Autobiography of The SEO Flea

I have heard so many myths about black hats and one got my curiosity ranging from the ordinary to the extreme. I found out that there's been a discussion about the black hat and a white hat in the net so i decided to go looking for it. Upon finding about the actual topic of discussion on the boards, i decided that i would go for the juice and not for the lesson. Lessons from a white hat or a black hat does not necessarily mean changing for the terms but getting the actual picture's details and getting them to be part of your learning. It does not necessarily mean that you can become either a black hat or a white hat after all the storms that you have had in your SEO life.

As one black hat quotes-" Man will always beat machine because there will always be someone smarter than the one that built the machine in the first place." and i believe that this is true in all aspects and angles we look in to.and because man built machines, wherever there is one, there is also a loophole in it ready and waiting for the big man of the hour. He who has the power to do and tweak everything that his playful mind would work in to his advantage always has the power and the fun in his hands.

On the other hand, there was what this one white hat quote that " true that black hats do give the search engines those algorithms that we white hats and black hats alike happen to undergo and yield in and at times fear to affect our online businesses but it still has to do a more devastating effect on white hats because they do not have the technologies to cope up with those changes." Now where does that certain quote leave us all? If one would just analyze things and take a closer look at the picture, it's as simple as this, which ever side we choose to be in, we all get the kicks and the share of the pie. But is it just enough to see the picture that way? Would you be content at just seeing things as it is? Well it's all up to you of course. Me, i always got content at going and riding along where the tide takes me, but now, everything has changed, I found out that it is sometimes necessary to do things the easy way because we humans have that within us, the tendency to go look for things to doing things the easy way to ease up on the burden. This is where technology comes in and this is also where great inventions and innovations have come to our world.

Take this other quote from a SEO, " I hope it does get harder to cheat the search engines because that will sort the wheat from the chaff and leave me more room to take a bigger market share." Isn't it true from anybody's point of view that the harder it is to cheat the search engines, the bigger the market share any white hat SEO has? Or is it the other way around? But getting the juice from the quote itself, i have seen so many times and was made to believe that it is always true that in the long run, it is always the white hat that wins until the inevitable happens that a black hat takes over the SERPs that one white hat has been inkling and working hard for to get his sites to rank high on. Where would that leave white hats and where would that take black hats. Since there is no end to all this, i would say that whatever i need to know i would take the challenge from now on.

It's all about having fun after all without having to blame anybody else for your fate and the resulting outcome of your actions. The greatest part of the juice in the picture is that you get to learn every aspect of the whole juice and not just limit yourself by looking at the picture not the art itself. Black hat or white hat, it's the art that counts that certain pictures or masterpiece has which nobody else sees but the beholder. It has always been that way which goes on and on and is responsible for all the great learnings and inventions in the world. Experimenting, motivation, innovation and finding ways to outsmart machines with the use of great technologies, that for me is fun and most of all achievement.

Search engines are getting worse for everybody these days and it is tiring and boring just to watch our fruits of labor go to waste and our sites get sandboxed, dropped or get outdated and outrunned by the technologies that those authorities implement. This thought makes those black hats thank that they are not trying to do things the hard way.

First, i'd like to give a little backgrounder about this specific topic which is "portal sites" or web portals that i would like to discuss in this post. I just came across this word just the other day and my curiosity led me to an umimaginably existing portal site that has so many pages in them. Could you guess what is the name of the site that has lived since the 1990's existence? i'll just discuss about his portal site later in this post. Some portal sites would even contain up to ten thousand pages and it made me wonder if such existence is really possible. I have not really seen any kind of portal site before this research enabled me on the knowledge but my interest made me wonder how one operates in the web.

I looked it up in the wiki and i saw this specific definition "A Web portal is a site on the World Wide Web that typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content. It is designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed to share collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones."

I have stumbled upon the existence of web portals just the other day as what they call it in the early 90's before the existence of the dot coms. At first i couldn't believe that they existed according to the spammer who e- mailed me about using portals to earn a significant amount of income through marketing and from using them. Problem is, when i tried to look for links leading to the great information that the spammer said the site promised, i cannot find any of it and on details of how i could use the idea of building a web portal.

Tried to do a little research on the matter and i found out that they do exist after all hoping that this time, curiosity won't kill the cat. Surprised at what i found out, according to WIKI, these portals existed during the days where the development of the early web browsers were still on the way. Web portals in general as to my own opinion are one of the most user-friendly type of sites in the early days of the web. These web portals do cater to the undying needs of its visitors as to relevant-content-rich pages that somehow is designed to make the users and visitors stay at a longer time fraction of their web browsing. These types of sites would you belive used to have up to 10 thousand or more pages to offer to their visitors and these pages have each a unique content in relation to the other pages.

What interests me most is that one of the most popular portal sites during those early 90's era of the world wide web is still existing now and is still giving relevant content rich pages that makes the user (us) stay for a long time. Guessed what site it is? Just click the link to find out.

Portal sites like -----, provide personalized capabilities that gives the user the advantage of viewing the different pages without going away from the mother URL or domain and providing access to the contents therein that are relevant to a user's search and query in the early days and this serves as their browsers as the equivalent to IE or Google or Firefox today.

Development of Web Portals:

These web portals were the most wanted place in the internet for marketers that are after of the portion of the traffic which enables them to earn income from. Such examples are America Online who used the Netscape Netcenter, the Walt Disney Company who used the Go.com and AT&T who used the Excite. In the early times, big network companies such as the CBS ( Columbia Bradcasting System ), popularly known in the early 90's also to be one of the biggest bradcasting companies in the United States is targeting Lycos also a popular portal site.

These portal sites (Lycos, Altavista, Infoseek, Hotbot, and Excite) at first started as either directories or search engines. Due to growing needs to expand their services and to make the users stay for a while more than the ususal, they were able to conceptualize and come up with strategies to lengthen the stay of users by providing what we now enjoy as free e-mails, chatrooms, messengers, games and news thereby increasing revenues and potential visitors and customers to market their services and products.

These portal sites died down in its overwhelming climax in marketing era when the technology of companies that are so called as the dot-coms came in the picture before the end of 2000. Currently there are many other types of portals that has emerged out of the bankrupted ones and the most successful that has been left to stand out successfully is Yahoo.

The dot-coms are according to WIKI -> " The period was marked by the founding (and in many cases, spectacular failure) of a group of new Internet-based companies commonly referred to as dot-coms. A combination of rapidly increasing stock prices, individual speculation in stocks, and widely available venture capital created an exuberant environment in which many of these businesses dismissed standard business models, focusing on increasing market share at the expense of the bottom line. " These dot-com companies is where we actually owe our tech situation these days because they were the ones that revolutionized and maximized the internet capability of great marketers.

While everybody seems to be busy with registering .com domains for their business and personal domain preferences and in registering with different domain hosting service providers available in the web these days, i am looking for things to enlighten myself with the matter trying to see if there seems to be any difference between these dot domains and other related factors that might just have more positive effects in terms of ROI for any online business. I never noticed or took in to consideration that these domain specific terms really could could give great advantages that most webmasters have disregarded. Most would never bother to see and notice at the same time that these plain and simple domain differences and preferences have numerous devastating effects, especially in the business that you have in the online world.

Trying to see some of the advantages and disadvantages that these domains offer, i have tried to do a little research on the their characteristics and their natural and organic effects versus human preferences in clicking for the domains in their numbers of searches and of their personal choice. When it comes to rankings and chances at appearing in the SERPs of the different search engines, webmasters have to be as sensitive at domains and human clicking behaviors by visually looking into these domains and trying to presume to be one of the regular internet surfers and visitors of the web. For example, type in any search query and when you see .com domains and .info or .org domains, doesn't it strike you in a way that you would rather prefer to click on the domain in your desktop with a .org or .info rather than the .com ones? Try and answer this simple question as an intellectual visitor. This way, one can simply notice that effortlessly, these dot domains have great effects in terms of marketing value and ROI in every online business that anyone is planning to establish in the web.

dot com Domains:

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"Despite the fact that more than 64 percent of Internet users coming from non-English-speaking countries and Asian speakers comprise 33 percent of the online population, only 11 percent of .com or .net registrations come from Asia, argued the Hong Kong-based DotAsia." according to earthwebnews
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Since the dot com domain is the most commonly used domain in the internet these days, therefore, it makes the dot com domain to also be the most preferred domain to use in the domain registrations for both business and personal uses of webmasters and online business owners. This fact serves as the point of determining that since the majority of internet surfers are used to typing out and appending the .com domain to most search box query, then this makes it more of a target for most domain seekers who would want to register an online business name in domain and hosting service providers and in seeking for effective ways of marketing a business by starting in domain registration and hosting of a .com domain. Disregarding the fact that .com domains are the most frequently used domains and also the most rhetorically appearing in the web these days, making most .com domains to be one of the least to click into when a query of websites appear in the SERPs as compared to.edu or .org or .info or .biz or .net by an intellectual internet surfer population.

This fact is of course in basis to the fact that most searches would yield results that display .com domains rather than .org or .biz and other more prestigious domains to look at by an educated internet surfer. The .com domain therefore as for my own opinion, is the type of domain that i would consider as somewhat some of the domains to avoid in my educational queries as an intellectual internet visitor and as an online business marketer in registering my own domain at the same time.

.org and .info Domains:

Try for example this query in your IE browser >>>-- "dot com domain characteristics" ---<<< where many .org domains can be found. And when you type in most any search queries, don;t you notice where the .org, .info, .edu are placed on rankings? Isn't it true that most search engine crawlers and bots also give priority to those types of appended domains? See for example this spammer and black hatter's site
and look for the fake links that he has provided through those auto generated backlinks in the comments section. Those are plain and simple .info and the other links are .org links that search engine crawlers and bots sees as an important page? Would you believe that this plain and simple blog with only a few backlinks used to rank #4 in the Google SERPs for its target keywords with up to 9 million competing pages? Yes it used to, back when it was not yet discovered by Google. But now? it's nowhere to be found in its original placement in the Google SERPs first page.

This is just to show the fact that most search engines do prefer as priority listing specially if the age of the site is a factor, the .info, .org or .edu or .biz or .net rather that the .com. Black hats have found a way to manipulate the search results by using these crawler popular domains in their continued roaming around the web and in the internet population.

Of course there are certain rules to using these dot appended domains as your URL but the most important thing in this article is that it is actually for the webmasters to realize that there is enormous amount of potential traffic in considering the these factors that i have stated above. I may not have provided so much details in this post but let me make you realize that the most important thing to consider in choosing your domains before having them registered for hosting and application is also the most left alone and disregarded and unnoticed yet so very reachable and simple.

.biz Domains:

Try checking these references out for some help and details in choosing your .biz domains and other preferences. These.biz domains are by the way what we call as TLD or Top-Level Domain intended for businesses and this serves as a distinguishing factor for most ineternet surfers in order to not confuse them into going or clicking for the right or wrong informations they are looking for. According to wiki, .biz is a phonetic spelling of the first syllable of "business." This .biz also acts as an alternative for the domain that is already available in the .com top-level domain with the administering party as http://www.neulevel.biz/. While .biz domains are for distinguishing business sites, the .info on the other hand is for the informative sites while ICANN is the managing sector with regards to assignment of domains and IP adresses in the web with the implementation of certain policies to follow in the registration of these assigned domains.

One way link is considered as the best form of link that any website should have if only to target popularity, ranking and traffic to any site you are maintaining. One way link building can be achieved in so many ways but the most important of all is its plus factor and positive advantage when it comes to SEO friendly terms with the different search engines. Another factor that contributes to the positivity of one way link building is that you can choose which sites you wanted to link to and in return you will be the one to choose the best sites you want to have a link with. This way, you can be able to avoid "link farms" that contribute to either loosing page rank or not gain any rank at all.

Link Farms:

Link farms are sites that are considered as "free-for-all" sites to link to. Linking to these so called link farms may make you loose the importance of your site instead of gaining one because it is easy to get recognized by search engines these days. Since there is no particular topic importance and concentration of links to only related sites pointing to yours, then the tendency of search engines is to see these link farms sole purpose to be to artificially increase the number of links (link popularity) pointing to your site. Since there is no value at all to consider with these types of links for the search engine users or surfers, then chances are your site will be deemed as useless to visitors. Of course these are hard for search engines to detect at a certain period of time but chances are in the long run, you will have to suffer for that and you might as well avoid it no sooner than outright.

One Way Links:

Whereas, one way links are bound to stay for the longest time possible, you should try avoiding link farms as much as possible. One way links also gives you the advantage of choosing which quality sites you would want and choose to be relative to your site and link to. More so, getting linked by other sites means that your content is worth the time for the other site's visitors in terms of juiciness and importance and that they can benefit from it. On the other hand, reciprocal links are as much easy to drop at any time if they feel that your link will no longer serve their purpose and strategy in their business and improvement of their business model.

Reciprocal Links:

Reciprocal links are links that are much more easier to remove at any time for the other party whenever they feel that it no longer fits their business model and needs. This therefore makes it even not as much of a sought after link building tactic to use for your website.

How do You Other Sites to Link to Yours?

Providing a good and juicy content helps keep your visitors and keep them on your page as long as they find interesting what you have to offer them. The technique is to able to burst amounts of informations that you know your target visitors may find interesting and worth a stay for their reading. Content is still king in these terms.

Manila, Philippines: After the launching of the Ituloy AngSulong SEO keyword ranking contest, the Philippine SEO will never be the same again. Many Filipino webmasters have resorted to improving their link building techniques and professionalizing the ways and means of getting relevant links for their websites whom they prompted to enlist in the Ituloy AngSulong SEO contest. For this purpose, they are hoping to win the contest and build prestige beside their names as a trophy in SEO.

Posting Relevant Informations:

So many great ideas and tactics with respect to the link building process as the contest goes along had promising effects to webmasters all over the search engine world and world wide web, not just here in the Philippine SEO local scene. One good tactic i have learned from the contest participants is link building by using the most relevant information distribution as linkbait. This is achieved through posting the latest search results and data about the contest keyword, "Ituloy AngSulong" from the big three search engines Yahoo, MSN and Google and regularly updating it in a daily basis to the least. Like the search engines, human webmasters are always on the lookout for any relevant and useful informations in the web with respect to their interests and likings, therefore if they find them relevant and important for their use, it becomes a source for them leading to accumulation of links and popularity for the other party. Specifically, let me mention the site itself (http://www.seobunker.com/) for purposes of reference to future readers of this blog. The site's author was able to archive and pool out data of sites ranking up to a 238 range as of today 11- 27 - 06. The basis of the rankings i believe is by computing the accumulated rankings total from the search results in the big three search engines and adding them up to get the total score (rank) which will then serve as the actual rank of the participating site. Presto! in any contest, a source to look at in any time to be available is a good help and there goes the link and the popularity thing in relation to SEO and marketing.

News as Reference:

Another relevant tactic i find so effective at this point of the Ituloy AngSulong SEO keyword ranking contest is using a site that provides news and relevant and latest happenings in the Philippine SEO community and the Ituloy AngSulong keyword ranking contest in particular. Proof that to this day, news posting is still one of the most effective marketing advertisements and strategy that any link builder has to be knowledgeable in to be able to make it big in the link building industry and in SEO in particular. This tactic also posts as a good and in fact one of the best ways of linkbait effectiveness.

Keyword Stuffing Technique:

But the most interesting of all the observations that i have seen through my regular and intermittent visits with the different Ituloy AngSulong SEO contest participants is the odd but effective way of the old times..."same old black hat keyword stuffing technique". This technique is not actually a black hat's way but tracing from the older ways of how the search engines see the different pages in the web, i guess this tactic is still one of the most effective. It was used before as one of the primary ways to get search engine rankings in the search engine results pages of your target keyword. These days, it was believed to be a long lost myth as the search engine bots,crawlers and spiders of the different search engines have been devised to be sensitive to spamming and on ways to control this attitude by the early webmasters therefore deeming this technique as obsolete and would more likely take you and your site/s that uses it to get banned, disregarded and blacklisted by search engines. It seems that there is no proof to this theory about how the search engine bots, crawlers and spiders behave but it could be accounted for the importance of a site's page that these bots..etc. reads these keyword stuffing schemes somehow as a relevant information for the search engines, therefore seeing it as a relevant website instead of a spam source if the keywords are in its proper places or the keyword density is at a considerable rate for the bots and crawlers.

As an actual experience, i have seen keyword stuffing as an effective way to get the rankings that you need but only in short time or period because sooner or later, the search engines and their batch of crawlers will see your site as spam source leading to blacklisting and drawback the indexing of your sites pages.

MSN Loves Blogs:

This is just my own observation with respect to the on going Ituloy AngSulong SEO keyword ranking contest. As i have observed these past few weeks of regularly visiting the ranking sites in the Ituloy Angsulong contest, i believe and would assume that MSN as a prestigious search engine really loves blogs and its organic chracteristics and is fast at indexing as an engine when it comes to blog sites.

On the other hand...

Google is Fond of Well Optimized Websites:

Yes, Google, unlike the other search engines is the more professional engine because i believe that all ranking websites in relation to the Ituloy AngSulong SEO keyword ranking contest is an engine characterized by professionalism and well rounded and SEOptimized pages with a balanced algo with respect to blogsites and their contents. Furthermore, a sites age factor is very necessary not just for the other two engines (Yahoo and MSN) but would mean a significant algorhytm plus factor with Google making it easier for their Googlebot to se the importance and relevance of any website the more.

And on the other hand...

Yahoo Is The Fastest Link Indexing Engine:

Based on my personal experience, it is absolutely true that Yahoo indeed is the fastest among the big three search engines to find relevant links of all sorts because the engine itself in terms of indexing links has the most numbers therefore making it the fastest to crawl up the link building efforts of every webmaster in the SEO industry. I have said this because not just based in the statistics of the contest itself but also on the websites that i handle as a link builder i have seen the great power of Yahoo in terms of indexing link building efforts, be it from forums, press releases, news releases, blog commenting, deep links indexing, directory submissions, feeds submissions and different link building tactics.

I have built an enormous amount of backlinks in this business site that i have been promoting lately which is primarily in to the microscopes business for a long time. The links below are just some of the derivatives of and product of our link-building jobs for the microscopes company.

Established as a microscopes dealing cooperative based in the U.S., Truevisionmicroscopes.com is a combination of a business and an organization at the same time that helps the scientific community by providing cheap prices of different microscopy equipments and gadgets from just the ordinary student microscopes to the most sensitive industrial microscopy equipments like the electron microscopes.

I have been the link-building outsourcing team leader for the cooperative for just about three months now and i can estimate that the job i have done for their busines is at a certain point where we have already built enormous amounts of backlinks just by directory submissions able to achieve high rankings in the SERP's of Google, Yahoo and MSN or the big 3 search engines.

By searching for the keyword microscopes alone in any of the search engines we were before nowhere to be found in their SERP's but to this date, we have been able to achieve better visibility in competing for the microscope keyword alone. Hardwork of the team has contributed to this point of our link building efforts and hopefully, by the end of the year, we are targetting to be on the top page as the #1 result in every surfer's search for the keywod microscopes where we are competing with about 1, 155,125 in MSN, 9,670,000 in Google and 3,870,000 in Yahoo.

McDonald's hires PR agency

to invite Fr. Ben Moraleda and Gary Granada



On the evening of October 17, I got a call from Ms. Bonjin Bolinao. She said McDonald's was sending a letter to Kaalagad, inviting us to a dialogue. She also asked me if it were possible to indicate in my website that McDonald's already sent a letter to Kaalagad (we received the letter the following day). I promised her that I will publish her letter in my website (http://garygranada.com). I believe the only way we may have an honest to goodness dialogue where public concern is concerned is for the public to know the facts. So I'm publishing and circulating this letter, as well as my reply to Bonjin, in fairness to everybody.



If you haven't yet, please read for a backgrounder

My Ordeal with the Arrogant Managers of McDonald's



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16 October 2006



KAALAGAD

Attention:

Fr. Ben Moraleda, Spokesperson

Mr. Gary Granada, Volunteer



Dear Fr. Moraleda and Mr. Granada:



On behalf McDonald’s Philippines, we would like to invite you to a dialogue with senior McDonald’s representatives on Thursday, October 26, at 9:30 AM at Top of the Citi restaurant, 34th floor, Citibank Center, Paseo de Roxas, Makati City.



McDonald’s would like to discuss with your group their efforts in addressing the various issues that you have raised. They would also like to formalize their commitment to your cause of reducing the use of harmful substances in the quick-service industry.



Thank you for your attention. Please confirm if you are available on the said date and time. Should you have further queries, please contact Mr. Stevie Martinez at 889-8332 loc. 131 or 0918-9258163.



Thank you.



Sincerely,



HCN Bonjin Bolinao

Managing Director

DDB Phils.

Ad Verbum PR



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And here is my reply to her letter (thru e-mail):



19 October 2006



Dear Bonjin,



I just read your letter dated 16 October, 2006. Thank you for the invitation. Because we are a consultative community, Kaalagad is currently consulting its members and staff as well as our partners in order to come up with an appropriate collective response.



Offhand, I would like to share with you my personal view. (Kaalagad is drafting its official position.)



I am of the opinion that your letter is insincere, insensitive and mercenary. It is insincere because you write as though October 6 never happened. No mention of the incident, no need for apology, no need to explain why McDonald's acted the way it did.



It is insensitive because you picked a venue which is one elevator ride from McDonald's's bosses' office, while we have to commute all the way to Makati from Quezon City. To add insult to injury, you picked the very same building where we were harassed by your security people and shabbily treated by your managers.



It is mercenary because I see PR written all over the page. It is not even signed by McDonald's but by an ad agency. We are not a 'market' that your college advertising textbooks may have taught you to regard. We are not a 'segment' of the market that you can simply 'sample', 'profile' and 'contain' if need be.



Don't treat us like we are a PR problem. I cannot take this veiled insult sitting down. So, to cut the crap, I will excuse myself from any possible dialogue with you or your client.



I have a very simple, doable and straightforward suggestion to you though. Why don't you and McDonald's use everything within your enormous financial and media clout to discredit what I am saying:



DON'T BUY MCDONALD'S BECAUSE:

1. McDonald's is arrogant - don't make them more arrogant.

2. McDonald's uses styrofoam - don't encourage them further.



I urge you to publicly discredit those two statements. And I shall be very happy, even eager, to be discredited and proven wrong if you really mean what you say. Show proof in all your stores and offices that contrary to what I am saying, McDonald's is a humble giant that puts public welfare above profit. That way, we all win!



I will publicly broadcast those statements. I know it sounds laughable for I can't even afford to pay for one column-centimeter of news item. A little-known folksinger versus a transnational ad agency of a transnational megacorporation is a like playing chess blindfolded with one rook less. On the other hand, I believe there are lots and lots of people who simply seek goodwill and solidarity. And I suspect many of them are fond of spaghetti and brewed coffee.



This will be the last time I'll write to you regarding McDonald's, hell I don't get paid for writing letters like you do.



Lastly, please do not take this letter as a personal affront. Like you said over the phone, we have common friends. I hope we are on the same page then, for instance, in taking the illegitimate Arroyo government to task over the specter of state-sponsored summary executions and brazen political opportunism that has become the norm in this country.



Tell you what, I hang out at Conspiracy (Visayas Ave, Quezon City, across Shell, beside Equitable Bank, landline 4532170). My favorite singers Cooky Chua and Noel Cabangon (who by the way once did a commercial for McDonald's) perform there. Our mutual friend Conrado DeQuiros is a regular. You might want to check the place out. Please let me buy you a beer, no scripts, no agenda, but as real persons in a real way.



Sincerely,



Gary Granada



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appropriate, salamat po~~

Have you ever seen interesting posts about Mc Donald's? here's one from the social and environmental activist Gary Granada who used to sing those wonderful melodies of songs and jingles of big multinational companies like the popular jingle of Baranggay Ginebra (Pagbigyan Nyo na Ako). This post i was able to obtain from other blogs and by virtue of the wanting for the truth to prevail i can say that i feel sorry for those people involved in this controversy from a blog post i read.


"My Personal Ordeal with the Arrogant Managers of McDonald’s"

"5 seconds"

"My name is Gary Granada, I am a Kaalagad volunteer, and I need 5 seconds of your time to help reduce the use of styrofoam in fast food chains."

"What was meant to be a nice and simple Saint Francis Day motorcade-march to McDonald’s yesterday turned out to be a nightmare. We were rudely treated by McDonald’s, to put it mildly. Weeks before, we already sought a dialogue with them to reiterate our concern for their reluctance to reduce their use of styrofoam, despite their pledge to seriously attend to it during our dialogue in 2002! (Jollibee said the same thing, and while we are not satisfied with their response, at least they made some effort to shift to other packaging and serving materials.)"

"We sent them a letter, went to their office, made follow ups, waited for a response. The most we got from them was ‘you wait for our call’. They never called, never wrote back, but verbally said they will assign representatives to receive our motorcade’s representatives."

"When we got there, their representatives turned out to be the Citibank Building’s security detail. Ill-mannered and impolite, they told us that they were told by McDonald’s that they were not expecting us. One of our staff went up to their 17 th floor office to find out whether they were willing to sit down and talk matters. Told to tell us to wait, we waited. The giant that it is, the bosses of McDonald’s apparently regard little children, nuns, mothers, priests and concerned consumers as their employees. We asked how long we were supposed to wait and got no straight answer. Finally they sent word for me to come up, just me, no one else. I thought these people must have seen too many spaghetti movies, perhaps they thought they had a hostage crisis. I was led to a conference room that could easily sit six or seven people and was greeted by two bright boys."

"Think about it. Naglakad kami papuntang McDonald’s, at pagdating namin doon, wala man lang bumaba para kausapin kami ng maayos. At pinatawag ako nitong dalawang batang managers!"

"It occurred to me that there were far more basic issues that plague McDonald’s than styrofoam. Like common courtesy. So I explained to these rich young rulers that the courteous thing to do was to go down, greet the delegation and ask how they may be of help. I even asked them where they were schooled, because in the public school in an obscure town where I came from, they manage to teach such things in Grade One. Their bloated bright brains must have taken up the space that was meant for their ears. It felt like talking to an electric fan."

"Meanwhile I insisted that somebody from Greenpeace, the Ecowaste Coalition, Franciscan Missionaries for Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation, and the JPICC of the Association of Major Religious Superiors of the Philippines (our partners in the activity) be present as well. They said they can only accommodate three people at most. Fine. So I said I and our staff will go down and we will send three people up. But at the lobby, the three representatives we sent were barred by security people from proceeding, again upon McDonald’s instructions we were told."

"It looked hopeless."

"We decided to wrap up the program when out of nowhere a condescending woman materialized and introduced herself as the media relations officer of McDonald’s. She said, ‘Why don’t you go to Jollibee instead, they’re number One.’ To which Father Ben Moraleda replied, ‘We did, and at least they are doing something."

"On the side, irked by her audacity, Fr. Ben quipped, ‘And please take that hand of yours off my shoulder, I don’t like you."

"And all that commotion for a very simple and very reasonable plan: that McDonald’s reduce the use of styrofoam by 50% within one year. McDonald’s has once again demonstrated its arrogance and incapacity to appreciate the sincere and constructive efforts of common folks to protect our environment. Unlike them, we do not make money doing what little we can to help make things a little better for everybody."

"5 seconds, that’s all I ask of you to help reduce the use of styrofoam. Sa mundo ng mga mayayabang, papansinin lang nila tayo kung tayo ay maninindigan. Take 5 seconds to think twice before choosing where to dine or order food."

"WHEN YOU HAVE A CHOICE, DON’T CHOOSE MCDONALD’S"

"I feel sad for that woman and those two young managers. So young, so successful, so ahead of their game, so privileged; so rude, so arrogant, so lacking in character, so bland. And I have since stopped wondering why their burgers taste the way they do."

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It will take a bit longer than 5 seconds, but it will go a long way if you can email this page to friends. Thank you for your time~
–Gary Granada ( http://www.garygranada.com)
7 October, 2006

Two hundred and more concerned citizens of the Philippines has filed another impeachment complaint against the lady President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. See details in http://bantayimpeachment2.blogspot.com/ for the updates on the case.

The impeachment was based in the statements made by the parents of the missing U.P. students stating that there was enough basis for the impeachment case and that is Palaparan's involvement as the administration's newest favorite butcher. the complaint was pushed forward with the help of 8 organizations and 200 individuals who signed the 21-page complaint. Many sectors expressed their support in the complaint including Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, lawyers, Protestant Bishops and pastors with a roman catholic priest, some government personnel, a retired army colonel, some local government officials, vendors, school teachers, professors, doctors and health students, OFW's, student leaders, and other victims of human rights violations under the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo regime (according to the Bantay Impeachment 2).

The different organizations are confident because they said in a statement that the president's SONA speech will be one of the greatest evidence to be used in the case filed. They also said that "it could be used in a basis that Mrs. Arroyo is an endorser of political killings and terrrorism in the country as committed by Palparan and his troops " said Ocampo.

There were also rumors of bribing the House of Representatives votees were being bribed for the administration's favor of turning down the complaint and possibly proving it to be lacking in substance. The most possible way to this is throught he poork barrels of the representatives which to no avail is one of the links to the allegation.

This proved in the last years impeachment where the lower house personnels who supported the impeachment had experienced two negative effects. That is either they lost their position or lost their CDF's in a way so legal through a mandate of law giving senators, congressmen, and even municipalities their CDF and IRA allotments. This is stupidity made legal by the law and is really a virtual example of how the government supresses the voices of the people by way of%

Joe Satriani - Always with me, always with you

the greatest guitarist i've ever seen so far...