October PTB Meetup Digest

At our recent PTB meet-up last Saturday, we discussed about the direction we are going with this group blog. We’re 11 in the group and yet we realized we couldn’t maintain the level (and quantity) of postings we do in this blog on a weekly basis. The past week bared witness to that. Yes, we have our own lives to take care of and several other blogs to look after too. 🙂

I myself have a lot of local tech issues and “insider infos” juicy enough to stir some heads and entice discussion. But again, I am constrained with NDAs, client privileges and off-the-record requests (although I share some of them in our regular meet-up, off the record).

In any case, we’re open for suggestions and feedback, which by the way I am already thankful since a few of our regular readers send links or interesting topics they’d like to share with us.

Going back to the meetup, due to bad weather conditions that day, we only managed to have Marc, Migs, Rain, Clair and me on the meeting along with our visitors Markku and Genesis. Likewise, the planned podcast didn’t push thru either due to some technical difficulties (now I know how much of a logistics/technical problem a podcast could be for 3 or more people on a roadside cafe).

So here’s a short rundown of what we discussed during the meet-up:

• Black hat SEO can be very lucrative. You’d just have to swallow your pride and keep mum about it. More of this on the SEO Philippines YahooGroups.
• Who’s earning how much from Google AdSense. Figures for pinoy bloggers range from $250 to $1,000 a month.
• Online Banking issues and browser compatibilities. A round-up and review will be posted sometime this week.
• Career in blogging. I was surprised that there are local Pinoys going to office just to blog and get paid regular salaries for it.
• How about a “Blog Conference” by bloggers for bloggers? No, we’re not talking about iBlog.
• Photography! Rain shares he gets his Russian camera lenses from eBay.com for as low as $30. And they actually arrive at his doorsteps in Bulacan.
• Blog Networks and how it can help you as an individual blogger. The power of aggregating and redistributing blog traffic.
• More on gadgets that AdSense bought you. Markku showed us his Canon DSLR which AdSense bought. And what about my soon-to-be iBook?
• Contributors. We have a couple of bloggers interested to join us here at PTB as contributors. Yes, you can.

Well, that’s about it. There are other topics we discussed that are better heard and discussed during (and only during) the meet-up. So join us next month!