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

David Kirk of Tech-recipes.com has interesting insights on the “DIGG effect,” or basically what happens when your site is linked up, and gets popular in social-bookmarking / tech news site DIGG.com.  It’s something like the SlashDot effect (i.e. your server basically dies because of the gazillions of people accessing your site).

To summarize the “top 10 things webmasters should know,”

• DIGG users don’t click ads
• They don’t use Alexa either
• Traffic from DIGG doesn’t generate much discussion
• Front-page DIGG news gets lots of flames!
• DIGG generates moderate traffic, but with large bandwidth consumption
• DIGGers are more polite than Slashdotters
• Traffic is lower during weekends (figures, eh?)
• The best DIGG post about a topic isn’t usually what reaches the front page
• DIGG may not necessarily boost your Google pagerank
• Front page DIGG news items usually gets bookmarked in other social bookmarking sites

Be sure to check out the site for the analysis.  IMHO, it’s great that
people are now discussing how DIGG.com affects the behavior of web
users.

Personally, I’d say that DIGGers are usually techies or at least people
interested in tech.  Hence, whatever behaviors tech people have in
browsing would also be prevalent.  For instance, majority would likely
be using Firefox.  At least
40% would have their own blogs.  And they would likely to be
AdSense-blind.  Or if they were not, they’re not likely to be clicking
around, looking for stuff to buy thru the ads (they’d be going to eBay, etc.).

At any rate, I have yet to see a sustainable business model coming from
the DIGG effect for webmasters, especially with this analysis.

From Waxy.org:

Two years ago, I launched
Upcoming.org and announced it to the world. Today, along with my
partners Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin, I’m unbelievably proud to announce
that Upcoming.org is now a member of the Yahoo! family.

What’s Upcoming.org?

Upcoming.org is a collaborative event calendar, completely driven by people like you.
Enter in the events you’re attending, comment on events entered by others, and
syndicate event listings to your own weblog.

Wow! Yet another acquisition by one of the giants!  They’re in consolidation mode after all!

(via DIGG)

Bayantel / Sky DSL is giving unlimited Airborne Access WiFi to its subscribers! From the SkyDSL website:

Free
unlimited Wi-Fi access in over 180 hotspots nationwide for only P500.00
one time activation fee (Wi-Fi free until July 24, 2006).

This
is interesting.  While not really free (you have to pay a PhP 500 or
approximately US$9 activation fee for access up to July of 2006), this is cheap enough for fast WiFi with wide
coverage, with AA’s 199–and counting–hotspots around the country (list here).

Similar to news of Google’s planning to setup free WiFi in the San Francisco area (and possible U.S.-wide? DIGG links here),
this is welcome news to WiFi users, especially freelancers and writers
who tend to work at cafes with their laptops.  No longer would users
have to spend PhP 100 (~US$ 2) per hour for prepaid AA Wingspan cards or PhP 950 per month (~US$ 17) per month for an AA Horizon
subscription.  Of course, casual WiFi users may not feel much of
the benefit for now, but this encourages WiFi use among those with
unlimited access–and it’s good for business for the cafe and mall
owners, ain’t it?.

It’s also a great deal considering the cheapest Sky DSL
subscription package goes for only PhP 899.00 (~US$ 16).  That gives you
192Kbps of bandwidth, burstable to 384Kbps.  Not great by western
standards, but here in the Philippines where dial-up is still the most prevalent means to connect, that’s cheap enough for a
broadband connection, even on the low side of the bandwidth spectrum.

(via Pinoy.tech.blog)

I’ve been a BNC
forumer for as long as I can remember.  I consider BNC to be a
great source of information on mobile phones and tech, whether they be
telco rumors or phone hacks/cracks.  I was very active with the
forums until I got hooked on blogs and blogging.

Last year, BNC moved from its own ebuyncell.com hosting to proboards, a free bulletin board hosting service, and renamed to BNC Temp.

Now the admins have setup “BNC Extreme Edition” at bnc-xe.org, but users are having problems accessing the site and logging in (Admins say it’s a DNS problem).

I just recently checked on ebuyncell.com/forums and it’s been up all along for quite some time now, under the name of ebuyncell.com Tech and Gadgets Community.  It’s a whole new look, and with new names (though some familiar names are still there).

And there’s this banner announcement on BNC Temp saying

i’d rather stay here….sa original…..buyncell…..bnc temp…and now bnc xe……….http://www.bnc-xe.org/

I wonder what’s been up with the BNC community lately.  I haven’t
taken the time to read through the latest discussion threads, but I
sense something’s amiss.

Any news?

From Pinoy.tech.blog: Airborne Access is set to re-launch its service for an annual fee of PhP 1,500 for unlimited WiFi connectivity!

This is an insider info from one of the account executives of
AirborneAccess. They’re re-launching their WiFi service for an annual
subscription service of only Php1,500 a year.

Yup, that’s
Php1,500 for unlimited WiFi access on all their 188 hotspot locations
across the country. Damn right, that’s a big bargain.

Hmm … Interesting.

Question now is speed and latency, with the congestion arising from an upsurge in users.

But if the network can support it, why not?  This may as well be
the ISP and DSL killer.  We’ll all just get to sit at our local Starbucks
sipping coffee while we waste away browsing the Web with our
unlimited WiFi accounts.  Ah, heaven!