Ambot ah!

A self-portrait I took after we had our retreat in Saint Clements Church, kind of symbolic perhaps. That’s just me ^_^
It’s quite easy to make actually, just had to play around with the burn and dodge tools in photoshop.

I was reading through my technorati subscription to the keyword “Iloilo” when I read about this funny story by Ilongga Cook on how a kongkee siopao saved her friend from hip fracture when she was hit by a motorcycle on the highway. For those who don’t know, Kongkee is one of the popular old restaurants located in downtown Iloilo serving siopao as their specialty.

• How to give your low-end Canon digital camera RAW support - Teaches you about this new firmware upgrade, which adds new features to Canon cameras. It’ll surely enable you to do a lot more things with your camera, thats why I’m going to try it with my Canon Powershot A700 myself.
• 10 Questions to Ask When Taking a Digital Photo - Digital Photography shool lists the a very comprehensive guide to shoot like a pro.
• Creating a Panorama with Photoshop and Photomerge
• 100 Things I’ve Learned About Photography - A very informative list on how to improve your photography skills

• The reason I’m ignoring your blog - Lists 5 reasons why you’re blog can be ignored during the first visit. The list is quite simple and straightforward but most bloggers will find it very enlightening.
• Ten Timeless Persuasive Writing Techniques - I believe bloggers need to be good at being persuasive, people generally read blogs to learn something and bloggers, in part, should write in a way that will be able to have an impact on readers.
• 21 Ways to Build a Better Blogger
• How to pick up a Western Union Quick Cash AdSense payment? - Recently google has enabled western union quick cash payment to Philippine-based published, Yuga writes a guide on how to pick up your earnings from western union outlets.
• http://headzoo.com/alinks - creates a a link automatically when word is mentioned in pages and posts. Really helpful in providing your visitors with better site navigation.
• Inside Adsense: Introducing video units - Google integrates adsense with youtube. Make money with youtube videos!
• How to Easily Prioritize your Projects - factors to consider what to prioritize when having a lot of projects in mind

• Peso to hit P25:$1 in 5 years - A presidential economic adviser made this forecast based on the increasing dollar inflows by OFWs. He seemed quite optimistic about it and said that exporters should improve their competitiveness on their own and not rely on gov’t subsidies. For me, there’s a lot more industries that will be adversely hit if the peso further strengthens to that level, which is almost half its current level. A strengthening of the peso isn’t necessarily a good thing for the economy, what investors and businessmen generally want is a stable currency because a fluctuating currency means higher risk. A higher risk will definitely turn off investors. A strengthening of the peso would also mean that the value of the dollar will decrease and this in turn will decrease foreign investments in the country (including “sunshine” industries such as Outsourcing and Call Centers) because investors would get less pesos for every dollar they invest. OFWs will also have to suffer getting less pesos for every dollar they send to the Philippines and less pesos means less spending power of OFW-dependent families and less money circulated from the spending of these families. My income from online advertising will also be affected since most advertising programs use dollar to payout publishers, too bad for me My take on this is that most of us has been adjusted to the level of the peso that we have now any abrupt changes will have a negative impact on a lot of industries in the economy, not just exports.

• RP’s first: Iloilo town bans, criminalizes plastic-use - This is a really good development. I hope the whole country will adopt what Santa Barbara town is doing. Even the U.S. uses paper bags for purchases instead of plastic ones.
• Power problem saddles RP | Camp Delgado PECO bill reaches P2M mark, electric bill 4 months unpaid - The high price and unreliability of power is one of the biggest problems of Iloilo, the rates is one of the highest in the country at P9+ per KW hr.. Even gov’t offices are having a hard time catching up to the high electricity bills, what more the average Ilonggo? I hope our Gov’t officials esp. will do everything in their power to uphold the best interest of their constituents.
• I’ve read in Skyscrapercity that a greenwhich branch will open Iloilo Supermart - Mandurriao branch. I’m so happy with this development since it’s just 5 mins away from my house.

I’m currently on the continual process of improving Explore Iloilo. I’ve just finished some of SEO modifications in the title, meta tags, post tags, and comment pagination of the site. I’m also slowly updating the watermark of most of the pictures at my flickr account to prevent other people from posting them without giving credits.

I’ve also added a Dinagyang 2008 section in the main page to prepare for the said event and is testing if “Text Link Ads” will be able to give me some extra income.

After reading this post, I’ve gained more ideas on how to improve Explore Iloilo such as:

• Online Surveys
• Subscribing to more SEO and Monetizing Blogs
• Links Bait
• Making Videos
• Social Networks (friendster, myspace, multiply)
• Create paypal account, which means I have to get a visa/mastercard first.

I hope they work, but more important I hope I’ll be able to do all of those in just a short period of time.

Now that I’ve expanded my subscriptions to SEO and Marketing blogs, I was able to read very informative articles that I know will help me in some way or another.

• The real secret to SEO - talks about how ol-fashioned hard work works best in sustainable SEO and not just use quick get rich schemes to climb to the top of search engine rankings. I always am tempted to obsess in the link hype, but now that I know that what I’m doing all along is going to be more effective then I guess I’m just going to avoid them. So far, it’s been a very slow process but I see a gradual progress.
• Sphinn - I’ve heard about it before but it’s the first time I visited their site and I regret that I didn’t do it earlier. I thought that it would be similar to other online bookmarking social services but Sphinn is actually focused solely on Internet and Online Marketing related posts. Plus they have RSS feeds to even individual categories, which makes it a treasure trove of new ideas for me.
• YouTube does a Revver with AdSense - If its really true then I sense a big thing to happen in youtube. It might even mean authentic videos/episodes to be posted in youtube by media companies themselves.
• The Website Marketing Mind Map: Internet Marketing Made Easy - looks very geeky but it’s one of my most informative reads yet
• The importance of a page 1 listing and how to get it - has statistics on how many clicks a page 1, page 2, etc. get per keyword search
• 10 Reasons to be Interested in Youtube - gained an idea on how to gain more traffic
• Using Flickr for Search Engine Optimization - Interesting read for flickr users

(Just thinking: If I can only direct this effort to Nursing, I hope next time around I’ll be able to post Nursing Stuff for a change.)

This November 9, the Heritage Conservation Society, which I have recently become a member of, will be conducting a seminar entitled: “Philippine Towns & Cities: Reflections of the Past, Lessons for the Future.” The event will be held in Sarabia Manor Hotel and time is unsure to me yet.

The seminar is aimed to teach local government units the proper care and utilization of heritage structures. It raises the issue of some heritage structures being (even unintentionally) destroyed because of modernization.

November 9 is a friday, which means I have a scheduled class in the morning and afternoon. Attending the seminar is important to me because I really want to be an active member of the HCS. Being absent in class isn’t an option for me, so I’m I just hoping that it’s going to start in the evening or late afternoon or that it will be sembreak by them.

Inquirer.net has posted an article about the said event and the article tackled about “recycling” heritage sites. It mentioned originally non-socially relevant old structures that have been transformed into productive heritage sites.

In London, a decommissioned power plant along the River Thames has taken a new life as the popular, elegant Tate Gallery of Modern Art.

In Mexico City, the Cemento Azteca plant is now an environment-friendly children’s museum—El Papalote.

Singapore has salvaged a cluster of decrepit shop houses, turning Boat Quay and Clarke Quay into an eclectic mix of high-end restaurants, al fresco dining, dazzling bars and pubs. [The Daily Inquirer]

I’m raising this issue because there is a heritage building in Iloilo that is threatened to be demolished to give way to a P350M Government and Convention Center. I’m talking about the Iloilo Rehabilitation Center (IRC), the building beside the Iloilo Provincial Capitol. It was built without aesthetics in mind but the functional purpose of being the provincial jail. Now that the IRC has transferred to a new building in Pototan, the old one building has become quite useless, so utilizing the lot in a more productive way seems apt. To an Ilonggo point of view, even though heritage conservation is important the old IRC is a non-socially relevant building. It would have been a totally different scenario if a very important historical figure spent some jail time in the old IRC but I guess it’s just not the case.

Getting in context on what’s happening outside Iloilo (even outside the country), where a old power plants are being recycled as art galleries and cement plants as museums, the old IRC could have other alternative uses too like being an extension of Museo Iloilo, which is in need of a bigger space to display its exhibits. The Gov’t Building and Convention center could be built in some other place, where there is ample space (esp. parking space).

It would be a shame to lose part of our heritage, even if it just seems to look like a “dot”. I hope I and many officials in LGUs will be able to attend this seminar.

I’m trying an experiment: to know if social networks such as friendster, myspace, and multiply can help drive traffic to Explore Iloilo. These online networks pose so much potential when it comes to promoting a website, product, or service (that is of course aside from promoting/selling yourself to millions of other users) and it would be a positive development if it did because it’ll open even new opportunities.

I’ve already opened an account in myspace, friendster, and multiply. I’ll only limit myself to these three because they have the most Ilonggo/Filipino users based on my knowledge. My aim is to have as many contacts/friends/groups as possible.

Here are the individual profile urls to each site:

• MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/exploreiloilo
• Friendster: http://www.friendster.com/exploreiloilo
• Multiply: http://exploreiloilo.multiply.com

As you can see it’s not finished yet, I’m still working on it. The email address of the account for these three is: chymera00 [a.t] yahoo [dot] com, I hope that you guys will add these account to your contact/friend list as well.

The aforementioned is of course just the secondary gain of this experiment. The primary gain is the promotion Iloilo. It would be great if more Ilonggos would be able to realize the beauty of their hometown.

Aside from the social networks thinngy, I also am developing an idea for a linkbait. I’ll post an update when its done but here’s a sneak preview of what it is: