Blogging For Money

I am not sure how the Prime Minister’s Office got my e-mail, but I received the above e-mail, signed by Najib Razak, in my inbox two days ago. Apart from the fact that there is no reason to send me a greeting card on the occasion of Chinese New Year, I have never sanctioned or consented that my e-mail address receive any form of bulk messaging from his website. This is nothing more than a blatant attempt at spam and really, the person who decided to mass-spam this to my account should be ashamed of himself.

Which brings to the next question: If the Prime Minister was able to get my unsolicited email address, what other information was he able to obtain without my consent?

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Mark Zuckerberg meets the actor who plays the version of himself in The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg. Both appeared on Saturday Night Live (SNL).

I never thought this day would come, but it has. Google has officially announced their setting up of an office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. According to reports, Google will also tailor current products such as Google Maps, Google News and Google Translate for local markets.

Google Southeast Asia chief Julian Persaud said Malaysia has one of the “highest percentages of usage of Google’s Web browser, Chrome, in Asia Pacific” together with 17 million Internet users from a population of 27 million.

“The online environment in Malaysia is growing rapidly, with significant developments in both broadband Internet access and e-commerce activities,” he told reporters.

“We are pleased to establish our newest operations in Kuala Lumpur, where we can draw from the highest quality local talent to further help users find the information they’re looking for,” he added.

Is this a sign that Google AdSense will eventually have Bahasa Melayu language support? I sure hope it does. It will empower a significant number of blogs in Malaysia, most of which are by bloggers writing in Bahasa Melayu and a fast-growing niche. I am sure a lot of Malaysians are eagerly waiting for the day to arrive.

Hat-tip: Amanz

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After a long period of nine months, Google PageRank (PR) finally updated today! I am quite pleased with the results of this update. In fact this blog of mine achieved a PageRank of 4, which is not too bad considering how little time I spent on the blog. PageRank is important as it is among the 200 signals that are been taking into consideration while displaying SERPs in the Google search engine.

Google PageRank is an indicator on the Google Toolbar which shows how “authoritative” a website is in Google’s view. Since a major update for the Google PR indicator takes place for only a few times a year, it is of no surprise why webmasters wait anxiously for every round of PR update. Last year, the most recent Google PageRank update took place in April 2010. Since then, there were minor Google PR updates but no real major update, which is very unlike the usual case.

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I didn’t see it coming but when it hit me, I realised that I absolutely love the new redesign of Namcheap.com. In fact, the redesign is quite long overdue….they should have done this way earlier.

Here is the web design of Namecheap, prior to 2011.

This is the new redesign, conforming with current web design standards and Web 2.0 trends.

Despite the release of fresh air, I don’t understand why some people are complaining about it. Its quite beyond my ken to understand why anyone would dislike the new redesign and prefer the old, drab look.

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The owner of a so-called “PPS Killer” blog aggregator recently visited to this blog threatening this blog owner with a “ban”. Unfortunately for him, Project Petaling Street has been modified to accommodate only blog pings. That makes it different from other standard installations of Pligg. Not trying to toot my own horn here, but PPS has many things which other blog aggregators (most especially a certain “PPS Killer” *snigger* hosted on a UK server) do not have.

Among its more interesting features are as follows.

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There has been rumours swirling around after slides of a Yahoo! meeting was exposed, suggesting that delicious.com, a very well-known bookmarking service will be shut down. Naturally I was worried about the issue as I myself am an active delicious.com user as well. However, since the news was not officially from Yahoo! I decided to sit back and await an official confirmation. As it turns out, I was not disappointed. Yahoo! has finally come out with an official statement saying that they are not planning to shut down delicious.com, but will consider selling it instead.

No real reason for me to panic, after all. I will still continue using delicious.com until further notice.