Pinoy Blogosphere

• Do you really need to learn programming to be successful online? No, but learning to code in PHP can help you a lot. McBilly explains why on his latest post.
• Just learned from Dexter of TechAtHand that some blogspot blogs are being marked as potential spam blogs even if they’re not. One example is the blog Jehzlau Concepts by Jehzeel Laurente.
• Adsense recently required all Adsense publishers to have a site-wide privacy policy page in their blogs. Whether you’ve already created one or not, the question is, do you understand why you have or need a privacy policy?
• Need more traffic for your blog? Jam talks about her experience on getting more traffic from StumbleUpon and shares 4 ways on how to get that traffic to your blog.
• Win a Premium FruitfulTime License from J Angelo Racoma’s first blog contest. It’s so easy to join, just answer the question he posted and leave your answer via a comment.

Around the Web

• Don’t want Google or other search engines to index your images? Hack WordPress has this short but effective tutorial on preventing search engines from indexing your images. This method is advisable for blogs or websites that use a lot of custom images and don’t want it to be spread across the world wide web for others to get or use.
• Wanna build a Quad Core desktop but have a tight budget? Jon Lee’s latest article will show you how you can build a Quad Core desktop for $500. You can really save a lot if you buy the parts and assemble it yourself. If you can’t do that, you can ask a friend or someone you know and still save money.
• Do you spend a lot of time watching television? If so, you are wasting a lot of your valuable time. Why not blog instead? Katy points out four reasons why blogging is better than television programming.
• Andy MacDonald writes over at BloggingTips on how to become successful in blogging by making an impression. Good read if you want to learn more on how to improve your writing/blogging skills.

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.

Recently I joined a project called the 2000 Bloggers. Tino Buntic was the person behind this project. The purpose of his brain child was to gather 2000 Blogger’s photos into one page, creating a montage. The only requirements to join the list was a blog url and photo of the blog author. Tino never asked or required others to link back or post the 2000 Bloggers into their own pages or blogs. Me, I did it on my own. I thought it would be cool to have those blogger’s montage on my blog. I volunteered to provide the code to others who wanted to display it on pages all for good, clean fun.

I just found out today that Tino has discontinued the project. He also took down the page that displayed the 2000 Bloggers. The reason? Because several bloggers are crying “foul” and stating that Tino’s project was a chain blog, spam blog or link farm. How can they accuse Tino of that? They didn’t even know what his real intentions were. However, Technorati also has viewed this as a negative effect on Technorati rankings turning them upside-down.

We’re listening to these concerns. In the same manner in which we decline to index blogs that don’t meet our quality criteria (AKA “splogs”), we’re loath to indulge these “chain posts” (“pain chosts”, ouch). Your voice is the most important one in the blogosphere’s distributed conversation. To dissuade chain posts from submerging your voice in their dilutative effects, we’ve updated our indexing systems on an experimental basis to filter out links of this nature. We all love photo collages of faces; we’ve had them, albeit on a smaller scale, on the Technorati site since last summer. However, “join us and use these links” memes such as 2000 Bloggers is really a disservice to rank measurement systems and thus this decision to change our indexing policies in that regard.

We hope these changes and many others that we have cooking will help you tap into the blogosphere to find the conversations, information and people you’re looking for.

I’m sure Tino Buntic never meant it this way. I’m sure his intentions were good. I admit that this thing did boost my Technorati rankings and also others who joined it. But if indeed the Technorati ranks were affected, I’m sure in a month’s time all would be filtered out and be back to it’s previous state.

I also can’t blame Technorati if they view it this way. They are also trying to protect the integrity of their ranking system. Technorati is known to be spam-proof and I guess this is one way of preventing future problems by preventing chain blogs or splogs (spam blogs) from taking over Technorati.

So is the 2000 Bloggers project a chain blog? a splog? a link farm? Maybe, maybe not. Others can say it is, others say it’s not. But it wasn’t intended to be that way. It wasn’t intended to game Technorati or Google. I think it just got out of hand and that Tino didn’t foresee any of these issues coming up. Too bad coz it was a really good idea. Good luck Tino, we’re waiting for your next big idea!