ribbed.us …

Oh before I leave, check out my buddy’s new blog … dbgg1979.

I’m inviting everyone interested in gaming to our very own little forum, the brain child of one dbgg1979. Even if you are only slightly interested in gaming, perhaps P2P is your thing, come and sign up. If you’ve been going or have been to one of our LAN parties, then this is definitely for you. We expect topics to be varied and the discussion from … from Windows gaming to Linux to P2P to more adult natured topics.

We’ll be pushing more features as things progress and from my recent talks with jiggy, he wanted the hardcore gamers and technical people here to come take part and moderate our forum. If you are one of these, hit up jiggy and see if you qualify. I personally will be holding a smaller stick in moderating the forum. My point is, the forum is about targeted fun with less rules and the company of those who share your passion for gaming and the internet lifestyle. No political discussion here, we can leave that for the fools on Political forum.

Come one, come all! to …

BFWGaming

Social networking and social websites might seem like something reserved for the western world, but it has been huge in the Philippines for years. When I lived in Cebu, Friendster was a big hit even before Myspace came along and popularized it. Today, Friendster is still the social networking juggernaut in the Philippines and most of Asia. With that said, it was only a matter of time before someone targetted ads at this audience and Multiply, the 5th most visited site in the Philippines has partnered with ABS-CBN, the Philippine media juggernaut to deliver it. Now instead of seeing dating ads targetted at Americans, Filipinos can see dating ads targetted at them. That is neat.

Multiply has been growing rather quietly internationally. The social media aggregator now has 7 million registered users and 10.5 million monthly unique visitors according to their internal numbers, nearly triple their 2006 traffic. Comscore’s most recent numbers show 12.5 million uniques for September.

The service acts like a meta social network where users can collect and share content from multiple social sites (photos, video, blogs). See our earlier comparison with Vox. Users post 1.25 million photos, 16,000 videos and 55,000 blog entries daily. However, while the U.S. is home to the largest share of their registered users, most of their traffic is international.

The Philippines is one of the most pronounced examples of their large international following. Alexa ranks Multiply as the 5th largest site in the Philippines – with more than 2 million unique monthly visitors. We had earlier reported that 39% of the site’s traffic comes from the Philippines. Therefore it’s no surprise that they’ve managed to land a multi-year ad deal with one of the Philippine’s largest networks, ABS-CBN. ABS-CBN has 67 televisions stations, 19 radio stations, 30 websites and reaches 97% of the Filipinos with televisions. Under terms of the agreement, ABS-CBN interactive will sell advertising and mobile services for Multiply’s Filipino users, with the two companies sharing revenues. – TechCrunch

So there is a big hubbub at iSTORYA about a recent Desperate Housewives show which had a scene that many consider … racist. Wow. Just wow. First of all, it was a joke. Lighten up! You aren’t as offended as you think. It is not cool to be offended. You are not patriotic if you are offended. You are a shallow, shallow person if you are offended by such little things. Filipino Americans aren’t as pissed off as the media says. Hey I’m not and a lot of people feel the same. I laughed watching the clip on Youtube. You know what is embarrassing? … the clip doesn’t embarrass me, Filipinos hooting and tooting about the grave injustice done unto them embarrasses me. The fact that people even give this a second look embarrasses the Filipino in me. “oh look at me, I deserve better”. Why can’t people just let their actions and achievements speak for themselves? We make fun of Mexicans, we make fun of Canadians, we make fun of the French, the Chinese, the Europeans. We have the right to make fun of everyone in the world because we as Americans are made of people from around the world. I love the Philippines, but all this fucking whining is recrunkulus … it never ends.

I can’t remember how many times I stood around with other Pinoys in Cebu and made fun of anything that wasn’t Pinoy. Let he who has no sin cast the first stone.

Apparently this has been circulating around the net for some time … the best part is this was done in one of Cebu’s prisons. Cebu, how I miss thee.

For a long time iSTORYA has long been Cebu’s biggest forum and one of the Philippines’ biggest. It was just a forum, it was great … but just a forum. The goal of being “just a forum” has be re-worked to become something more … a true portal to Cebu with a blog type approach. Check out the front-page for news, reviews, and commentary about iSTORYA and Cebu.

That sounded a bit like a commercial didn’t it?

Once a year the city of Cebu shows it’s colors and bursts into celebration known as the Sinulog. Participants gather from all corners of the country to celebrate the baby Jesus. The whole city is stops for one day to join and watch the parade as it snakes through the city. Sinulog was one of my favorite events while I lived in Cebu and seeing pictures of it still reminds me of what I’m missing.

The party goes on into the nights with street dances, drinking, and drinking, and amm, more drinking. Pit Senor!

Links:

• Sinulog Street Scene Pictures at iSTORYA
• Official Sinulog Website
• City of Cebu Official Website