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!

EDITED: 05/10/07

What is Pagerank?

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E) –
via Wikipedia

Google’s description of Pagerank:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

For quite a while, my blog was stuck with a Pagerank of 4 but now it finally made it to a Pagerank of 5. I found out about it last week when I was checking my pagerank using iWebTool’s Pagerank checker. I’m not 100% sure how I was able to increase my Google Pagerank but I do remember doing a couple of things recently that could’ve helped in increasing my blog’s pagerank.

A couple weeks back, I came across an article about increasing a blog’s Google Pagerank. One of the tips that was mentioned was adding a sitemap to your blog or website. Since I didn’t have a sitemap for my blog, I went on and researched on how to create one. Fortunately I came across the Google Sitemaps Generator plugin by Arne Brachold. What this plugin does is it generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. Once I installed and activated the plugin, I created a sitemap for my blog then I submitted and added it into my Google Webmaster Tools dashboard.

I’m no expert but I do hope my experience could help and provide you with additional useful information. I know there are other ways of increasing a site’s pagerank and I’d greatly appreciate it if you can share it with me and my readers.

Check out Pagerank Explained for a more detailed explanation on Pagerank.

EDIT:
I’ve edited the title of this post after I was informed by jhay that Google did it’s regular PR update. I know about the PR updates but it didn’t dawn on me that my Pagerank increased because of the update, I totally forgot about the PR updates. Anyways, I also confirmed this after I read the article on PinoyTechBlog – Google PR Update Underway?.