The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a group which represents the recording industry(music and video) distributors in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors.

The association has commenced high profile lawsuits against file sharing service providers. It has also commenced a series of lawsuits against individuals suspected of file sharing, notably college students and parents of file sharing children. It is accused of employing techniques such as peer-to-peer “decoying” and “spoofing” to combat file sharing.

If did not understand the firsts 2 paragraphs, that means “If you are fond downloading free stuff(music/mp3/music videos) from the internet, RIAA can put you in a lawsuit and troubles to have you for fines.” RIAA is a pain if they were here in Cebu. I have not heard any news of them putting up fines and lawsuits to anyone here in the Philippines but we should be careful atleast.

Fortunately, there are multiple websites that aim to provide free, fully legal music downloads. You may not find the top music listened to this week, and probably last week but you will find these sources provide new independent music, while others focus on the older public domain recordings.

1. MP3.com Free Music Directory

Among the oldest music download sites still in existence, MP3.com has gone through a few phases in the past. When I first used it about 10 years ago, it was populated with independent musicians and used as a place to share, download and buy their music. These days it has morphed into a more commercial enterprise, hosting mostly streams and including a large list of high-profile musicians. Few of the well-known tracks offer MP3 downloads, but there’s still a wide variety of indie artists who do.

2. Public Doman 2ten

If you like older recordings of classic artists like Leadbelly, Louis Armstrong, and Billie Holiday then this is the place for you. The selection isn’t very large, but it’s got tracks you’d have a hard time finding anywhere else. It seems to focus mainly on blues recordings but has a fair amount of jazz, swing, and even some classical.

3. GarageBand

Were it not for persistent troubles with their streaming software, I would probably list GarageBand.com as my favorite of the sites listed here. They’ve got an extensive list of genres to choose from, a large collection or artists and tracks, streaming “radio” to discover new music, and reviews for many of the bands and tracks available. Not all tracks have MP3 downloads, but many. Among the sites reviewed here, GarageBand has, in my opinion, the best “one-stop” music experience. You can choose a “radio” playlist that will pick songs from within your chosen genre, find and stream individual tracks, or of course download the MP3s.

As hinted earlier, the only thing holding me back from giving GarageBand a glowing review is their stream player. Perhaps it’s just me, but in the weeks I’ve been trying it has not yet properly played a single track on Linux or Windows XP.

4. Free Music Archive

With GarageBand’s streaming difficulties, I’d pick the Free Music Archive as my favorite of the sites listed here. It’s got a fairly wide selection, clean simple site design, and allows browsing by genre. Much of the music available on FMA is licensed under Creative Commons, so it can also be a great source for samples and tracks to use in remixing. Speaking of remixing…

5. ccMixter

This site is unlike any of the previous ones, not just in content but in purpose. The idea behind ccMixter is that users can post tracks or individual samples for others to download and remix or re-purpose. For example, you can download individual vocal tracks with no music, and create your own guitar line to match with it. If you choose, you can then re-upload your new and improved version to share with others. Someone may take your version, add some drum & bass and make a club mix. Not that that’s necessarily an improvement.

When Imeem got owned, where do you get your music now? You wish facebook had a good music application. Well, your wish just came true. Introducing Muziic, music application in facebook which allows you to add  some radio stations, to search and listen to specific tunes. And most importantly, you have the ability to create playlists and share them with your friends just like Imeem.

Is this imeem’s reincarnation? Apparently not, its from facebook, the non-stop innovation social network. What more can you expect from such a social network giant?

In contrast to many other music-related apps on Facebook, as soon as you install it, you’ll be able to listen to music – and lots of it. Besides the featured songs, and the ability to search for albums, artists and songs (the actual music is pulled from YouTubeYouTube), the most welcome part of the app is a list of online radio stations, organized by category, similar to the one found in iTunes.

Though you are listening to free music and radio stations, you won’t be hearing many advertisements.  Here are a few words about Muziic from the application’s creator, David J. Nelson:

“With Muziic, the goal was to create an application that actually gives Facebook users what they want in a music app. As someone who is not a big fan of most Facebook apps, I wanted to keep the experience clean, functional and user friendly. No incentivized garbage, forced friend invites, etc… Just a music app that delivers.”

Muziic also enables you to easily create, save and share playlists, and comes with a quite useful Facebook tab that displays your listening habits, similar to the way it’s done in Last.fm. On it, you can find user’s playlists, recently played songs, favorite radio stations, top artists and top tracks.

Though, you cannot download music from this facebook music application yet. We can expect that in the future and I am quite optimistic soon that will come. This application is rock solid as it is constantly gaining fans and users right now. You can now go to facebook and start enjoying this application. Let me know if you have anything bad to say about this app.

You might think that our girls section is for perverts. NO NO NO! We palahubog also admire women of class. Businesswomen so to speak. But we won’t just feature any businesswomen, we feature only the most attractive girls in this section of palahubog.com.

Ivanka Trump is an Executive Vice President of Development & Acquisitions at the The Trump Organization. She is the daughter of Ivana and Donald Trump. Pretty big names as you can see. Her dad is the Chairman and CEO of the Trump Organization, a US-based real-estate developer. Not to mention an American business magnate, socialite, author and television personality.

I think it is impossible to see her here in Cebu, Philippines because I don’t see her coming here for any reason. Though it would be possible that she may come to Boracay, Philippines for a vacation. I wish I would be there when she comes.

Her American beauty is unique and she has a very awesome body. She was a fashion model afterall. I just love the executive beauty of this woman. I would no doubt want to work for the Trumps if she was my boss. Hell, I would even work for free. Her simple beauty is a perfect combination of her glamorous look.

Here are some pictures of her so that you will know why she deserves to be here in palahubog’s girls section.

[View with PicLens]

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I am so busy this week that I didn’t have a chance to read manga for 2 weeks straight. I just visited onemanga today and found out that they already have an RSS feed button. That is good news indeed for us manga readers. I was looking for this subscription link before but back then they did not have this.

What are RSS feeds? Click here for a brief and simple explanation of how it works and how we can use it.

Now, you don’t have to go to onemanga to check for updates. You can easily subscribe to their RSS feeds and you will be able to get updates from their website directly to your RSS reader directly.

Below you will see a picture where you can find the RSS subscribe button of onemanga.

If you like palahubog.com and would want to know our latest post, you can read them from your RSS feeds reader. You have to subscribe to our RSS feed to get our latest feeds. You will find our subscribe button as shown in the picture below.

What is an RSS feed reader?

What are RSS feeds?

RSS feeds are the updates of the website that you subscribe to. For example you subscribed to onemanga.com, you won’t have to go to onemanga every time just to check for updates. You can just go to your RSS feed to read all of the updates that came from the sites that you subscribed to. And if you did subscribe to onemanga’s RSS feed, you will receive their RSS feed right away as soon as they have updates on the site or a new manga posted. This saves you time  and resources.

What is a RSS feed reader?

It is a tool that allows you to read the feeds that are delivered to you from the websites that you subscribed to. This tool allows you to read various updates from selected websites of your choice. It works like google mail or yahoo mail where you read emails, but in the RSS feed reader, you read RSS feeds.

Why are RSS feed very useful?

It saves you lots of time of having to go to a website just to check for updates. If you subscribe to an RSS feed of a website, everytime that website updates, you will be notified through your RSS feed reader. Not only will you be notified, you will be able to read the updates(which are in the form of feeds).

Below is a video from google with a very simple explanation of how RSS feeds and RSS feed reader work. This is about their RSS reader, the google reader, which is what I am using right now as my RSS feed reader.

RSS feeds makes bookmarking websites look oldschool. Back in the days, when if we like a website and want to visit it some other time to check for updates we bookmark it.

Today, most websites offer RSS feeds. Especially blogs like palahubog.com offer RSS feeds. This makes it easier for readers to read and get updates from the sites that they like.

Several websites design their RSS feeds to look attractive. RSS feeds today come in many designs and forms. Below are pictures of how they may look like.

If you like to track or get the latest feeds/updates from a specific website, you can just look for buttons that may look like any of these buttons. Just click them and subscribe to the feeds.

If you like palahubog.com and would want to know our latest post, you can read them from your RSS feeds reader. You have to subscribe to our RSS feed to get  our latest feeds. You will find our subscribe button as shown in the picture below.

Twitter just partnered with Australia’s mobile titan Telstra to provide SMS support for Twitter. As is typical, receiving notifications is free, with standard text message rates applying for sending tweets via SMS.

If you happen to live in Australia and your mobile provider is Telstra, you can enable the service by sending the text message “START” to 0198089488. Associating your phone with your Twitter account will enable all the usual Twitter text commands.

Officially, this adds Australia to the list of countries supporting tweets via SMS. Below is the list of countries supporting tweets via SMS.

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• India
• Indonesia
• New Zealand
• Australia

I wonder when will they be having this in Philippines. Twitter blog says there will be more countries supported soon. Facebook SMS support is already in Philippines since mid way this year, (2009). Tweeter is under rated here in Philippines but I hope they will support this soon. I hope we can learn to appreciate twitter, I think its already in its peak and we should not miss this era in our rapidly changing technology. You may ask why you need a twitter account? Click here to find out.

Twitter was founded on 2006. With headquarters in San Francisco, California and USA, twitter is one of the biggest and fastest growing companies is the US. Not many of us here in Cebu, Philippines would appreciate twitter because we don’t understand how useful it is. We tend to appreciate more on social networking websites like friendster and facebook because we want to connect with friends, share our pictures, update our status and let people know of what we are doing.

Twitter works in a similar way but most of us did not know it. Our first impression of twitter was “Oh, just another social networking website. Major functionof this new site is we can share our status(facebook/friendster terms we got used to). Nah, this is nothing new, we can do also do this in friendster and facebook. We can only have 1 picture, and the picture does not show as big as our primary/profile picture in facebook/friendster, this website sucks!”. So, Why join tweeter? Why do you need a twitter account?

You were wrong. Twitter may seem limited to us when we first saw it, and nobody seem to appreciate it when it was new. Now and ever since it was launched, twitter has more users and everyday more and more have learned to appreciate it.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets.  Tweets are 140 characters long, text based post. These post are broad casted to your followers(friends and fans) as soon as you update/post it.

In friendster/facebook we add people to become their friends and our friends. In tweeter, if you add someone who did not accept you yet, you are following that person. You are the follower/fan of that person you are trying to add/follow. If he/she follows you back, then you are called friends.

What makes twitter very useful is the sharing of tweets. Its like news, real-time news. If you did not know this, information you find in google is not really uptodate/real-time. Websites have to be submitted to google, then indexed for them to show up on google’s results. This whole indexing process can take upto 7days to 1 month at most. Why does it take this long? websites have lots and lots of information, not very specific and probably broad topics. Are you seeing my point now?

My point is, twitter has more uptodate information. Brief and straight to the point information. Its short and light, that means searching for information is much faster on twitter. Data/results are more uptodate, more to say “real-time”.

Google and other search engines appreciated this idea, and they have made their move in integrating twitter to their search engine systems. Google and Bing currently the largest search engines have now been working with twitter to generate more accurate/real-time search results. This project had already started months ago and you will soon be seeing real-time results in these search engines in the next few weeks.

Another thing about twitter is that more and more tools/websites that are compatible with it. See the few examples that I have below.

Twitpic is a website that allows users to easily post pictures to the Twitter microblogging and social media service.

TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace application. Like other Twitter applications it interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles.

Tweetie is a client for Twitter, the social networking website. Its mobile version runs on iPhone and iPod Touch, while its desktop version runs on Mac OS X.

Twittermail allows you to tweet using an emails.

Twitter Counter is a counter to show your twitter followers.

 Twitter Vision shows a visual map of Twitter posts.

Above are just a few of the twitter tools you can find in the internet. There are a thousands more that are currently active, and there are thousands more tools still being developed. You can imagine twitter’s future, 2 search engine titans google and bing are trying to get a hold of them and their technology.

If you think you are in because you have a facebook account, you might as well setup a twitter account. Create a twitter account now and make sure to follow us. 

Facebook will soon have a new face. New facebook design is on the way and its going to take effect anytime soon, based from our sources.

This new design is being tested with a select group of users that I am not a part of. I sure would want to be part of a testing team for facebook’s projects. You can see why facebook is on the top of the social media ladder, they innovate always. ALWAYS.

Why is facebook so popular? Because almost evertbody is using facebook. It is the fastest growing company and it is as big as twitter. I myself would always want to write something new about facebook once a week. If you want to get the latest from facebook, you will always find it in this blog. You can subscribe to our RSS feed to get the latest updates. Or you can follow us on twitter to get the latest trends online(including social media and gadgets).

The screenshots display the key changes we’re highlighted:

- notifications move from bottom right to top left

- huge search bar to make search a core part of Facebook

- preview your inbox on your homepage (same as notifications)

- numerous design tweaks

Can’t wait to try their new design. The new face of facebook is coming and I want to be the first to experience it. How about you? What do you think of this new design?

Excuse the title of this post, I just found out about this and this just proves that I have been old and rusty in terms of web updates. While searching in google for answers about “How keywords affect your website ranking?”, I found out this revelation. Google did answer a lot of questions with this post from their blog which is where I found out about the information. You can read their post here.

To simplify things, keywords and descriptions of your website are only for relevance.  This means it only affects the type/categories of ads that are going to come up on your embedded advertisements. These information, no matter how many keywords you have, does not affect your website rankings on google. No matter how many times you submit or update your website information, this does not affect your website rankings.

Below is a video explaining the that google does not use meta-keywords for ranking results in the search engine.