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.

Here’s one interesting observation I’d like to share. We ForeverGeek contributors sometimes post links to our more substantial articles on DIGG.com, to share and possibly get some inbound traffic (as with what other writers/bloggers are fond of doing). We have had our share of DIGGs, and it was great. Traffic usually rises to absurd levels (but of course, we make sure our servers could handle the load) and we get great feedback from readers and other blogs.

So far, we’ve already had four stories that were frontpaged, according to this query. Yes, this includes the DIGG link to the podcasting article I authored (which I’m quite proud of).

But if you tweak the search query to “include buried stories,” you get nine frontpaged stories, including older ones. But what’s intriguing is that this type of query would include quite a number of stories posted after the FG-DIGG issue where DIGG’s credibility as a reader-driven site was questioned. In particular, that one story was frontpaged by the sheer number (and speed) of DIGGs, but was quickly “buried” because of the sensitivity of the issue.

After that one, no other FG story had actually appeared on the DIGG front page, but the query for frontpaged stories (including buried), as likewise linked above, would say otherwise.

Something seems amiss. The search query classifies one story as “frontpaged,” but the article doesn’t actually appear on the frontpage. Now buried stories are prominently marked as “buried,” and I can understand why those will not appear on frontpage. But what of those classified as frontpaged, but not marked as “buried?” Why aren’t they appearing on www.digg.com?

I am very much confused why the DIGG search query classifies some stories as “frontpaged,” but “buried,” but without the appropriate “buried story” marking.

DIGG founder Kevin Rose mentioned something on the TWiT podcast about moderators actually choosing which stories to get frontpaged (here’s a recap I wrote for FG). So this means among other factors in the algorithm that decides which stories are sent to the frontpage, there are human “editors” who get to select their picks.

So in the end, one might ask, is DIGG.com really the user-driven website it publicizes itself to be?

Once a story has received enough diggs, it is instantly promoted. Should the story not receive enough diggs, or is reported, it eventually falls out of the digg area queue. Digg works because a large group of people actively promote good stories to the homepage. Since this site’s content is user-driven, it is up to YOU to contribute.

I used to be such a DIGG fan. Somehow, I still am–I still find DIGG’s ideals to be something to root for, especially given the collaborative nature of the Web today. But for me, DIGG.com has lost its magic!

You may have noticed the change since yesterday. My venerable hosting provider, Abe of Ploghost, and I were in close coordination over the course of a couple of hours last midnight in my switching to our new racoma.com.ph domain. Still some minor glitches as of this posting (I’m trying to make racoma.net work perfectly in sync with the com.ph domain, too), but hopefully all will be solved within a few hours.

Other sub-domains have also moved:

* ba.racoma.com.ph
* vince.racoma.com.ph
* pau.racoma.com.ph

A new one, just added:

* alanjr.racoma.com.ph

It’s part of our “use COM.PH” campaign! We will be registering .com.ph domains for free for active bloggers, along with a year’s web hosting, SEO assistance (for those who want to be search-engine friendly, and who probably have popular blogs already), and blog set-up for your CMS of choice (we do recommend WordPress).

Do keep tuned in for more details. We will likely start off with those with active blogs and preferably with considerable readership. If you’re interested, email me your monthly stats for the past two months, along with your preferred .com.ph domain, and I’ll see what I can do for you.

It’s now online!

Of course, you still get this site (the J Spot) when you key in www.racoma.com.ph on your browser–it’s currently a domain parked on my host. I’m working on transferring everything (including the blog subdomains) here.

It’s all part of the free COM.PH package I wrote about previously.