ajb{log}

From my 319 subscriptions, over the last 30 days I have read 19,662 items, starred 64 items, shared 131 items, and emailed 43 items.

Here are my January 2009 top most read RSS feeds:

FriendFeedLinks – Home
Hacker News
Engadget
Gizmodo
Google Video – Top 100 New Videos
CrunchGear
The Inquisitr
Startup Meme
Boing Boing
YouTube :: Most Viewed Videos – Today
Design You Trust. World’s Most Famous Social Inspiration.
VentureBeat
Lifehacker
TechCrunch
FeedMyApp
Dvorak Uncensored
Tech Blog
Design Float / Popular Entries
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
KillerStartups.com – all
Cult of Mac
FirstShowing.net
Mashable!
Css Creme
ReadWriteWeb
Mployd.com – Where hiring happens
CSS Globe | Web Standards Magazine
Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome
Search Engine Watch Blog
swissmiss
GigaOM
Photo Basement
The Apple Blog
Web2List
launch feed
Hot Chicks with Douchebags
Abduzeedo – design inspiration & tutorials -

Yes you are reading that right, Facebook is bigger than Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey combined in terms of population. Facebook has a staggering count of 150 million users according to Mark Zuckerberg (Founder, Facebook).

Country population breakdown:

Turkey – 71,892,808
Canada – 33,515,000
Australia – 21,468,700
New Zealand – 4,280,000
———————-
Total 131,246,508*

That, my friend, is really impressive! It makes you wonder how they keep their systems running smoothly, how they scale up rapidly.

Facebook has more than 10,000 servers and leverages mostly open-source software across a distributed architecture, with thousands of MySQL instances. “It’s almost a new challenge every day,”

Jonathan Heiliger (Vice President of Technical Operations, Facebook)
CNET interview

That’s not the only thing, Facebook has more than 10 billion photos! Some additional stats:

• 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site daily
• Over one petabyte of photo storage
• Serving over 15 billion photo images per day
• Photo traffic peaks at over 300,000 images served per second

Truth is, impressive is an understatement.

*Source: Wikipedia

I’m an avid subscriber of NETTUTS. A popular tech blog that covers a wide range of topics about web development such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, CMS’s, PHP and Ruby on Rails. I was curious how many of their pages are actually indexed at Google and I tried to learn more.

Let’s take a look how many pages at NETTUTS are indexed. Note that this will vary from one location to another, as well as ISP used and nearest datacenter used by Google (I’m currently testing this in North America and the count is going to be variable and approximate).

Let’s hit “site:nettuts.com” at Google. They have approximately 588 indexed pages. Now let’s see how many backlinks they have. Let’s hit “link:nettuts.com“. They have approximately 1,400 links going back to them.

The numbers above are not really that much. However, what matters here is when you look at their RSS feed subscriber count, they have 14,400.

So, what’s the point? Sites like NETTUTS still proves that content is king. It doesn’t matter 100% how many pages of your site are indexed at Google, what’s really important is that you deliver quality content to your visitors.

The rest follows.

I just tried some great chocolates from a company called Coppeneur. They are based in Germany but have North American distribution. What I really liked about them, aside from the brilliant and fresh taste, is that the packaging and presentation of the chocolates makes them stand out among others. They are really classy.

And it looks like I’m not the only one who is noticing how good they are. Here is a detailed report on tasting Coppeneur chocolates from another blogger.

Some more pictures below:

I so love the Hot Chili and Black Pepper one!

The above ones are from Madagascar chocolates and Ecuador chocolates!

You have to try these out. Best gift for this Christmas season.

ABS-CBN, in a statement said that it will acquire 2.5 million shares (5 percent stake) at Multiply, a Florida-based social networking site. Multiply is the second largest social networking site in the Philippines after Friendster.com. Multiply.com maybe catching up slowly with Friendster.com in terms of unique visitors (see Compete estimates below).

Friendster on the other hand, the most popular social networking site in the Philippines may be losing its steam after more than 2 days of downtime due to a data center power outage in Santa Clara, California. You just can’t seem to wonder how did Friendster allowed itself to be offline? Was it because it had a single point of failure? Having one data center housing more than 85 million users? Could a data mirror in Asia have helped since most of their active users are there?

In any event, Multiply just got a strong partner in the Philippines – media giant ABS-CBN. But will Multiply be able to grow their user-base in the Philippines with the help of ABS-CBN and overtake pinoy-favorite Friendster? The answer to this question might be sooner than later.

What are your thoughts?

Sources: Business Mirror, ABS-CBN

There is a new blog in town – Tech Blog Philippines (www.techblog.ph). I’m one of the contributors on the group of popular tech bloggers in the Philippines. There’s just a lot of them to mention here.

Tech Blog Philippines (TBP) just started and still oiling the engines to the blog and will soon be up to speed. We’re promising lots of new stuff on this blog.

TBP is being spearheaded by the same cool guys at PinoyBlogosphere. Watch this space, it’s gonna be fun!

To subscribe to the TBP feed, just click here.

–aj

Our site Mployd.com has been chosen as an honorable mention at the recent SEOmoz Web 2.0 Awards.

First off, I’d like to personally thank the guys over at SEOmoz (They. Are. The. Authority in SEO). I also like to thank the huge names in the industry — the judges. I appreciate it very much!

SEOmoz Web 2.0 Awards Judges

• Pete Cashmore
• Chris Pirillo
• Tony Adam
• Darren Rowse
• Ciaran Norris
• Duncan Riley
• Andy Beal
• Todd Malicoat
• Chris Winfield
• Christopher Null
• Dharmesh Shah
• Jeremiah Andrick
• Alexis Ohanian
• Tamar Weinberg
• Terry Ng
• Joost de Valk
• Guillaume Bouchard
• Spencer Rascoff
• Anil Dash
• Brent Csutoras
• Jeremy Schoemaker

This really came in as a big surprise for us here at Mployd HQ. Why? Just take a look at the winners at the Employment and Jobs category, not only you’ll see popular names like Standoutjobs ($2M funding) and Careerbuilder, but also the 800-pound gorilla Monster.com. And having Mployd behind these 3 big guys couldn’t be much more sweeter.

Again, to SEOmoz and the judges, thank you very much for this!

Have a great weekend!

–aj

Meet the new Last.fm killer (I still love you Last.fm) – Lala.

Cool interface, nice use of screen estate, awesome dashboard, all-in-one page actions, and yeah free to listen to music.

DRM free music starts a dime. Isn’t all of those cool?

I haven’t gone through every single thing inside Lala but obviously, I’m impressed!

Some suggestions to add:
* Radio station
* API
* Widgets

Great stuff guys. Keep the features coming.

–aj

By the way, I know people don’t like the word “killer”. For me it basically means a “very good competitor”.

Most website owners and webmasters wonder if the site they’re managing is on Google. We often search our domain, our company name, or even our own name and some specific keywords to see if the website we’ve done a few days back has been crawled and placed on the massive index of Google.

Yes, most SEO (Search Engine Optimization) professionals already know these things. However, for the newbies and for the rest of us, here’s a quick tutorial to know if your site’s status is in the Google index or not.

It’s a basic 2-step process to be in the know. But, you can further move forward enhancing your SEO efforts like verifying your domain, adding a sitemap, getting to know your search rank, top keywords search for a specific time, etc. at the Google Webmaster Tools.

Let’s start. Here’s how:

1) Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitestatus

2) Enter your domain on the input box (ex. http://www.mployd.com). Click on the “Next” button

Now, if your website is in the Google index, you should be able to see this notification

And you will be asked if you want to go and manage your website at the Google Webmaster Tool

If your website isn’t listed yet on the Google index, you should see something like this

Google will also suggest that you submit a Sitemap on their Google Webmaster Tools (which will eventually help your rankings on the Google’s search engine results).

Pretty simple huh? Go and check your website now if it’s listed and I hope it is.

Cheers!

–aj

I received yet another threat looking invoice from The Economist. For those who doesn’t know, it’s a printed magazine. They also have an online edition.

I got their so-called “risk-free subscriptions” from a popular website. The 6 RISK-FREE issues free trial advertised on tons of websites is not even a big secret. In face, you can easily find one with a simple google search “the economist trial subscription“. But beware though. Don’t even think of subscribing or even entering your personal information on their form. Or you might end up just like me.

Here’s what they tell people all over the net:

Subscribe to The Economist today and you’ll get 6 RISK-FREE issues as a free trial. If you wish to continue your subscription, you’ll receive 18 additional issues (24 in all) for just $49.90. That’s 65% off the cover price. You’ll also receive a free gift, The World in 2008 from The Economist, upon payment for your subscription. If you decide The Economist is not for you, write ‘cancel’ on the bill, return it and owe nothing.

That’s right folks. Write ‘cancel’ on the bill and you owe nothing. Yeah, right.

Unfortunately, if you have fallen to their trap and subscribed – they will start to mail you (after your 3rd or 4th magazine) invoices stating (or looked like) you owe them. I wish I still had those mails so I can scan them and show it to you.

I have the “final notice” invoice though to show you how threatening (look like) they are if you don’t pay (read: subscribe).

Here’s the scanned invoice:

Lets take a closer look at the invoice and let us analyze it word for word they use to…

1) Make it look like you owe them something (look for “Outstanding Debt”)
2) Use terms to look like you are in trouble (look for “reinstate your “GOOD” credit status”)
3) Tell and scare you if you don’t subscribe to their magazine your file will be flagged as a “BAD DEBT”

Wow! What a way to treat someone from trying your magazine which you advertise (see above) and then force them to subscribe (pay) to their magazine. Most people receiving these kind of invoices will fall prey to their scheme. Please don’t be that person.

Ok. I know what you are thinking, “You should have mailed them to CANCEL your account! Moron!”. In fact I did (I just honestly didn’t know if it should have been ‘Cancel’ or ‘cancel’ or ‘cANCEL’, it might have been case-sensitive.

Also, I felt something on my gut that that wasn’t enough so I even used their online contact form and asked them to CANCEL my account ASAP (even before I received the invoice above 01/04/08). This time though, I used ‘CANCEL’. It might just work, I told myself.

Then I received an email confirmation (below) I got that I’m out (supposedly) of their mailing list (that was Dec 17, 2007):

Neodata by the way, is a company they use to outsource their direct marketing service. More here.

My original request was:

Please remove my name, address and my information out of your database. I keep on receiving invoices with “financial obligations” requesting me to pay a subscription. Get me out of that list. Please.

Yes, my friend, “The Economist” kept on mailing me invoices to settle my “Financial Obligations”. See how they use words to seemingly scare and force you to pay? I’d bet my cats life I am not the only one receiving these kinds of invoices.

Risk-free trial is good for business. If the customer really wanted the magazine, they will subscribe (heck, I am getting Business 2.0, Forbes and Fast Company for pete’s sake!). However, if they feel it wasn’t worth it or didn’t like it (especially if he has opt-out, CANCELled), get that customer out of the mailing list. And DON’T send them that kind of invoices your Credit Department send!

Alright, this post is now becoming a TV drama series.

Seriously, don’t ever subscribe to them if you are unsure you really want the magazine. It is going to be one hell of cat and mouse to get out!

Let me end this by quoting a famous person who said something about “The Economist”.

“I used to think; now I just read The Economist.” – Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle Corporation

For the rest of you, maybe you need to think again. And again… and again…
–aj