Empress Of Drac, A Cebuana Blogger

Before we’ll bid good bye to 2011, let me introduce to you the winners of the 4th Annual Best Cebu Blogs Awards, held last 9th of December at SM City Cebu.  These bloggers were selected from over a hundred nominees and underwent over 2 months of intensive screening process.

Best Cebu Fashion Blog Winner  - Fedwilyn P. Villarba of www.chicinthetropics.blogspot.com
Best Cebu Personal Blog Winner - Ken Rodriguez Taarup of www.aroundtheflexure.com
Best Cebu Food Blog Winner - Jeane Miraflor of www.food-diary.net
Best Cebu Technology Blog Winner - Bert Azura Padilla of www.cebutechblogger.com
Best Cebu Travel Blog Winner - Mark Gallardo of www.triptabai.com
Best Cebu PhotoBlog Winner - Gerard Domanguera of www.tikboy.com
Best Cebu Events Blog Winner - Ronnell Padillo of www.ronnellpadillo.com

An article published via SunStar Cebu listed all the winners including the Top 10 Famous Bloggers according to Facebook Like.  See the article’s screen shot below.

Best Cebu Blogs Awards is the only independent award giving body in Cebu that recognizes the importance of online publishing and how it currently shapes and affects today’s media consumption.
View photos of the awarding night here.  To learn more about BCBA visit our website at www.bestcebublogs.com.

The official list of registered participants was already released by the Secretariat Committee yesterday.  Double check if you can find your name in the final list (the list is arranged alphabetically by name).  Read more notes and instructions here.

Be sure to be there on time.  The first 50 walk-in registrants will receive special prizes.   This is part of the event’s Early Bird promo.  Be there in SM Trade Hall as early as 7:30AM.  SM’s Gate 5 will be open by then.  Read the Entrance Instruction here.

Don’t forget to bring your wifi devices.  SM Trade Hall area is a wifi zone.  Spread the news about Visayas Blogging Summit 2011 by using #vbs2011 as your twitter hashtag.  You can also use it as a marker if you are posting in Facebook and other social networking accounts.

And, DON’T forget to CHECK-IN the moment you arrive in the venue.  Let your friends know that you are attending one of the country’s largest social media summits by checking in at Visayas  Blogging Summit 2011 in foursquare.

Lastly, don’t forget to bring with you notebooks and pen.  Chris Ducker, one of the featured speakers at theBlogWorldExpo in Los Angeles, USA this year, is VBS 2011’s Keynote Speaker.

Excited much?  Check VBS 2011 website to learn more about the people behind the event.

See you. (:

N.B.: Also, get your cameras ready all the time.  Miss Earth Candidates will be dropping by at the summit at around 11 AM.

For the sake of giving back and spreading the link-love, I decided to turn this site into a DoFollow blog. It’s now time to share the link juice and make everyone (with the exception of spammers and malicious bots) happy.

What the heck is DoFollow?

DoFollow is actually a SEO jargon which is used to label a link that passes a value through a link-back from (i.e. your comments) to your website. All blog-sites and websites are NoFollow by default and it’s up to the site admin or blogger if he wanted to change the link attribute to DoFollow.

Benefits of DoFollow Blogs

DoFollow blogs exist to encourage commenting and discussions but it can also be very beneficial especially to people who just launched their blogs/websites. If you have a new blog and wanted to promote it, you can just look for blogs that are Do-Follow and try to comment on their post. Every back-link of your approved comment passes a value to your blog-site giving it a good reputation and value to search engines. Back-links are just like friends, the more friends you have the more popular you are. Same with your blog-site. The more back-links it has the more popular it become to search engines. Being popular to search engines means it’s well-indexed and is ranked higher in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Abuse on DoFollow Blogs

Because DoFollow blogs passes link-juice and popularity, lots of netizens called spammers attacked unaware DoFollow blog owners spamming blog posts with nonsense comments to create key-word oriented back-links to their commercial websites. This, is the very reason why lots of website/blog admins prefer NoFollow over DoFollow.

Comment moderation on DoFollow blogs is very strict. Kindly read the comment policy of this blog before posting your feedback. Happy blogging and don’t abuse the DoFollow feature.

As part of the launching of Multiply.com’s new E-Commerce system here in Cebu, they feature one of the most successful online shops that is originally created by three Cebuana sisters. WAGW or What A Girl Wants, the trendy shop located at the 2^nd floor of Ayala Mall Centre, started as a mere online shop in multiply.com way back 2008.

The three Cebuana sisters who have no background on how to build a website make use of multiply.com’s user-friendly platform to sell their products. After a few years of hard work and maintaining their online presence through multiply.com, WAGW has now reached avid customers from Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. They also have clients from outside the country like Singapore, USA, Dubai, and a lot more.

What A Girl Wants is featured on the top 1 spot of Spot.ph’s Top 10 Online Boutiques: 2011 Edition. Below is an excerpt why a lot of people love WAGW.

“They’ve enlisted the help of real Filipino models, fashion stylists, hairstylists and makeup artists to come up with editorial spreads that give you ideas on how to mix and match their clothes. They’ve also collaborated with emerging fashion icons such as Laureen Uy and Camille Co to help them come up with collections for the young and trendy market.”

With Multiply’s new interface and more refined e-commerce system, small online store owners and shoppers are expected to reap better and bigger benefits.

Multiply.Com Launches New E-Commerce System in Cebu

Multiply.com, one of the most visited and largest social networking sites in the Philippines launched their new E-Commerce System in Cebu last June 16, 2011 at Formo Bar & Restaurant, Banilad, Cebu City. This new system is their main ace and what makes them stand out from the rest of social networking sites that are also popular in the country.

Multiply Commerce has upgraded features for both shoppers and merchants. For shoppers, Multipy Commerce introduced teh Marketplace that offers a listing of the variety of shops available so people can easily find what they’re looking for. For sellers, the Multiply Commerce program was developed to help them manage and grow their business. Read more here.

It was early this January (before the Sinulog Festival) that a business team from Manila visited here in Cebu to introduce the country’s newest group buying site - Buyanihan.com.

Buyanihan.com is the very first group buying site in the Philippines which features the best discount deals on restaurants and hotels, theme parks, concerts, shows, foods & beverages, and I hope they would include (in the future) RTW items like cotton jeans, t-shirts, blouses, jackets, shoes, and even nursing scrubs or any standard uniform for workers.

I think this kind of buying trend will become very popular to Cebuanos since this gives us the convenience of buying online - items on display are offered in affordable prices because it would be bought in bulk.  This is ideal for families, barkadas, office workers, groups, or any individuals who wanted to spend less for more.

I hope Buyanihan.com will not limit the type of products that they will display on their online store.  They can also display cosplay costumes like school girl uniforms, nursing uniforms, lolita, and a lot more.

Visit www.buyanihan.com to see their latest products and offerings.