Google introduces stylin’ new themes for iGoogle done by famous artistic icons such as:
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Expect a Yahoo! office in Manila by the second quarter of this year, says newly appointed general manager Jojo Anonuevo (of Mobius fame). Claiming to capture 85% of the 22 million-strong Filipino Internet population, Yahoo! is bent on dominating the online advertising market in the country, which it says will make up 5% of the total advertising spend here. Aside from that, the local Y! office will work on generating more content for Yahoo.com.ph through their content partners, which will most likely include Inquirer.net and Yehey. Yehey is rumored to start selling advertising for Y! since last year.

Smart business move on Y!’s part. If they really want a taste of the market, it’s a no-brainer to go to where the action is. Most definitely, Google has their work cut out for them. Will I be blogging about Google coming to the Philippines soon? Wait, they chose Malaysia right. Probably not in the near future.

Let’s try to hypothesize a scenario wherein Google tries to outbid Microsoft for online portal Yahoo! I think Yahoo! would take Google’s offer in a heartbeat, knowing that they are more culturally similar and both, in their own seemingly quirky ways, are pushing the limits of innovation on the web. Microsoft, on the other hand, stands to lose the only chance they have of carving a chunk out of the online advertising market that Google dominates. It will continue to make big bucks out of its software business, but all of that won’t mean anything when business, advertising, entertainment and should I say word processing are quickly shifting their gears to the Internet.
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There’s buzz floating around that Google is going to build a data center in Malaysia. In a discussion I’m following on Slashdot, some commenters are posting why or why not they should consider the Philippines.

Here’s what they have to say (and comments thrown in by me):

THE YESSES:

1. Filipinos speak impeccable English. - I agree that most of us can speak decent English, but impeccable? Don’t think so. But for sure we speak way better English than Malaysians (peace, la). This is still one of our strongest points over our neighboring countries.

2. Labor is cheap in the Philippines. - Not too sure, because considering the high-caliber engineers they require, Google can also have it cheap in Malaysia and India, if not cheaper.

3. The Philippines is a very Westernized place. It would be easy for them to conduct business here. - I’ll have to disagree with this one. Look at China.

4. Filipinos love Linux. - Ok, this guy is stretching it.

THE NAYS:
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I couldn’t resist it. I’m a bit vain that I google my name every once in a while. If you’re like me, you can check the Google toolbar if it includes your name in its query suggestions. If you don’t have the toolbar installed, get it from toolbar.google.com. The trick is to slowly type your name and wait for the toolbar to give you suggestions.

See your name in it? Kinda cool right?

I noticed a lack of localized gadgets for us Filipinos using iGoogle, so I came up with a few Google Gadgets that deliver the freshest headlines from our top online newspapers.

Click on each image to add them to your iGoogle page. Enjoy!

The Google blog revealed that they are currently beta testing a new Google service — Google Knol, which appears to be a direct competitor to Wikipedia, About.com and the much-hyped Mahalo:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

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Google turned 9 years old yesterday, and what better way to celebrate it than to roll out the Western Union Quick Cash option for Adsense publishers!

IMO, this is far more convenient and virtually worry-free compared to receiving it through mail. Knowing all the thefts going on in our corrupt local post office, I hope this sad chapter of our online lives will finally be over. For now, supported countries are the Philippines, China, Malaysia, Pakistan, Romania, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Colombia. Google will expand it to more countries but did not specify when.

For instructions on changing your form of payment to Western Union Quick Cash, head over to Abe’s post.
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It’s the big G’s 9th birthday! Wishing you more success and Adwords clients!

Noticed something new on my Google Adsense panel.

Google now gives Adsense publishers the ability to create a whitelist of URL’s that are permitted to display Adsense ads under their client ID. After only a few hours of activating it, I already found 7 sites illegally using my ID. Activating it also means that ads displayed on disallowed sites won’t be counted as impressions or clicks. You won’t earn anything nor will the advertiser be charged.
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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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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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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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Anyone else seeing a change in the Adsense homepage?

This is a BIG improvement from the old one:
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The new Google Webmaster Central brings together all the tools webmasters need to monitor and optimize the way the big G treats their sites. I think that it’s about time they came up with this. Gone are the days when we have to search for link:domain to check for backlinks. It’s all there at Webmaster Central. Simply log on to your Google account, add your site and verify it through meta tags or HTML.

A list of my pages and the number of external links pointing to them:
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