girlfriend in a slideshow while I work.

For me, no matter how Apple hypes all the other features and functionalities of the iPad, I do think its multimedia functionality is reason enough to buy. The rest are just gravy. Well that’s speaking as a third world geek where the availability of free wifi hotspots for internet browsing and email is scarcer than a taxi in Makati on a Friday afternoon.

Of course we can also talk about pogi-points but that’s beside the point.

eBook reader, photo frame, movies. Those are enough for me, really. Now if I can just get my hands on $500 bucks, everything would be perfect.

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See the picture above? It’s compelling, don’t you agree? You really can’t take your eyes off it. It warrants a second and a third look. In my case, I just had to take a picture of it. :)

I live in a third world country so a sight like that is not at all out of the ordinary. In a huge way, Infolinks is kinda like this picture. Visitors to my sites look at the black fonts in a plain white background and they get jolted out of whatever reverie they’re in when they see those double underlined green words.  Some folks can’t help themselves that they just have to click on the links. It’s hypnotic. Which is why in most days, the clicks I get from Infolinks far outnumber the clicks I get from Google Adsense.

As a long time blogger and a trying hard, second rate, online money-earner wannabe, I have experimented with a lot of ‘potential’ money makers and so far, when it comes to ease of integration with my blogs, Infolinks is one of, if not the easiest one to implement. Some similar contextual ads have the same ease-of-use functionality but they will make you wait for some time before you finally see the ads. With infolinks it’s like a plug and play device that you just stick into your computer’s usb drive, and you immediately see the results a few seconds later. I’ve never had to contact their support for anything. Well, except of course the email I sent to confirm that this little blog actually was one of Infolinks website of the month for January 2010.  Ahem.

My only regret with Infolinks is that I didn’t jump on the bandwagon sooner. I was one of those ‘hypnotized’ by some of my blogging buddies’ green underlines but I didn’t really took any immediate action to join the program.  It was only until later when they were raving about how in most days Infolinks has been outperforming Google Adsense in their blogs that I did. I must say that from what I’ve experienced so far, Infolinks gives other contextual ad programs a run for their money.

These days, I’m now one of those who rave about Infolinks and have been preaching its gospel to the very few people who follow my blogs. I just hope that for those who have yet to join, once they read this post and see the picture of a toilet bowl sitting on a man’s head, they will;

No. 1 – Immediately sign up with Infolinks, and not feel the urge to do–

No. 2

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I did a little research on what would be the best netbook to buy, but in the end I decided to go for the HP Mini because of one distinguishing factor, the keyboard. If you take a look at the Mini you will notice that its keyboard is similar to that of a full-sized laptop. This is very important for me because I need to come up with a lot of articles week after week after week. And although the other netbooks boast of better features, I just really need something that has decent enough speed and RAM plus the standard 1.66Gb of processing speed. How much do you really need for word processing and facebook anyway?

The HP Mini was gorgeous when I first beheld it! I couldn’t wait for the lady to hand me the netbook so I can already connect it to SM Megamall’s wifi. Alas when you’re buying things in credit, you can’t really expect things to be superfast. Anyway, when I finally got my netbook, I was really hungry and wanted to go home.

After a quick bite, I tried out my apartment’s wifi connection on my new Mini. It worked perfectly! I can even work from downstairs where my living room is! I slept that night with a silly smile on my face. The following day however, the HP wouldn’t boot up. The freaking system has crashed! A required DLL library cannot be found it says.

Unfortunately for me, I was on my way to my province when it happened so I couldn’t bring it back to Sillicon Valley to be fixed.

Fast forward 10 days after when I got back from the holidays, I was asking Sillicon Valley’s security guard who I should approach regarding repairs of a defective unit. The guard pointed me to compuserve, which was across Sillicon Valley. I pleaded my case before the all-powerful technicians of this warranty service shop but all I got was “Sir, that’s a software problem so that’s not covered by the warranty.”

After explaining that I only used it for a day, they finally said that they will reinstall the software and will only charge me for the labor cost. I asked how much, they said P1250. WTF!? That much to install a frigging software? I get a defective software bundled with the HP Mini, and when the software conks out after a day, I get charged an additional P1250. Wow, that’s quite a cutthroat deal.

I almost shouted at the technician when I told him to pack everything and give me my notebook. There was no way in hell that I’m gonna pay that much to have my software re-installed? CompuServe? Seriously? Almost any moron including this one can install a windows OS blindfolded these days and youre charging me that much? Talk about highway robbery if ever there was one.

I huffed and puffed towards Sillicon Valley and asked to talk to their manager. Fortunately I saw the technician who prepped my HP Mini and immediately told her what happened. She also mentioned software is not covered by the warranty but she said the amount they’re asking is too much. I think she saw how vexed I was because she called another technician and asked him to take a look at my notebook and try to do a recovery.

After a long while, it looked like my hard disk needs reformatting because they couldn’t fix it anymore. I told the guy not to worry about, I’ll just buy an external DVD player and I’ll just take it from there.

And that’s the story behind the resurrection of the HP Mini. For sure we didn’t start in the best of terms but I kinda feel that we’re gonna be very good friends. As for that blasted CompuServe office, man those guys are pirates. I still can’t get over the fact that they would charge me that much for such an easy job. Oh well, good luck with that.
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Ok, I’m not really doing something nefarious this time but I am very much glued to the internet every day, working on another stand-alone yet on a subdomain blog. It’s been such a fan thing to do that my vaunted Alexa Rank in my major blogs have suffered. But I guess that’s alright considering that my new sub-domain blog has just been going up and up.

I’m talking about my very own blog about facebook cheats. Yep I’ve joined the bandwagon and you know what, there’s still a lot more seats in there! My facebook centered blog can be read at http://facebookcheats.thirdworldgeek.com. I just seriously started adding a lot of articles around the third week of December and the results have been really good. I’m up to an average pageviews of around 1200/day with unique daily visitors averaging around 400 in the last couple of days and still going up. I told you it’s so much fun!

This facebook blog is currently focusing on Ninja Warz Tips, Tricks, and the occasional cheat. So if you’re playing Ninja Warz this is a good resource for you to visit. If you’re not, THEN WHY THE HELL NOT? Where else can you play a game where you meet lots of people and you get to kill all of them? loll.

Anyway the site’s traffic is sourced mainly from search engine visitors. I’m just starting to realize the power of the Thesis Theme when it comes to SEO. Only a couple of minutes after publishing an article and it’s already indexed by Google. Freaking awesome! The blog is also featured heavily on Mahalo and some of those aggregator sites like zappafly and others.

Subscription to the site is increasing by the day as well, as of last check, my email subscribers have reached 171. Not a really big number in any case but still, with not much marketing, just pure unadulterated content writing, I’m very satisfied with it.

I’ll probably go back to posting the usual stuff when everything’s not so crazy anymore in the office but right now, this baby here is hogging all my time.

Hey visit the blog some time. Cheers!

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I did a lot of research on where to buy my Canon 7D so I can get a really cheap price. My usual bargain hunting ground for anything electronic, tipidpc.com came out with a few suggestions but eventually I got convinced by a seller from sulit.com.ph. He was selling a Canon EOS 7D body for only 82K which is a real bargain considering that if you go to the more established stores, they’re selling it at around 99K. That’s a whopping 17K in savings.

I immediately contacted the seller and we agreed on a date and venue where he will be handing me the camera. Take note that most sellers in tipidpc.com or sulit.com.ph do not have their own physical stores, most of the time they’re garage type of sellers where they just keep their inventory somewhere and just deliver everything by hand or through forwarders depending on the item.

I’m not sure if it was a good thing or not but when I consulted a photographer friend, he was wary about dealing directly with a direct seller instead of a more established store. His main concern was the warranty. Most direct sellers will only offer either a personal warranty or a supplier warranty. If you go for the manufacturer warranty there could be some added cost.

Which was what happened in my case. I asked the seller if the price already covers the Canon warranty, he said no, and that it only covers his supplier’s one year warranty. He said that if I want Canon’s 3-year warranty, I would have to shell-out an additional 7k. Major ouch.

I was feeling a little gung-ho then so I said what the heck, I don’t need no warranty, I’ll just pay for the annual clean-up and stuff like that. The day of the delivery however, the seller called me and said they don’t have a stock as of the moment and it could take a whole week before they can re-stock! Well ain’t life grand!

As I was already itching for the Canon 7D and Christmas was fast approaching, I tried to contact the usual players in the domestic market for photography equipment. The famous Henry’s of Quiapo wasn’t picking up their phone so I called Camerahaus. They said their Canon EOS 7D body costs 99K as advertised. But when I asked if that was their final price they said they could probably lower it to 93K. I pushed a little bit more and asked if they could lower it some more to 90K and mentioned that I’ll be paying cash. After some whispered moments with the manager (I think), they agreed. The great thing about it is that the 90K price we agreed on already covers the 3-year Canon warranty! It was pretty sweet.

To make the long story short, I handed over my wad of saved money, got my spanking brand new Canon EOS 7D camera and was out of the Camerahaus store feeling like a million bucks.

I’m a total nub when it comes to DSLR cameras so if you’re looking for a review on the Canon EOS 7D, you may want to check out DPreview.com.

I’ve been using my new camera for a few weeks now using a borrowed kit lens and some snub nosed lens and it’s absolutely gorgeous. The sound it makes after a shot, the clarity of the pictures, the HD quality video– it’s awesome. Pretty heavy too, but really it’s a wonderful wonderful gadget.

Now if I can only save some more money to buy me a bazooka type telephoto lens, that would be awesome. Oh, and another lens for landscapes would be nice as well.
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I was doing my usual thing a few hours ago when I came across Junald’s website; junaldpascua.info. It’s not really a rocking site aesthetic wise, as a matter of fact it leaves much to be desired if I have to be brutally frank about it.

However, when I started checking out his stats, I almost fell out of my seat! I was actually in Pan De Pugon in Butuan City having to endure another sleepless night due to insomnia and what I saw completely eradicated what little chance I had of sleeping while it’s still dark.

Junald put in a little widget on his site which allowed me to view his stats in real time. And I’m telling you folks, that little site of his was making a killing in the search engines, it’s unbelievable! I did a little more digging and I kinda figured out what he’s doing. And I must say, well done! Junald demonstrated that with a little effort, even a relatively new site can get numbers like you won’t believe.

I’m quite convinced that his site is a one-man show, and to stand toe-to-toe with other sites (traffic-wise) that are bigger and with obviously more manpower than his website is freaking awesome. And if the info I got in the internet is correct, this guy is from the same town where I grew up!

Polomolok represents! Woot!

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Such is the case in terms of SEO contests.  Most international SEO competitions are won by people who have banded together to achieve a specific goal, which is usually to get the top spot in Google on a particular keyword. This is the same thing when we blog.  Even without us knowing, by networking with other people, by befriending other bloggers, we are already collaborating, at least on the most fundamental level. Apart from the usual relationship formed out of such networking, we are hoping that reaching out to other bloggers will have a beneficial effect on our blogs either through personal visits from our network or via referrals.
 

Why Collaborate?

 
It only takes a meeting of the minds of two or more bloggers to collaborate.  There just has to be a single objective that the collaborators will work on.  An example will be creating a news site.  This is all the rage nowadays.  A group of bloggers agree to contribute news and stories they find interesting (or sometimes specifically assigned) and post it in a common blog.  The idea is that with a lot of bloggers contributing regularly, the blog that they’ve created grows exponentially more than a blog that was created by a single blogger.  It can be a profitable exercise that is definitely worth your while.  Sometimes when you’re blogging independently for so long, boredom sets in and having a group of like-minded individuals that you can communicate or work with makes blogging a whole lot more enjoyable.
 

Collaboration Points To Consider

 
Choose the right persons to collaborate with.  This is the first and most important requirement when doing collaborations.  Ensure that the people you are trying to work with are people that you can work with, people that you are comfortable being around with, and more importantly people that can work.
 
Thresh out the monetary consideration early.  Although collaboration usually happens between friends, the business side of the activity has to be resolved early.  This is to ensure that there won’t be any misunderstanding when your collaboration starts making or losing money.  Arguments over money is one sure way to flush your collab project down the drain.
 
Everyone has to pull their own weight.  You don’t want to have freeloaders in your group.  Make sure that everyone contributes.  Serious collaborations can be labor intensive so everyone has to do their own share.  If you’re not contributing anything or not serious with the collab, man up and leave the group.
 
Appoint somebody to take charge.  There has to be at least a semblance of order in a collaboration.  Although fun is a major component of collabs, it wouldn’t be very fun when you’re not seeing any result.  Having somebody who will prod the group members to do their assigned tasks is very helpful.
 
Meet regularly and brainstorm on how to make things better.  Regular meetings ensure that all the things you’ve outlined, all the things that you said you’re going to do is actually being worked on.  This is also a good way to update each other on what’s happening.  Of course this can also be a very good excuse to socialize and get a breather from the wife or girlfriend. J
 
Celebrate your successes, learn from your mistakes.  No collaboration is not without problems.  Those who quit on the first sign of trouble are not really serious to begin with.  Likewise, make sure to celebrate whatever milestone you’ve achieved with your blogging collaboration.  A couple of beers would be fine,  a couple of buckets—awesome!
 
I’m sure there are a lot more things to consider but these points should be enough to get you started.  One thing to remember though, this collaboration thing should not be something that would make you lose your identity.  You still need to maintain your individualism especially with your blog.  The worst thing that could happen is if by being too absorbed in your collab projects that you’re no longer doing your own thing.  Always remember why you wanted to collaborate in the first place—and that is to break the humdrum existence of individualized blogging.
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Two reasons to look forward to Christmas;

Apple’s New Magic Mouse

The New 27 inch iMac

These new Apple products simply blows away any self-respecting geek’s brain.  It’s amazing how these products can be very, very sexy.  I’m actually at a loss for words to describe how excited I am about these products.  These babies have completely rearranged my wishlist for christmas this year.

There’s no need to waste words here.  Just watch this Apple video and let gadget lust wash all over you.

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Matt Mullenweg however says you shouldn’t be and this is why.

I recently helped a friend upgrade his Wordpress account to the latest release. It took quite a bit of work because he was still on version 2.3.3 which means we had to install the Auto Upgrade plug-in and start from there. If your blog is running much recent versions of Wordpress, then it’s just as easy as clicking on the update now that show when you’re in your admin page. It only takes a couple of minutes and voila, you’re updated.

Upgrades or updates are there for a purpose, more often than not these upgrades are released to counter or fix a vulnerability that allows unscrupulous people to exploit such weaknesses. By installing your upgrades, which is free by the way, you remove the risk of getting attacked. And really that’s a no brainer.
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1. Spam goes beautifully with eggs, and sometimes with ham. But when commenting, spam is not kosher. When you comment, comment sensibly so you won’t be mistaken for a spammer. Don’t just say; Nice blog, or nice post, or great article, or any of those thousand and one generic comments that people say. Relate to the article, share your experience, disagree, challenge, or if you don’t have anything to say, shut-up and move on to the next article or blog.

2. Look for dofollow blogs. These are blogs that provide juice to your link. In short they give you linkjuice which should do wonders to your skin, I mean blog. If you’re not sure where to find them, you can search for dofollow diver in Google.

3. Once you get to those dofollow blogs, where appropriate, strive to use your keywords instead of your name. Also, instead of just putting in your website’s url, try and put in the url of the page you want to rank high in Google’s search engine. This my dear friends is called deep-linking. You link to a page in your blog, and the entire site gets a boost as well.

4. PR, PR, PR. As much as possible, comment on blogs with high PR. These sites’ linkjuices taste better to search engines.

5. Most importantly, don’t just comment anywhere. Comment to sites that are within your niche. A niche is the central theme of your site. If you write about sports for example, go to sports blogs and comment. If you don’t have a particular niche and you just write about anything. Well, bloody hell, goodluck with that. Seriously though, just look for the closest blog you can find that is related to the web page that you would be linking to.

The blog you are looking for then is a high PR do follow blog that is within your niche. Easy enough, yeah?

Here’s one commenting strategy that you could use as well.
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