Another meme! Fellow blogger Kim Castillo tagged me for this one and asked, “What are five revealing things about you?”. Since I don’t really have a personal blog, I’m going to do this here and try to keep it related to our theme.

1. I don’t handle stress very well. Right now, I’m having some dizzy spells. Two weeks ago, I had a nasty sore throat that required me to take some antibiotics. I guess it’s due to my sleepless nights during my programming activities that began last month. To add to the chaos, I have many other sites and responsibilities to attend to. I also need to get at least 7 hours of sleep or else I’ll be too stressed out to do anything.
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Here’s a neat addition to Ratified.org:

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Google’s Aileen Apolo tagged me for this meme: What are the 3 signs you see happening now that make you say, “it feels great to be Pinoy”? Thanks to the Macalua who started this meme.
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I’ve been using Quantcast since last year and all I can say is it has the potential to give Alexa a run for its money. That is because Quantcast doesn’t rely on a silly toolbar for its ratings but instead analyzes data from advertisers, publishers, ISPs and advertising networks, which I think is the most sensible solution. Besides giving your site a rank, it studies your audience, gives their age, ethnicity, income and education. Where else can you find out that your site attracts a younger, primarily male, Asian, college educated crowd?

Here are some analyses of popular Philippine sites:
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I got a rude awakening this morning.

The newspaper headline read:

Peso surges to 45.87:$1

Gone are the days when the exchange rate was 55 pesos to a dollar. Ugh. Just when my earnings were rising. But I guess it is a double-edged sword. The economy is doing well (although debatable) which naturally means that the local currency must improve too. Being a Management Economics major, this basically means that imports become cheaper thus decreasing manufacturing costs and on a macroeconomic level, inflation. But on the other side of the fence, dollar earners such as exporters face stiffer competition and thus experience a drop in earnings.
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Sorry if I sound like a 10-year-old. But if you’re as big a fan as I am, you gotta check out the new theatrical trailer of the Transformers movie! It’s hot as hell!!

Thank me later. Go here.

Janette Toral came up with a new initiative of naming the top 10 emerging influential blogs in 2007. I think this is a great idea because it will help us discover new blogs by looking at other people’s lists. Janette is also raffling off $100 to ten lucky bloggers. So what are you waiting for? Read up here and blog about it.

Now, as for my list, I wouldn’t exactly call them influential, but I make it a point to read them everyday because I like their content and writing style.

Off the top of my head, here they are in random order:
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Here’s a quick update for Ratified.org:

1. I’m currently trying to single out a bug that fails to update a blog’s Technorati rank. When that happens, it tends to screw up the blog’s history profile.
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Lately I’ve been tinkering around with the endless possibilities of the Technorati API. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I added a section in Ratified.org simply called “Meme“. In a nutshell, it’s a blog meme that tracks the current and most popular stories in the Philippine blogosphere. The story’s relevance is measured by its age and the number of other Filipino blogs linking to it. I used Technorati’s API to track all the stories from select blogs. I admit that it does seem Digg-ish and Techmeme-ish, but what the heck.

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I’ve been following Benj’s progress at the SEO World Championship for quite some time now. I and several other SEO Philippines members even handed him some link love to help out in our own way. Two days ago I became a bit anxious if he was really going to win. Even if he was consistently on top, we can never tell how the standings would end up knowing how unpredictable search engine results are.
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The new Google PageRank updates are now reflecting on our toolbars. Thanks to the SEO Philippines message board for the heads up. Again, Google has been kind to me. Ok maybe too kind. Besides maintaining my directory’s PR 7, all the top categories have garnered a PR 6 each, including a good number of lower categories. My two other blogs, Darn Slick and My Davao City both shot up to PR 5. It’s also great to hear that a lot of Seo.ph members earned some PR gains on their sites.

I see Google PageRank as a “please factor’ that I like to look at on my toolbar every now and then. I tend to just work on content and backlinks and leave it to Google to judge if I’m doing a nice job. Other sites link to me not just for the sake of it. They link to me because I give them good reason to — great, original, interesting content. If that reflects on my PageRank, then wonderful. A high PageRank does go a long way in SEO terms — you get crawled more frequently, thus keeping your cache fresh, you get a better chance of ranking higher for keywords you’re targeting and as a result you get higher traffic. I’m an SEO junkie, so don’t blame me for liking PageRank or any kind of rank for that matter.
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