Hope you folks enjoy this week’s edition of the Weekend Roundup!

Blogging

• 6 Random Networking Tips
• The Rockstar Guide to Getting More Traffic, Fame, and Success
• How “Best Of” Posts Can Help Your Blog
• Most Bloggers Forget This Simple Rule. Do You?

WordPress

• WordPress 3.0.2
• Everything You Need to Import and Display RSS Feeds with WordPress
• Add Extra Security To Your WordPress Blog with AskApache Password Protect
• What’s Coming Up in WordPress 3.1?

SEO

• 9 Step SEO Checkup Using Google Webmaster Tools
• 5 Alternative Google Search Plugins (FireFox)
• Top 10 Must Have SEO Extensions for Google Chrome
• Has Google Shot Itself in Foot With Recent Changes to Search Pages?

Social Media

• Why Social Media is Inseparable From Customer Service
• “Less Followers” Is The New “More Followers”
• Social Media Ethics: Competitor Relationships Should also be Disclosed
• Using Social Media to Help Missing Persons

Technology

• Microsoft Research Develops Zozzle JavaScript Malware Detection Tool
• Google Algorithm Discriminates Against Bad Reviews
• IBM chip breakthrough may lead to exascale supercomputers
• Attack of the Trojan printers

Gadgets

• Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 128GB USB 3 SSD (Toshiba HG2) Review
• DARwIn-OP humanoid
• Nooka Zub Zayu watch
• LaCie Hub4 is One Sexy-looking SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Hub

Pinoy Blogs

• Lenovo IdeaPad G460 Review
• A Cool Contest Before November Ends
• HowTo: Automate your torrent downloads with utorrent
• Nikon Great Lens Sale December 6 to December 31, 2010

JaypeeOnline Weekly Recap

• Gowalla 3.0 Integrates Foursquare & Facebook Check-ins
• WordPress Swag Store Now Open
• Yahoo! Top 10 Searches for 2010
• $3,500+ Christmas Giveaway
• WordPress 3.0.2 Security Release
• Mozilla Labs F1 Social Addon
• DeLorean DMC-12 USB Flash Drive
• Lenovo IdeaPad Y560 $530 Coupon

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or want your article or find an interesting story that you want to be featured in the next Weekend Roundup, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page.

From small personal sites, forums, school & university websites, large corporate websites to government websites – thousands of websites get hacked, maliciously attacked and compromised with spam and bad content each day. In an effort to provide webmasters with more useful information, Google will soon be sending more notifications to webmasters via the Webmaster Tools Message Center.

From the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google’s search results. If it pertains to a hacking or abuse issue, the notification will point to example URLs exhibiting this type of behavior. These notifications will run in parallel with our existing malware notifications.

Starting this month, Google will notify webmasters about more potential issues they’ve detected, including:

• Spammy or abused user-generated content
• Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
• Suspected hacking

Here’s an example of a suspected hacking notification:

These Google Webmaster Tools Message Center notifications will be very useful and helpful to webmasters and bloggers like me. If you don’t have a Google Webmaster Tools account, I strongly suggest that you get one. If you already have a Google account, all you need to do is visit the Google Webmaster Tools website and login.

Aside from these new message notifications, it offers a lot of useful tools and services for any webmaster or blogger. If you’re site gets hacked, having a Google Webmaster Tools account will be very useful because it will specify which part of your site is having or causing the problem and provide you with the necessary steps to fix your site.

Anyways, I know some of you have been waiting for this part. Here’s this weeks roundup of links about blogging, technology and gadgets from all over the web including some news from the Pinoy blogosphere.

Blogging

• Are you familiar with sitemaps and the Google Webmaster Tools? If not, then you should read Blogsessive’s detailed post on how to build a xml sitemap and incorporate it with Google’s WebMaster Tools.
• Are you addicted with blog stats? Dr Nicole of Kitchen Table Medicine shares 10 tips for stat addicts to help you kick the habit and make better use of your time. via Problogger.
• Weekend is almost over and still no word about the release of WordPress 2.7. Anyways, that shouldn’t stop you from getting ready for it, right? Here’s a list of 10 WordPress plugins that will help you test drive the new features the upcoming version on your blog.
• WPZoom has compiled a list of WordPress Rockstars, people who have contributed a lot to the WordPress community. Great list!

Gadgets

• Good news for Nokia fans here in the US. The Nokia N85 will start shipping this coming week and will cost you around $556.
• Unwired reports that Motorola will be cancelling the RAZR/Ruby line of phones. Reports also say that they’ll be ditching the Symbian UIQ for the Android. So I guess it’s both good news and bad news, right?
• Trying to catch up with Asus, MSI recently released the MSI Wind Box. This tiny black computer attaches to a VESA-mountable monitor and converts it into a all-in-one computer.
• Looking for a nice Christmas gift for your kid? Check out this Wall-E laptop designed for kids. I believe this would also be a nice collector’s item.

Technology

• The guys of Dev Team have successfully ported Linux to the iPod Touch and the iPhone. Future plans include porting Google Android. via Engadget.
• Michael Arrington of TechCrunch talks about the 3 reasons why netbooks aren’t good enough.
• Here in the US, people change their computers every 3 years on average. With all the thousands of computers being disposed do you ever wonder where do all those used computers go?
• Black Friday Tragedy: Wal-Mart employee dies from stampede – A Long Island Wal-Mart employee died when people came rushing in for Black Friday sale.

Pinoy Blogs

• Arpee Lazaro talks about his recent “experience” during a product launch and how he was “treated” by one of the event organizers. PR agencies in the Philippines should learn from this experience. Hopefully this doesn’t happen again. via TechAtHand
• Marhgil Macuha shares his review of the Nokia N78. Haven’t seen this in person but it sure looks like a pretty nice phone to me.
• Jehzeel Laurente explains the meaning of the word “nyok”, which is gaining popularity in Plurk and the Pinoy Blogosphere. Nyok!
• Wii rip-off? CD-R King, a popular media store in the Philippines has released a game console called the TV Sports Game. via Atma Xplorer

JaypeeOnline Weekly Recap

• 50 Best Inventions of 2008 – Time Magazine’s list of the best inventions of the year.
• WordPress 2.6.5 – Latest WordPress release that fixes a XSS expoit and three other bugs.
• HowTo: Recover Windows Vista Drive Icons – A step-by-step guide on how to recover the Windows Vista drive icons
• ASUS Eee All-in-One Touchscreen PC – Asus latest product. A smaller and cheaper alternative to the Apple iMac and HP Touchsmart PCs.
• Are You Ready For WordPress 2.7? – Read this post to find out if you and your blog are ready for the upcoming version of WordPress.

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or want your article to be featured in the next Weekend Roundup, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page.

Thanks for your time and hope you guys have a great weekend!

Btw, most people know or call this as a “reinclusion request” but Google refers to this as “reconsideration request“. Why? Because not all penalized sites or blogs get removed from Google’s index so reconsideration is more accurate than reinclusion. Got it?

Here are the steps you need to follow to file a reconsideration request:

• First, go to Google Webmaster Tools
• Sign in with your Google account. If you don’t have one, then you’ll need to create one.
• Once you’ve logged in, click the link that says “Request reconsideration” at the right side of the dashboard



• Specify which site you want to be reconsidered and don’t forget to put a check on the checkbox.



• In the blank space provided below, write down what you did, the measures you’ve taken to fix the problem/mistake, and that you won’t do it again.



• Click on the Request reconsideration button and you’re done.

Wasn’t it easy? Of course, you’ll have to make sure that your blog/website doesn’t violate any of Google’s quality guidelines. Once they received your request, they’ll send a message that goes like this:

We’ll review the site. If we find that it’s no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we’ll reinclude the site in our index. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request. We do review all requests, but unfortunately we can’t reply individually to each request.

After that, all you can do is wait. There’s no way of telling how long it will take and I guess it varies for each account or situation. I also don’t know how many times or how often you can submit a request. What I know is that it could take several weeks or even months before you could get an answer or result. So just do what you can and hope for the best.

Was your blog’s PageRank recently penalized? Have you submitted a site reconsideration request at Google Webmaster Tools? Was your request granted or denied? Please share your experiences, thoughts and opinions on this matter. We’d love to hear it.