Year: 2007

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Mostly Everything

The Narrow River of Content

Winthrop Yu, former head honcho of PC Magazine Philippines led me to this Forbes piece on how specialist blogs are stealing rich advertising from tech media – and I don’t just mean traditional tech publications, but their online counterparts also. In other words, if I were an advertiser, I’d actually see more value in putting ads in TechCrunch and Engadget than in CNET, PC Magazine and its online PC Mag website.

What?! Why the online counterparts? Because the surfing public is smarter now. They use popup ad blockers to get rid of annoying and unwanted ads that cram content into a funnel, you’d be forced to sprawl a 600 word article into 4 pages just to get more page views.

According to the article, Google Search revolutionized advertising, as searching for content in the form of products and services proved to bring in a sense of “demand” from the consumer and contextually targeting advertising to match content. Hence, Google AdSense is raking in tons of cash from just technology blogs alone.

In the “old model” of print, you’d need a publishing house and a printing press as well as your editorial, sales and marketing staff to run the business. On the web, you barely need an office. You don’t even need a sales team as the consumers themselves target ads for you via contextual search.

OK hold on. Before this post grows into a “new vs traditional media” rant, I kid you not, it isn’t. Let’s talk about traditional web sites.

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Blogger Down!

So it finally hit me. The GTalk banter of CJ telling me to go to sleep were all unheeded as she would see me online at 3PM her time, which is about 12 hours in time zone difference.

Repeated late nights online and the preference to walk around the city (instead of taking a cab) under the rain with no umbrella has resulted in me catching the flu. Aching bones, nosebleeds, fever. Haha! And I’m still up blogging! (I’m crazy!)

But seriously, In really need to get some rest and figure out how I can best organize my daily tasks so I don’t end up working till 3 AM.

In this light, I’d also like to thank everyone who attended the first blogger food critique class I organized with the help of Christine and Markku. You can view some of the photos and experiences at Noemi’s blog.

I’m off to bed, with a blanket and drugged.

P.S. If you’re looking for really refreshing dalanghita juice (our local green orange), Juned’s family sells by the bottle. You can buy them in juice form or in the concentrate. I took five glasses so far and I’m feeling much better.

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Mostly Everything

Coming Soon: Yoga on the Nintendo Wii

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Been reading a lot about the upcoming peripherals for the Wii. One such interesting product is the Wii Fit peripheral that converts your Nintendo Wii into a personal trainer. Gamespot reports:

As we saw with the Reggie, you can’t play Wii Fit without first letting the game calculate your BMI. This figure is apparently a realistic indication of fitness based on height, weight, and age. Once the game has this information, it can set goals to help you lose or gain weight and reach your optimum BMI level. [SOURCE]

The Wii Fit will be available in the US come early 2008 but will debut in Japan sometime late this year. I guess if you’re a couch potato gamer and want to really work those flabs, Wii Fit might be a good way to reach a compromise. The game also comes with some yoga exercises:

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As well as “games,” the early demo build of Wii Fit includes some yoga and balance exercises. On the yoga side, you need to adopt poses such as the half moon pose, the tree pose, the single-leg stretch, and the sideways twist. The idea is to adopt the postures for as long as possible, stretching more and more as you progress. When you’re finished, you can see how well you stayed within the optimum zones with a line diagram that shows how much you shook and stayed within the parameters. On the balance front, there are two-legged and one-legged exercises, as well as an overall body test; but our limited time in the Nintendo booth prevented us from checking these out.

Hmmm, something Jane would like perhaps? I’m quite impressed with how the Wii has changed the way we play games. I’ve reorganized my room just to allow a wider space for me to play Wii Sports (I have a mean backswing!!). Next goal is a bigger television.

Wii Fit images courtesy of Gamespot

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Mostly Everything

T9 Advocacy: “We’ve lost one generation to TXT Speak”

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I was able to interview T9’s Marketing guy, James Young last week. For those unfamiliar, T9 is the company behind the “predictive text” software we see in most Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Windows Mobile and Motorola phones:

A campaign is being launched in the South East Asia region to address the alarming rate of elementary school kids who have succumbed to the pangs of “text speak.” Abbreviated words like “tnx”, “go der” or “w8″ have been appearing in elementary school essays and the worst thing about it is that a good number of these children don’t see anything wrong with it.

The campaign is currently ongoing, albeit silently. Wizard of Ads, the events company behind T9 development company Tegic, is helping create noise about the growing concern of “txt speak” to the younger generation. I’m only familiar with De La Salle University in Taft as one of the schools that supports this campaign.

As a parent, sibling and blogger, how much concern do you think this merits? Rico narrates the following experience:

My sister’s friend, who used to teach in High School, said that her students were using text speak in essays. And this was more than four years ago!

This should be a true concern, because I believe that properly spelling out words facilitates meaningful written communication. The problem with text speak is that it encourages lazy writing, in the sense that someone uses it to convey a message with as little effort as possible.

That’s understandable in today’s fast-paced world, but can we expect people who can’t even bother with proper spelling to express themselves properly through writing? What a waste if this was the case!

Are we unconsciously raising a generation that cannot spell right, because of a mobile phone?

[Download the advocacy brief]

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Mostly Everything

Blogger Breakfast at Portico, Serendra

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Yesterday morning, I brought my family to a mini breakfast meet up with Dine, Noemi, their husbands and Chats. My mother was quickly assimilated into the group and boring talk about child rearing and childbirth were brought up. The small meet was held at Portico, at Serendra by invitation of the marketing group of Chateau.

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