I’m miles away from the Leopard store launch in Greenbelt (allegedly, all the Apple Powermac employees are in Leopard spots make up). But this is the most I can give. I videotaped the countdown to Zero Hour.
Was honestly expecting something grand to happen to the site. But still, I’m such a geek. Such an Apple Geek.
Juned: It was fun
Jayvee: Is that the correct word?
Juned: It was fulfilling!
We talked about blogs, blogging, and using blogs as a teaching instrument in lesson plans. According to the teachers, high school students are very familiar with Friendster blogs as their means of self expression. Why not channel this enthusiasm into a learning tool in the classroom? The teachers were very receptive and although the session was short, we’re working on phase two of our school penetration program. We’ll be working with the top journalism students of Lagro National High School and help them use blogs in a number of class projects. The possibilities are numerous. [Blog and Soul]
Thank you to Arpee and Juned for working on this project. Do you want to volunteer your time to talk about blogs to students? Click here.
Putting things in perspective, I believe the issue about the Google PR numbers game is at most, a relative discourse. Yuga says that bloggers should not rely on Google PageRank and Riz exposes the idea that PageRank is a wonky statistic.
Let me give an analogy of how Google PageRank works in the light of print industry. In the beginning, a lot of media buyers would rely on ONE thing when it came to advertising on print. That THING would be the claimed circulation figures that a publishing sales team would present forward. Anybody could claim a readership of 10,000 copies nationwide but in reality the print run receipt would only amount to 1,500 copies. How bad! How evil! But why is this done? There would be such arbitrary things to consider such as pass on readership figures which were all transcribed from an in house formulae which nobody had any idea how it was calculated.
Magazine stand visibility was another thing. So many of the same mag issue adorned the wooden displays at bookstores. Did it mean that the magazine sold well? No. Not really. It could simply mean that the particular issue was overstocked. There was so much market visibility BECAUSE there was very little conversion to sales. And magazine stands wouldn’t care less anyway as they stock on consignment.
What’s my point? There are so many things going on when it comes to determining what really brings influence forward. A magazine may only have 1,000 readers but what if their ads are all targeted towards the market? Advertisers still don’t realize this because the truth is, they don’t want to, and don’t have the time to dwell on such things. That’s the broker’s job.
The Google PageRank issue is proof that the online publishing / advertising industry is still in its infancy. PageRank, Technorati links, actual traffic … these are but figures which are arbitrarily defined by the industry as measures for influence and reach. But there has to be a system somewhere – a system that’s easy to understand and Google has made that system a no brainer for advertisers to grasp, using a scale of 1 to 10. And hey, who can contradict the number 1 company in the world? That’s advertising made simple.
Today is October 26 2007 in Philippine soil. In about a day’s time, Apple will make its biggest operating system announcement in the form of Leopard. The countdown on the Apple website current reads 17 hours to go. By that time I’ll be in Davao for the Mindanao Bloggers Summit, which means that I won’t be able to watch the keynote. I mean really, its not Leopard that I’m waiting for – great as the software is, this isn’t a scoop. It’s the anticipation of the new line of MacBook hardware that Steve Jobs MIGHT announce. I can hear him say it now:
“Mac OS X Leopard is available now for a retail price of $149.00. Oh and just one more thing … the new line of MacBooks will ship with Leopard starting today.”
But what about the local launch of Leopard? Well, I have the official date from the email invitation. Mac OS X Leopard will be launched on November 8 2007 in the Philippines.
November 8 2007.
November 8 2007.
November eight two thousand and seven. Venue and time to be announced.
See you MacHeads there! 🙂
Aaron Brazell, our technology manager at b5media confirmed a suspicion I’ve kept to myself. A few weeks ago, Cellphone9.com dropped from a solid Google PageRank 6 to a 5 and then today, a 4. Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger also dropped from a towering 7 to a measly 4. Same goes for Brian Clark’s Copyblogger. Must be disappointing to admit it, but A Bugged Life, though not linked to the network dropped in PR from a 5 to a 4 a few weeks before Google declared jihad on blog networks. Funny though, because as soon as my personal blog’s PR dropped, it made Technorati front page.
At b5media, we are weighing how we want to respond to this. Either we give in to Google and let them dictate what we do and have the unenviable position of losing pagerank and possibly advertising dollars, or we take the stand that quality content is quality content regardless of Google and that our content will speak for itself. We still produce millions of pages of content per month. We still have respect in the community. We still have advertisers recognizing that these sites are valuable assets to leverage to get their campaigns out on. [Technosailor]