racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

My blog stats are going through the roof.

According to my webalizer, the J Spot had 127,959 page views from 36,741 visits by 12,749 unique visitors for the month of October.  That’s a daily average of 4,127 page views from daily 1,185 visits.

That’s a 28.5% improvement in terms of page views over September, and about 38.5% improvement in terms of unique visitors.

Previous months’ stats:

• September 2005


• August 2005

This month saw the most unique visitors in a month, but with less actual visits than August or September.  This probably means less repeat visitors (why? don’t you guys like my stuff?).  But with the most page views, this means the site’s visitors also had a fun time navigating around the J Spot’s pages.

Top search result was Cassandra ponti with over 800 queries hitting the J Spot.  And that doesn’t include the keyword permutations.  In all, the Pinoy Big Brother related searches were dominant, and made up about 90% of all queries hitting the site.  Other keywords/phrases used include:

• Chx Alcala


• Chx Alcala Pics


• Pinoy Big Brother


• Sam of Pinoy Big Brother


• Cassandra Ponti Pics

Wow.  People are hungry for PBB-related stuff!  Personally, I usually refer to Retzwerx and Showbizpinoy for PBB matters.

On the geographic aspects, 48% of readers were from the Philippines, while 32% from the USA.  The rest were from Canada, Japan, China, the UK, South Korea, Australia, India, Singapore, and the occasional highly-anonymized reader from the CIA HQ in Langley, VA (ok, just kidding).

Ad revenues are better than the previous months.  Fellow problogger Abe told me that my site’s already AdSense optimized.  I just need to improve further on the traffic.

October’s been a great month.  I’m sure more good things are in store for November.

From Smartmoney.com

Bill Gates acknowledges that Google Inc. has become a fierce rival, but he’s also quick to add that he’s not afraid of the upstart search-technology giant.

Bill can be as optimistic as he can.  He’s sitting on gazillions of dollars in stocks and cash.  And Microsoft is still the 900 pound gorilla in the software indsutry.  If I were Bill, I’d retire and spend the rest of my days helping out the poor.  Wait, hasn’t he already semi-retired and went on to help out good causes?

My post today on Pinoy.tech.blog: OpenOffice.Org more bloated than MS Office?

Yes, most of us here are FOSS advocates, but it seems disappointing that our beloved office suite doesn’t fare too well against bloatware’s (read: Microsoft) own offering in terms of resource utilization.

Yes, oOo is geared more towards the budget-conscious.  But the fact that piracy here in the Philippines is still quite rampant, makes both products “free.”  Also, I can argue that more than 50% of the Filipino computing population is still into slower machines.  Hence, given the performance considerations, people might rather go for MS Office.

As of today, I’ve removed the coralized links to the audio files for the J Spotter Podcast.  I received reports that the download was timing out, and I concluded it could be a problem with the coral-cached audio.  So here are the direct links to the files.  Hopefully, I won’t run out of bandwidth.

• MP3 - 128 kbps Hi – 6.74MB CD-quality MP3


• WMA - 64kbps Hi – 3.42MB CD-quality WMA


• WMA - 32kbps Lo – 1.73MB Low quality WMA

If you have a podcatcher (a.k.a. a podcast client), you may also subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheJSpotter.

There are discussions (my bro’s blog, Inq7.net, Manila Bulletin 1, Manila Bulletin 2, the rest of the blogosphere) that the Pinoy Big Brother theme song, Pinoy Ako by Orange and Lemons, was ripped off from a 1980’s song Chandeliers by the Care.

I tend to agree with my bro on this one.

Orange and Lemons claims that the song was indeed inspired by Chandeliers, but there was no copyright infringement perpetrated, since the similarities ended with the guitar intro.

According to ONL vocalist Mcoy Fundales, there was no other similarity, even in the melody.

But I got to listen for myself, and I can say you’d be frickin’ tone-deaf if you don’t think Pinoy Ako’s rhythm approximates that of Chandeliers almost to a T!  Not only is the guitar intro a sound-alike, but the rhythm and structure of the two songs do approximate each other (check out the bass guitar riffs and the drums).

Listen for yourself.

• Pinoy Ako – from tristancafe.com
  


• Chandeliers – from nestlepoell.net
  

Don’t get me wrong.  I find Pinoy Ako a catchy and ear-friendly (though too frequently played) tune, and the kids love it!  But it just seems so eerily similar to Chandeliers that you can’t help but wonder about the intentions of the composer.

Well, maybe he wasn’t aware that his music so closely resembles another song already in existence.  Or perhaps the group wasn’t betting on their song going very popular in pop culture.

At any rate, according to the Manila Bulletin article, the recording labels owning the rights to either song don’t find any infringement.

So in the legal realm, ONL is safe.  But I still have my doubts in terms of artistic integrity.