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

Admit it, you’ve violated your service provider’s (email, hosting, blogging, photo-hosting, etc.) terms of services one time or another.

Nude photos on Flickr. AdSense on mature websites. Obscene photos on wiki encyclopedias. Corporate blogs on personal blogging services. We’ve seen ‘em all. Sometimes we click that feedback link and report the offense to the appropriate authorities, but in most cases, we just turn a blind eye. In most cases, after all, one wouldn’t expect a favorable response timely enough for our taste. Or perhaps we do enjoy the websites or content themselves, and would rather have them online than not.

I’d say it’s a bit more complicated than just “good” vs. “bad,” or even “right vs. “wrong.”

… the difficulty with ToS compliance is that we live in a world where companies tend to be biased and users tend to abuse–slightly or unknowingly, at least. Unlike the Force, which has a dark side and a light side, it’s a bit more complicated with all the in-between grey areas.

Quite a lengthy post over at ForeverGeek. Enjoy!

Here’s something anyone into SEO (search-engine optimization) would find useful: Google Trends. It’s a spanking new service brought to us by Google Labs (meaning, it’s still in “beta” stage, just like most other things Google) that lets users compare search volume trends across keywords or phrases (from two to five).

Say, I want to check out trends in the search volume for “blog” and the plural “blogs” for the past couple of years, I get this result:

The blue line would be for “blog,” while the red for “blogs.”

So clearly, more people search for the singular rather than the plural form of “blog,” and this trend has been on the rise ever since. The tool also marks the peaks, or high points in search frequency, and gives the details on the particular top search results during that period.

What’s great is that this tool also gives you the trends in how often the searched keywords appear in Google News items, another great way of comparing across keywords or phrases.

Another good feature is the geographic aspect of the search trends. Trends gives information on the top searching countries, cities, and languages for the queried keywords.

Now what good is this for SEO? It helps you identify which keywords or phrases are best to use, when coming up with content for in-site optimization (i.e., keyword density) or link anchors for off-site optimization (i.e., backlinks). Do check out the SEO Philippines blog if you’re interested in making your blog more search-engine friendly.

Or perhaps you’re just interested in checking out what people are looking for–Trends would come in handy for this, as well.

More information on Trends can be found on the About Page.

Okay, so there were some questions on the free . com . ph offer, and I got to provide a few generic answers to some of the inquiries. Sorry I have to add to the “conditions” (but we still don’t ask for any big thing in return). Giving something for free isn’t all that easy, I’ve come to realize.

Here are more specifics on the deal.

I’ve been making teasers and pitches on our offer for free .com.ph domains for Filipino bloggers. Well, it’s all about establishing our own Philippine ccTLD as an ideal place to be for Pinoys, and we would be shelling out our own funds just for this.

What’s the catch, you say? Well, nothing much, really–we just ask you to be active at blogging. We don’t even intend to monetize the domains, at least in the short term. Let’s just put it this way. Domains (and TLDs) are like real estate. You develop them and the value grows over time–not only the value of the specific xxx.com.ph domain, but of the com.ph namespace itself. I think you’d be pretty tech-savvy enough to understand these concepts (especially since you’re reading my blog!) by now.

Recently, I’ve been explaining that the .com.ph domain and web hosting would be free for at least a year. People have been picking up on the idea (i.e., Manuel, Yuga, Erwin, Raymond) and some are quite concerned about sustainability and continuum, in that a user might be expected to pay up in the second year. Let me clarify that it would be for at least a year, and the deal will not necessarily end there.

So actually there is a small catch, but it’s not really a condition wherein we will be asking for you to give us something in return. The only condition is that the recipient would be using the domain actively–that is, you would continue to actively blog on the com.ph domain given to you (say, a couple of times a week would be great, but there’s really no set frequency or number of postings). In that case, we will continue to provide domain and hosting for free, for as long as the sites are active (I’m going on record on this)!

I’ve already got a handful of inquiries. If you are interested, please do send me an email at jangelo (at) racoma (dot) net (yes, .com.ph will work, too) with your blog URL and a few summary stats, such as how long you’ve been blogging, and your uniques, visits, and pageviews for the past couple of months–we’re interested in knowing a bit more about your blogs and blogging activity, of course.

Update: Check out this post for further details. We’re just about to set up the initial set of bloggers. If you’re interested, again, do send me an email.

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Okay, so I tried testing the approximate speed of my SkyDSL connection last night via speakeasy speedtest. I got 543 Kbps down and 479 Kbps up. But that’s in the middle of the night, with everyone on their ZZZ’s. I was probably sharing the pipes with only a handful of other night-owls and zombies.

And I think I forgot to turn off the http proxy access on my browser.

I tried testing again just around two this afternoon, and here’s what I got. With proxy disabled, I got a download speed of 508 Kbps and upload speed of 222 Kbps.

I then activated the Sky DSL Proxy (http://proxy.skyinet.net:3128) and got these results: 500 Kbps down and 448 Kbps up.

So the download speed plays around 500 Kbps–pretty close to the 512 Kbps the published data rate. Understandably, upload speeds are slower, but in this case I was surprised it even surpassed the 200 Kbps mark (upload speeds are usually less than half or even less than 20% of the download speed). And with the http proxy, it’s likely that the proxy server’s upload speed is faster, hence attaining the near-500 Kbps rate for upstream transfers.

Not bad.

Of course, the speeds are only estimates, but then again, I would say such tests are a good proxy of how fast your connection really is.

I think this is something Smart WiFi (now branded Smart Bro) users should try.

Update: As of May 2007, Bayantel / Sky DSL has been reportedly really slow. I’ve experienced this myself, and I’ve published a copy of an email I sent to Bayantel CSR here:

Bayantel / Sky DSL is Really Slow These Days