BLOGGED PHILIPPINES

First and foremost, let me give a little background of myself. I was born in Bulacan, studied college in Manila for five years, graduated in  2007, moved to Cebu the same year and stayed in the city for about nine years now. Every year, I travel to Manila and Davao at least twice. I'm also a long time user of Waze App. What I'm trying to establish here is: I know what I'm saying. Driving in Cebu. So, there's this latest buzz about a report from Waze tagging Cebu City (or likely Metro Cebu) as the worst city to drive at. Looking closely at the published report, the famous Google traffic app uses the following indices to rank the cities: Traffic – Density and severity Quality – Road quality and infrastructure  Road Safety – Density of accidents, road hazards and weather  Driver Services – Access to gas stations and easy parking  Socio Economic – Access to cars and impact of gas prices  Wazeyness - Happiness and helpfulness of the Waze community (as...

It used to be that we can only buy apps from Google Play Store Philippines. Then there came to be books. And then finally, movies are now being sold in Google Play Store Philippines. Just go to play.google.com/store/movies to access this new feature.

I just discovered that Google is now able to track local flights here in the Philippines. By just entering the flight number, the search engine will return to you the next departure and arrival of your flight. For example, I want to know what time will be the next departure of Cebu Pacific flight 5J579. All I need to do is to put the flight number in the search bar, and then boom, you have the results. With this capability, it's now easy to know whether your friend has departed or arrived already, or whether you'll be able to catch your flight, etc. I've also tested Cathay Pacific and it worked. I tried PAL and AirAsia Zest but it seems not working yet for them. Maybe in the next few months it will be available on more flights.

Do you want to receive promo updates as quickly as possible? Well, here's a good news regarding that. Blogged Philippines is now in Google Plus social network which means that you will receive updates faster than before! How? Google Plus has this email system where every post will automatically be emailed (default setting). This is in contrast with the current Feedburner email system where it only emails at one specific time of the day. So, without further ado, here's the link to Blogged Philippines Google+ Page . All you need is just a Google Plus profile. https://plus.google.com/b/115250672230473466414/ or just click this badge:         Related articles Google+ Invites Now Working Again! (techalang.com)

It seems that Google is intermittently opening and closing the invite capability of their newly introduced social network named Google Plus or simply Google+ . Yesterday, it seems to be working after almost a week after the first shut-down of the invite mechanism. After few hours though, probably 5 or 6 hours, they closed the invitation mechanism again. Now, as of checking at (8:45 AM , Manila Time), the invite mechanism is apparently working again. For those who would like to be invited, just put a comment below. Please provide your email as well. As mentioned, Google Plus (Google+ or G+) is Google's new take on the social networking arena. It core features are the following: Circles . You can sort out your friends to different groups so as to enable you to easily limit the information you share to certain people. This is a great step with regards to privacy. Sparks. It is simply a feed of items with regards to a topic of your interest. The goal o...

Cross posted from Technology Logs . Yes, Google's Blogger.com is now up and running! This is actually my first post after the almost-three-day downtime of the popular blogging service. The outage came after Blogger's scheduled maintenance last Thursday (PHT). The maintenance was supposed to to last for only one-hour but after it, Blogger came back to read-only-mode wherle users can't upload new contents to their blogs. They also removed all articles and comments posted during the short uptime after the maintenance. Although Blogger said that they already started restoring those articles, my posted articles are yet to be restored until the time of writing.

Cross-posted from Technology Logs _________________________________ It’s Christmas day for most part of the world today and so is here in the Philippines. Crowded shopping malls, traffic roads, lanterns and Christmas lights are common sign of the busy holiday. In addition, Christmas carols are in every radio stations and music players. Since, Christmas is claimed to be a celebration of Jesus Christ’s birth, I conducted a little test to see how people do in the internet. I would like to know how internet people think in this season. I used Google Trends , a popular web stat tool that tracks down search terms inputs in Google around the world. The result is not what most of us would expect. My expectation is that the search terms would be more like Jesus, Jesus Christ, Jesus and Mary or anything related to Jesus’ birth. Ironically, Google Trends shows that Santa Claus is the king of Christmas search. From the Google Trends ’ data, the term “where is santa claus ” is the hott...

Image by Farid Iqbal via Flickr iPhone 4 Apple Inc. announced early this week the latest version of their industry leading mobile phone, the iPhone. Commonly referred to as iPhone 4, the latest model boasts the following features: - More scratch free and tougher glossy panels at the front and at the back. -“Retina Display” capable of high resolution displays even exceeding the capability of the Human Retina -New integrated antenna wrapped around the sides. - A4 chip which is more powerful and more energy efficient compared to its predecessor. -Built-in three-axis gyroscope capable of advanced motion sensing with greater precision for an even better gaming experience. - Front facing 5MP Camera capable of capturing stunning photos, HD videos, and video chats. - 2 microphones for better phone calls and audio-video recording http://www.apple.com/iphone/design/#design-video Google Caffeine Google has just announced the release of its new search engine codenamed Caffeine. Go...

Santiago, Chile—Google along with the group Global Voices honored the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) in the first “ Breaking Borders Award” held during the Global Voices Summit in Chile. The award aims to recognize those groups who fight for the freedom of expression online. PCIJ and two other groups ( Kubatana.net and BOSCO ) won the said award. According to Google’s official blog post: “The awards — given today at the Global Voices Summit where Internet activists from 60 countries have gathered — were originally announced November 3, 2009, when Google and others marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the aim of celebrating how the Internet has become a vital ally in worldwide efforts to advance freedom and political change. This is particularly true at a time when dissidents, journalists and bloggers remain under severe pressure in the online and offline worlds.” Nominated groups from around the world are evaluated by a body o...

It happened at last! Google finally break out from the Chinese command to censor web results. Yes, as they have said in January 12 that they will stop censoring search results in mainland China, they did it Monday this week. Google is now redirecting search queries from on Google.cn to their Hong Kong servers at Google.com.hk , where censoring is not implemented. Chinese regulators, on the other hand criticized Google for breaking their promise to the Chinese government. They also accused Google of connivance with US government with information imperialism. Image by Wikipedia Commons Google has been censoring search results in mainland China for several years now. But in January, after the alleged hacker attacks from China on Google’s infrastructure causing Google to lose some intellectual properties, the company has broken its silence. They announced that they will be stopping the filtering of search results of Google.cn and will just leave it to the regulators. They said that ...

Official Google Blog: Google welcomes Picnik Search engine giant Google announced its acquisition Picnik, a web photo editing service that enables you to edit your photos online without leaving your browser. Picnick is working in a cloud computing technique that enables a user to do computing processes in the internet without installing software in the user’s computer. Picnik’s acquisition is another expansion of Google’s ever-growing cloud. Picnik will join other cloud services like Google Docs. Google also said in its official announcement that they will be rolling out several changes including new features to Picnik. Most of these changes are due to its integration to other Google services. Also, they will still continue support current Picnik partners to allow current users to continue to share their photos with other websites. It is interesting to note about this announcement is that Yahoo owned Flickr is one of Picnik’s current partner sites. Google said in its statement...

On its official blog post entitled “ Serious threat to the web in Italy ”, Google denounced the decision of the Italian court convicting three Google executives in the country for violating Italian privacy law. The case was filed because, in 2006, a video of an autistic being bullied by his classmate was uploaded in Google video, a video sharing service by Google prior to its acquisition of You Tube. Though Google immediately removed the content, the court upholds that Google is still responsible for the violation of privacy law. Google plans to appeal the decision. They argue that European Union law gives web hosting companies a safe harbor from liability as long as they immediately remove illegal contents when informed of their existence. According to Google, the court decision is another threat to internet freedom. They reasoned that if all websites that allows user-generated contents like Blogger, You Tube and other social networking sites will be deemed punishable by the la...

Google’s latest service, the Google Buzz finally reached my account a day after its big announcement. Actually, on the day of announcement I’ve been hitting the F5 key on my keyboard several times even though I was well aware that Buzz will not reach all Gmail accounts for a few days after the announcement date. And, finally yesterday, when I opened my Gmail, this message appears on my browser:

Google's leading web video service, You Tube unveils a new feature for keeping out contents you or your children might not opt to view. This new feature is called the "Safety Mode". It is a filtering service designed to screen out mature contents or videos that contains graphics (example: news about violence)that is not suitable to some audiences especially children. Of course, You Tube still does not allow pornographic contents. This safety feature is just an additional way to give users a measure of control over the videos they view. You can enable the safety feature right at the bottom of the video content. There is also a feature that will lock your settings on your web browser. To know more about You Tube's "Safety Mode" feature, visit You Tube's official blog or see the video below.

Chrome on the Rise Image via CrunchBase The fastest browser in town, Google Chrome has increased its usage share. Recent report from Net Applications shows the continued growth of the popularity Chrome web browser. The January report shows that Chrome already got 5.2% market share. Late last year, the browser already knocked off Apple’s Safari at third place on the browser war. Although still far from the current second placer, Firefox, and even farther from dominant Internet Explorer, if the growth will continue at the current rate it will overtake the browser leaders in the very near future. Chrome also exceeded the Google’s expectation. They set a goal to reach the 5% mark by the middle of 2010 but they ended up reaching it earlier than expected. Google recently released Chrome 4.0 boasting the ability to hold extensions (add-ons) like Firefox. This new capability is expected to further boost the usage of the Chrome. Chrome is a very young contender in the browser war. It w...

Last week, I decided to remove all my Adgitize advertisements on all my blogs. I have three strong (in my personal viewpoint) reasons for doing so. The first reason is that my Adgitize ads don’t earn much. This is probably the least influencing factor among the three. Since I started to participate in this advertising program last December, I only earn just a few cents. ALL these earnings came from, not on ads itself but from the articles I posted during the month. Adgitize only gave me (I don’t know for other major, high-traffic blogs) 2 cents for every posted articles on my blog. I am fully aware that to earn from Adgitize you must do more like clicking on their ads to view other blogs. This is similar to the blog advertising program called “Entrecard”. You have to visit and “drop” on members’ websites to gain points which you can use to advertise your own blog. The second reason is the server downtime last week. Again, this is just a weak reason. It’s more like the icing...

Google encouraged third party developers to find and report security bugs or flaws on its one and a half year old browser, Chrome. They will give out $500 to $1337 cash rewards for those who could find and immediately report these security flaws before hackers and malware writers use them in their evil deeds. Image via CrunchBase This technique though is not new. Mozilla foundation has a successful long running reward program for developers who could find security holes on their famous browser, Firefox.

In response to Google's announcement that they will stop censoring search results on their Google.cn website after series of hacker attacks , China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said that the country's internet is open and international companies are welcome as long as they obey the law. Whether this means that they will still force Google to censor their searches is still unclear. Google has been censoring search results that contain items pertaining to sensitive national issues like suppression of freedom of expression and other political issues. The search giant received a lot of criticism when they submitted to the Chinese government policy . Critics argue that it is contradictory with the company’s core values summarized in its motto: “Don’t be evil.”

After what the company described as "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure", Google finally decided to end its obedience to China's policy on web censorship . And if forced, they threatened to leave the country and close all of its offices. The attacks were targeted on Google's email service Gmail. The hackers attempted to access the Gmail accounts of known Human Rights activists that are protesting against China's suppression of what they believe as Freedom of Speech. The attack failed to see the content of the victim’s emails, but had penetrated Google infrastructure and were able to see up to the Subject line of the emails and the date of the account creation.

Search engine and online advertising giant, Google Inc, finally unveiled its highly anticipated smart phone, the Nexus One . Image by  http://www.flickr.com/photos/abulhussain/ / CC BY 2.0 Operating in Google's open source software platform, Android , Nexus One is often tagged as a Droid Plus because of its similarity to the Motorola Droid that was released last year. Unlike Motorola Droid though, Nexus One does not have hard buttons but simply relies on touch screen keyboard like its rival, iPhone.