Ms. Aileen Apolo of Google.com will be in Davao City from June 29 to July 2, 2007 for a series of talks and meet-ups. If you’re a businessman, SEO practitioner or blogger residing or just happen to be in the city, check out her schedule of events:

June 29, 2007 (Friday)
Marketing Your Business Online
Presentation by Google and Yehey.com for SME’s
2:00 PM to 5:30 PM
Department of Trade & Industry-11 Conference Room
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Yahoo! Photos is officially scheduled to close down on September 20, 2007 to give way to their other photo sharing service, Flickr. A sad, sad day for its 30 million plus users. What is more sad though is there is no intelligible way to migrate your pictures to Flickr. They simply tell you to redownload your pictures to your computer or purchase them in a CD and go somewhere else. Curious though that they didn’t recommend Google Picasa. Come to think of it, it does make sense in a way. If you have a thousand pics uploaded on Yahoo! Photos, there is no way it will all fit within Flickr’s 10mb space limit. And Yahoo! Photos is BORING. I think it’s become a big burden on Yahoo! that they just want to get rid of it and focus on making real money from Flickr.
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After buying my HP desktop a few months ago, I’ve been scouring the Internet for antivirus programs that are compatible with Windows Vista. I use Active Virus Shield (AVS) for my laptop, so naturally I would install it on this new desktop. Unfortunately, at that time it wasn’t compatible with Vista. So I opted for the pre-installed Norton Internet Security that came with the unit. Now that the two-month trial period had ended, it’s now asking me to pay for the program. Perfect timing because I desperately wanted to get rid of it because it was slowing down my computer. I revisited the AVS site but it still did not have the Vista-compatible version. So I searched Google for active virus shield vista. Ah, good thing I did. The Download Squad features the latest release of AVS that is Vista compatible. I found it odd though that the official site did not carry it yet.
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I’ve been slacking a bit on maintaining this blog. Before I recently upgraded to Wordpress 2.2.1, my version was 2.0.4 that was released a year ago. Not even hacking this blog on my birthday would force me upgrade! I dunno what kind of bug bit me, but I suddenly had the urge to upgrade everything.

After successfully upgrading Wordpress, I went through my plugins list. It was only then I realized that I had five active plugins that I wasn’t even using and one plugin that’s been waiting for an upgrade for two years! If you’re wondering which plugins I use, here they are:
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I’ve been given a hard time practically all my adult life for sleeping late at night. Thanks mostly to my forward-thinking relatives who believe that waking early is the key to success in life and staying up late is the root of all evil. I think that’s just absurd.
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I’ve decided to give my blog a major facelift using my Darn Slick Gadgets theme. I just realized how easy it is to customize this theme. By changing only a few things, it gets its own unique look.

Take a peek at the Mindanao Bloggers Summit blog, Lit Girl, Shop Chicks and Darn Slick. See what I mean? I’m going to offer a .psd file in a future release so users can put their own unique background image.

Looking for my Hedcut Photoshop tutorial? Somehow that post got clobbered in the search engine results. Well, I’m writing this to take my rightful place in the serps! I really had fun creating this tutorial. Hope you learn something from it!

First of all, I apologize for the delay as I have been busy lately with some projects and a job I’m applying for. The lack of time simply did not allow me to update my plugins.

Anyway, here’s something that everyone’s been clamoring for. I understand that guestbooks tend to get a lot of comments, that’s why many suggested that I add a paging feature. Actually there’s a plugin that does that, but on the downside, the guestbook templates don’t pick it up.
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From my experience of running a web directory and blog directory, I’ve come across dozens of blogs that join these so-called link “trains” to increase their Alexa and Technorati rankings. Some are also in the illusion that it will increase their Google PageRank. At Ratified.org, I know for a fact that a bulk of those in the top 20 participate in such schemes. Had I excluded them, Bryan Boy would easily be #1. What happened to that plan anyway? Well, I decided to shelve it for now.
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Always makes me feel good to see Filipinos coming up with cool online applications. Recently, Eugene Villar released Lakbayan, a quiz-type app that rates how well-traveled you are in the Philippines. Being from Davao City, ironically I have not been to many places here in Mindanao. I’ve actually been to more while I was living in Manila. Heck, I’ve been as far as Quezon Province where I spent 3 days with some of my classmates. It took us 6 hours and 3 different rides to get there. I also frequented Subic, Tagaytay and Clark often with my dad.
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Migs Paraz interviews me in this cool meme. I’m becoming addicted to these meme-things. They’re irresistable!

Migs: Having built your own search engine, what do you think of Pinoy search engines? Do they still have a purpose given that everybody uses Google anyway?
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For a couple of years now I’ve been looking around for talented people here in Davao who have the potential to make an impact in the blogging world. Not necessarily to make big money, but to have a medium where they can have a big voice. So far, I’ve invited three people, one girl and two guys. Sadly, the girl is the only one who remains dedicated to her blog. That’s Kim Castillo, the author of the rockin’ Southisms blog. Anyway, I’ve gotten another girl on board recently, but right now we’re still working on her blog so I can’t reveal the site just yet. There’s another girl I’m trying desperately to convince since last year. But there’s a problem — the domain she wanted is already taken.
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