“I was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time…” so starts the intriguing short story set in the United Kingdom and told via the Google Maps API. “The 21 Steps” by Charles Cummings is the first story of Penguin Books’ We Tell Stories, a collection of six stories by six authors and released in six weeks (hmmm, 666?). We Tell Stories aims to do storytelling using the various tools, interactive or not, Web 2.0 has to offer; looking at the two stories so far released, the first uses Google Maps API, while the second uses blogs and Twitter. Interesting, isn’t it?

Read this entry »

San Francisco just finished their turn at Earth Hour about two hours ago, and more than 17 hours after Metro Manila switched off its own lights. Earth Hour is a viral movement that started in Sydney, Australia last year and became an international affair in 2008 as 28 partner cities and hundreds more supporting towns and cities switch off lights and other non-essential electrical devices for one hour to raise awareness about global warming and climate change.

Read this entry »

I was caught unawares by the news that 99.5 HiT FM would be replaced by the old Campus Radio station. So last Holy Week, the HiT Squad signed of the air and 99.5 Campus FM started its broadcast on Easter Sunday. It should be recalled that the old Campus Radio on 97.1 MHz was reformatted by RGMA into Barangay LS 97.1 early last year and that the institutional 99.5 RT also bid goodbye (to become 99.5 HiT FM) about a month earlier than that. While HiT FM is RT in practically everything but name, the Campus FM will definitely be a step into a different direction.

Read this entry »

One thing I did over the long weekend was to contribute some more to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, something I had been doing last year. This time around, I tackled various places in Metro Manila, not just the southern portions, and I added more types of data and not just streets.

Read this entry »

I got curious as to which Pinoy blogs have the highest traffic according to Alexa. While traffic is not the only important measurement of a blog’s worth (there is also number of feed subscribers, number of incoming links, Google PageRank, etc.) it is the metric most indicative of a blog’s potential profitability in terms of ad revenue (see my earlier post about online ads). Practically every advertising scheme on the Web relies on getting high traffic. An ad program that uses CPM (cost per mil [thousand]) is directly affected by traffic—every page view translates to a constant income. Even if the ad program uses the CTR metric (click-trough rate), the site’s ad revenue grows as traffic grows even if the CTR remains constant.

Read this entry »

Two weekends ago, I finally got around to creating the locator maps of the municipalities of Dinagat Islands, the newest province of the Philippines that seceded from Surigao del Norte in 2006, for use in Wikipedia. Locator maps are maps that show the where a place is in a larger area. In this particular case, I am showing the location of the municipality within the province of Dinagat Islands. Shown below is a rendering of the locator map for the town of Tubajon.

Read this entry »

The continuation of my Groovee Playlist™ series is long overdue (see the last installment), so here’s the first edition for this year. As before, I’ll link to the Wikipedia article about the song (if it exists) as “[W]”, and to the YouTube search (or official music video) for the song as “[U]” so that you can sample the song and see if you like it as well.

Read this entry »

Connie, over at Write Life Guide, asks “Can you remember your first Internet experience? How was it like?” Well, surprisingly, given the fact that my non-work waking life is centered on the Internet, I can’t remember exactly when I first got on the Internet or what was the first web page I visited.

Read this entry »

Yes, I’ll admit that I’m having rally fatigue. So, unless our dear Madame President did some really egregious blunder that threatens to stabilize everything we Filipinos have struggled for (the ZTE mess doesn’t), you won’t see me marching up the streets and cheering Cory and Erap (a mightily strange tandem, I must say) and asking for GMA’s resignation.

Read this entry »