This blog used to be a haven for forex traders and online investors. It will now contain my political views and opinions about the current state of affairs in my country the Philippines from here on. Please feel free to comment on my posts.
Pesky Pop-up Ads or Just somebody not happy with my blog? Please help me find out.
I just received a warning from Entrecard saying I have to make sure I don't have pop-up ads in my blog. I don't notice any pop-ups myself when I access my own blog. However, I am not ruling out the possibility that there may indeed be pop-ups that selectively appear depending on where the reader's ip address is. I know for a fact that Chikita ads do such things. I've gotten rid of my chitika ads months ago because of this. I also have just recently changed my template. But still, I have no way of knowing if pop up ads are still on this blog unless people catches my attention to it. And today, Entrecard sent me this stern email warning!
Your account 'Traders' Hub' on entrecard.com has been warned. The administrator provided the following message:
Please make sure blog does not contain popup ads - thanks!
Please contact support@entrecard.com if you have any questions regarding this warning.
PLEASE NOTE: You are expected to resolve this issue promptly. Failure to do so will result in the removal
of your Entrecard account.
So I thought of putting up this Entrecard contest to get the help of Entrecard droppers who visits my blog. The contest rules are simple. The one who can help me catch the pop up or pop-ups wins 3,000 EC's The firsst one who reports a unique pop-up ad wins and there can be more than 1 winner depending on how many pop ups exists. If you notice no pop-ups please leave a comment on this post just the same, saying you did not notice any pop ups, and you will automatically receive 50 EC's from me. (Your comment will let me know if there indeed exists pop up ads in this blog or not!) If it turns out that there are no pop-ups and nobody wins the 3,000 ec's, I will electronically raffle off the prize among the commenters to this post - with 1,500 ec's going to the first placer, 1,000 ec's to the second placer, and 500 ec's to the third placer. If indeed, there is/are pop up ad/s, I will give an additional 3,000 ec's to whoever can give me a suggestion that will lead to the elimination of the said ad. You may view the page source of this blog or I can email you the html of this site upon request. Contest will run from today March 30, 2009 till April 15, 2009. I will be announcing the winners a blog post on April 16, 2009. Happy blogging!
Note: The image you see at the bottom right of my site is not a pop-up ad but a static image which I regularly change everytime I have a new post I want my visitors to take note of!
Today I stumbled on a site that provides free service to shorten long URL's. Competing with a list of existing URL forwarders, urlzoom.org is providing much more than redirecting sites. Urlzoom.org provides you with trackable tiny url's where you can monitor all the referring sites to your blog including the date and time of all the click-throughs to your site!- a necessary tool for any internet marketeer.
So, why would I want to shorten my tiny url?
Long url's are hard to remember. If you happen to be an internet marketeer, or have joined an affiliate program, or, if you happen to be upstart blogger wanting to develop a wide base of followers, then you do need a short url. For one, it would be easier to remember for your readers. I have struggled for a long time with my own long url (http://bigdaddyrichard-swirlingthoughts.blogspot.com/) in the past! I wanted a shorter one when I started blogging. But being a newbie then, I didn't know how to do it! I innocently editted my url name through my blogger dashboard, and instantly I became invisible to everyone. I lost my technorati rating and page rank altogether. I simply didn't know how to go about it then. I also didn't know then that there exists URL forwarders like urlzoom.org! So I reverted back to my old, hard to remember url. Today, I am happy to have joined urlzoom.org. Since I blog a lot, I often cut and paste my own url as a link. With a shorter url, the job is now a cinch!
Shorter url's are also helpful in conducting mailing campaigns. They are manageable and easy to remember. If you happen to have joined an affiliate marketing program (such as amazon.com), chances are you have an incredibly long url to manage as is common. Chances are, you may also not want to reveal your affiliation on the onset in your e-mail campaigns. With urlzoom.org, you not only get a short url, you also get a trackable tiny url which keeps track of all the click-throughs going to your site including the time, the date and the referring sites. The best thing about this is it's free! You just need to register with your email address and you're in. Enjoy tracking your stats!
April 2 has been declared by the United Nations General Assembly through a resolution passed in 2007 as the World Autism Awareness Day. It aims to encourage member nations to undertake measures to raise people's awareness about this disorder that is affecting 1 out every 150 individuals in the world. It is estimated that worldwide, about 67 million people are affected by this developmental neurological disorder with 500,000 of them in the Philippines.
What is Autism?
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental neurological disorder characterized by deficits in socialbehavior and communication, and a restricted range of activities. At least 1 in 150 individuals are affected with ASD. Autistic infants show less attention to social stimuli, smile and look at others less often, and respond less to their own name. Autistic toddlers have more striking social deviance; for example, they have less eye contact and anticipatory postures and are more likely to communicate by manipulating another person's hand. Three- to five-year-old autistic children are less likely to exhibit social understanding, approach others spontaneously, imitate and respond to emotions, communicate nonverbally, and take turns with others. However, they do form attachments to their primary caregivers.They display moderately less attachment security than usual, although this feature disappears in children with higher mental development or less severe ASD. Older children and adults with ASD perform worse on tests of face and emotion recognition.(from wikipedia)
Contrary to common belief, autistic children do not prefer to be alone. Making and maintaining friendships often proves to be difficult for those with autism. For them, the quality of friendships, not the number of friends, predicts how lonely they feel.
Watch the video below to understand what autism really is!
Autism is not a disease but a developmental disorder. Early recognition of its symptoms will help minimize its life lasting effects on individuals and even markly improve their development. Autism has yet no known cure but we can cure our ignorance of it and start helping to raise conciousness about it. There are many things we can do like: (Mouse over and click on the links.)
Donateto the world wide research fund designed to study more about the disorder and possibly find a cure for it.
Join Walk With Wubbzy On The Weband reserve part of your blog for a month long fund raising campaign for Autism.
Be informed. Get Involved. Let us help improve the quality of life of people with ASD and their families. Embed the video Walk With Wubbzy On The Web in your blog sites! Let people know you care!
April 2, 2009
"AutisMusical" WAAD Concert
4:00 P.M., SM North Edsa -Featuring a young musical prodigy with autism
With people tightening up on their budgets because of the current economic crunch, shoppers are left with no better choice than to "let their mouse do the walking" and shop online!
Online shopping is today, turning out to be the logical, economical, and most convenient way of procuring your household needs. You will save on fuel costs since you do your online shopping without leaving the comforts of your homes. No more irritating waits at the end of long queues of busy store counters! No more hopping around from one shop to another or from one mall to the other! You can even take your sweetest time browsing through different products without pesky sales ladies pressuring you to make the purchases! Yup, this is what online shopping is all about - convenient, comfortable, and it's tops!
But hey, how do you go about doing your shopping online? Do you Google it? Or, do you go to your favorite online shops or visit the most popular sites?
With Easter just a few weeks away, you probably must be looking for gift ideas for your love ones by now! Since Google has the most comprehensive listing of anything and everything in the web, you'll more than likely 'google' your search! But guess what, if you google something like "gift ideas for Easter", you will end up with 2,260,000 links which will send you into a seemingly endless trek of hopping from one website to another until a product catches your fancies! Of course you can fine tune your search to limit the results! But, the very reason you are googling your search is because you have no idea of what gift to search for in the first place! So how can you even limit your search? Of course, you can always go to some popular online shops, but then again, the choices may be limited to whatever they have on stock and whatever their affiliates are selling - which you may not even find to your liking - and sends you into another wild goose chase for a product that is to your liking.
There is now a better way of doing your online shopping.You can now do your online shopping thru ShopWiki.com! ShopWiki crawls the entire worldwide web the same way Google does to find every available site. This means you can find everything and anything that is for sale on the web at ShopWiki. Of course, the easiest way to find something on the web is to google it, but if you want a more relevant search result for any product on sale in the web that is taylor-fitted to your specific needs, then you must "shopwiki" it.
Shopwiki.com is an online directory of anything that is for sale in the web just as Wikipedia is a directory of articles on almost all subjects written and published in the web. If Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia covering practically any web published topic of discussion, Shopwiki.com is the online shopping encyclopedia of everything that is for sale in the blogosphere. As with any other wiki, Shopwiki.com is a collection of collaborative websites and serves as an online database of everything that is sold in the entire web.
But much more than being an online directory, Shopwiki.com makes online shopping fun and convenient. For example, if you want to go shopping online for Easter gifts but don't have any idea what to look for, Shopwiki.com has the ShopWiki Gift Guides which helps you source and taylor-fit your gift choices according to either who your gift recipients are or, what gifts best suits the occassion. Your choices are even fined tuned further more by ShopWiki Gift Guides. For instance, if your recipient happens to be a woman and you click on the appropriate category (Gifts For Women), it will link you to a page where the gift products are further broken down into smaller categories more descriptive of and more suitable to your recipient's personality, such as Fashionista (if she is a fashion buff), Animal Lover (if she happens to adore pets), Artiste (if she is an art enthusiast), Beauty and Spa ( if she is forever concious of her looks), College Student ( if the recipient is still in school), and much much more. The ShopWiki Gift Guide helps you choose the best gift befitting your recipient to the tee with exceptionally great ease.
You can also narrow down your search for gift items to fit a particular occasion. With Easter just around the corner, you can use ShopWiki.com to narrow down your gift choices to the "Happy Easter" Gifts.
Unlike other online shopping directories which limits their product choices only to the products sold by their affiliates, ShopWiki.com lists and links everything and anything that is for sale in the web. A click on any of the products in this site will pop out links to all the available sites in the net that is selling the same product. The choice of which shop to patronize is always totally yours. One other great feature of the site is the price snippet which pops up when you mouse over a particular product, giving you a list of the best available prices of the product you are searching plus the links to the sites offering them. Cool, indeed!
ShopWiki.com is also a resource center for product guides, tips and tricks, and a lot more...all related to the products listed in the site.
You can kiss your worries goodbye when you want to go online shopping. There is only one place to go to find the product you are looking for. You need not spend precious time surfing through different online shops just to canvass the best prices available in the net. ShopWiki will do that for you.
Entrecard will now not only bring bloggers traffic to their blogs, it will now, also allow its members to monetize their blogs by allowing EC members to exchange their EC credits for cash right on their EC dashboard!
HOW THIS WORKS!
Entrecard is tying up with a third party ad network and will be allowing ads to run through the entire entrecard system. I am not so sure yet how this is going to be conducted, but I assume the ads will run through the EC drop boxes in our blogs. I presume that instead of the usual widgets of the EC members, who bought an ad from you, appearing on your drop boxes, they will be replaced by 125 X 125 ads from the ad network. The thing to take note of here is although members will still have the right to reject the ads that will appear on their drop boxes, they need to pay a rejection fee with EC credits (the amount of which is still being determined).
Entrecard will paid by the ad network per cpm ad placed. According to Entrecard administrators, 75% of the revenues will be used to buy back credits from Entrecard members. The other 25% will be used to grow the network.
I personally do not see anything bad about the whole thing. In fact, I believe, the men behind Entrecard deserves to get paid off for the great job of putting together a free network that generates free traffic for upstart bloggers. They deserve to be able to cash in for the great service and effort they are doing for bloggers for free! The wonderful thing about it is the pay off will not come from the member bloggers but from the ad network! The other good thing about it is the fact that under this new scheme, EC members will now have the chance to convert the credits, which we can't help but accumulate as we make our daily rounds of EC drops, into real cash!
In the past, Entrecard has been criticized a great deal in some social network forums by people who I believe knows very little about its real value. I believe the critisms come from disgruntled EC members who abhor having to make the tedious daily rounds of EC droppings, describing the regimen as a useless, worthless task.
When I was new to Entrecard, I also thought of EC the same way, finding the task of dropping EC cards daily too tiring and directionless. When my account was deleted for some TOS violations several months ago, I got irked and condemned what I thought then as a useless practice just to get my blog visited. I even wrote a post on this. I felt then that there is no short cut to gaining blog popularity, and develop linkages with blog followers, but to post useful and relevant stuff on your blogs. But guess what, the many weeks I was out of the Entrecard network, I saw my visits drop to 0 on certain days - even if I thought I had very good and relevant posts then. Nobody, it seems was paying attention. My blog was dying a slow death - despite the hard work I tried to put in into it.
I finally decided I will give myself a second chance with Entrecard. I corrected my TOS (Terms Of Service) violations and had my two blogs reinstated. Now, hear this. I made a unique experiment with my two blogs which are both registered with Entrecard. In one, the Traders' Hub, I became a "dropaholic" droping EC's and visiting EC member sites to the maximum of 300 drops a day which is allowed by the system. (I even used the credit generators I found in some of the EC members' sites at some point in time for faster droppings, only to get exasperated when I noticed that most of the drops lists I came across with included non-EC members, irritatingly stalling my daily runs while I look for the non existent drop boxes in said sites). On Swirling Thoughts, I intentionally did no drops! The results? My Traders' Hub was giving me over 200 visits a day while I hardly had more than four visitors on Swirling Thoughts in a day!
This is what Entrecard is all about. With the "U drop I follow" policy being practiced by majority of the EC members, your visits are reciprocated with a similar visit and a drop by EC members. While it is true that you won't get 100 visits for every 100 drops you make daily ( my ratio now is 180 visits for every 300 drops I make), the more important thing is you get substantial daily traffic which otherwise won't be there if you are on your own - and, which is a very vital to get successfully noticed in the blogosphere. Do not forget, no matter how good and relevant your posts may be, no matter how unique and beautiful your website design is - you still will have no visitors because no one will even know your blog exists at all unless someone pays you a visit and word is fast spread around - besides, it will take a while before you are able to develop a circle of loyal followers who will like your blog enough to want to visit your site over and over again!
When I used to give marketing seminars in the past (incidentally, blogging is no different from making a sales pitch), I fondly describe the various stages to a successful sales presentation with a four letter acronym - 'AIDA' where A stands for Attention, I stands for Interest, D for Desire, and A is for Action. I always emphasized the very first, and take note, the hardest stage of the selling process which is to catch the viewers' ATTENTION. This is normally a tall order for a newbie blogger to achieve on his own.
Well, Entrecard is providing them the free platform to do this. With Entrecard, visits will come! Attention can be had through reciprocal drops made by site owners of the blogs you just made your own drops to! But thereafter, it will now be up to you how you will gain the Interests of those making such fleeting visits to your site - how you will make them linger longer after making their drops on your site! It will now be up to you how you will package your site to be attractive enough to sufficiently develop your visitors' Desire for any one of the products or services you are offering in your blog. It will be up to you now how you will skillfully craft your blog to be attractively loaded enough to convert those fleeting visits into Actions - which will result ultimately into products bought through your site, or services subscribed to, or linkages clicked on! (And this in turn will lower your bounce rate!)
The bottom line is, Entrecard will only get the ball rolling for you! You still have to do the rest to achieve whatever level of success you have set out to achieve for yourself right from the start.
Much more than the generated site visits, Entrecard has also developed its own 'marketplace' where members freely interact by buying or selling, links, comments, reviews, even physical goods, using only the generated EC credits as payments. Those seemingly 'empty' visits earn credits which can be converted into productive blogging ends after all!
Entrecard has its own toolbar too, which members can use to surf through all member blogs in the network, zero in on special categories of EC members, and reach a more relevant group of targeted blogs!
Entrecard's slated partnership with an ad network is a welcome development for me as an Entrecard member. For where else on earth can you find a social network that helps start up bloggers get the much needed blog visits to get noticed - for free! Where else on earth will you find a social network where bloggers even get paid for working hard to successfully develop their own blogs into formidable sites in the blogosphere? Well, this is how Entrecard's slated partnership with an ad network looks like to me!
At about the same time that the Madoff Scam was hugging international headlines, a similar "Ponzi" scheme was also being investigated in the Philippine Senate. Tagged as the Legacy Scam, the Legacy Financial Group in the Philippines headed by Celso De Los Angeles, a graduate of a Jesuit-run exclusive school in the Philippines (the same school from which the president's husband came from), managed to perpetrate a "double your money time deposit program" that gypped Philippine investors to the tune of Php 24 Billion (approximately $500M). Done through a network of under-capitalized Rural Banks, De Los Angeles blatantly operated in the open, unhindered by helpless regulatory agencies, setting up operations nationwide unchallenged - and, all these done despite being in the Central Bank's watch list since 1984 for similar infractions.
As one local newspaper quoted it,
"Regulators could only shake their heads in amazement at the “aggressive marketing methods” that allowed 13 undercapitalized banks representing less than 1 percent of the country’s 1,359 rural banks, to attract a total of 12 percent of the rural banking system’s P116.5 billion in deposits." (Inquirer.net)
How he managed to perpetrate this "Ponzi" like scheme unchallenged by authorities until a Senate probe on the scam was conducted recently is no longer a mystery.
On his own admission, the vice president of the country, Noli de Castro, confessed that De Los Angeles bankrolled his candidacy in 2004. It must be recalled that no less than the vice president recommended De Los Angeles to head the National Mortgage Finance Corporation immediately after elections.(political payoff?)
Even more disturbing was the revelation made by Ricardo Tan the former head of the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation, who was already conducting a probe on the Legacy group as early as four years ago together with the Central Bank employees. According to Tan, he was invited by the Speaker of the House of Representatives to dinner through his subaltern George Regalado. This was what he had to say:
“To my surprise, when I got there [to Edsa Plaza Shangi-La Hotel], we were joined by Celso de los Angeles,” Tan said, referring to the alleged owner of several rural banks that PDIC was investigating for unsafe and unsound banking practices.
Tan said Nograles asked him to go easy on the probe of the Legacy rural banks because of De los Angeles’ ties to several administration allies. When contacted by the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Nograles vehemently denied the report.
“Primo, give him what he wants. He needs it. He helped Kabayan (Vice President Noli de Castro) a lot,” Tan quoted Nograles as saying to him, speaking on behalf of De los Angeles, who supported De Castro during the 2004 elections.(Inquirer.net)
More disturbing developments are being exposed by the still on-going senate investigation headed by Senator Mar Roxas, who pledged he will not stop until the culprits are in jail. Witnesses are lining up, and their testimonies are revealing the unbelievable extent of corruption prevalent in the current administration of Gloria Arroyo. A SEC commissioner has been told to go on leave (take note: not dismissed, or suspended, or asked to resign as is customary in cases of such magnitude) after witnesses revealed he had accepted bribes from De Los Angeles. Congressmen and certain Central Bank officers were also identified by witnesses to be under De Los Angeles' pay off list. Certain court officials are also being questioned for issuing temporary restraining orders in favor of Legacy on petitions for injunctions against the company. The question right now is "where will the buck stop?" The cases which have been filed against De Los Angeles in the past have come to nothing!
Corruption has been a way of life in Philippine politics. This has never been made more evident than in the last 8 years that Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is the president. No less than her own husband has been tagged as a perpetrator of some of the more prominent graft cases in the country. With the press, the military, the judiciary, and the House of Representatives at her beck and call, corruption can only be expected to get even worse and more blatant in the remaining two years of her administration. The Legacy Scam case will be one of the many corruption cases that Gloria Macapagal Arroyo will leave behind as the legacy of her controversial presidency!
The clerics, the so-called 'civil society', and the pretentious patriotic businessmen who helped Arroyo grab the presidency in 2000 must by now be regretting having supported Arroyo then. Never mind her supporters in the military, the judiciary, the congress, and the senate - as they have all been sharing with the 'spoils of war' after Arroyo's rise to the presidency up to now - through cash handouts, choice government appointments, padded budgets and other perks freely handed to them by the president! Never mind the local press, as their mouths have also been gagged with gifts, payola's, and sometimes outright intimidation. In the meantime, the rights of the hardworking Filipinos like those who were duped to invest on Legacy are continually trampled, with their complaints having no chances for redress.
I doubt whether a resolution of this case can be had under the Arroyo administration. It is so much unlike here in the U.S. where investigators and prosecutors go about their duties as public stewards without fear or favor. Remember, Madoff was charged only last December 12, 2008. Today, he is behind bars!
As for De Los Angeles, for as long as Arroyo, and De Castro, and the other Congressmen on his pay off list are in power, he can and will always avoid incarceration using his political clout, and a battery of lawyers.
I got this response from a certain Matt, EC Support Manager who is also the blog owner of http://ragingrev.com/ one of the blogs I regularly visit everyday (I didn't know that the owner is the EC support manager.) I yet have to receive Entrecard's official reply to my query under Ticket ID: IRE-716363 regarding the issue.
I have deleted all of the blogs in question...thanks for pointing this stuff out to us here at EC...if you see anymore don't hesistate to let us know.
Thanks
MattEC Support Manager
I am glad they took out the accounts already from the Entrecard roll. I guess I won't be seeing those spam badges anymore. The old entries of those badges, however, are still in my drops inbox. I still need to be careful not to click on them. Those who have them too in their drops inboxes must also exercise care so we can deny the spammer his expected free revenue from us.
4days ago, I posted " GUESS WHO I SAW IN MY ENTRECARD DROP INBOX - TED MURPHY OF IZEA!" after I noticed 2 CPC ads from Social Sparks, a paid to blog network under Izea owned by Ted Murphy, appearing in my EC card drop inbox, disguising as EC member complete with badges and pretending to be EC droppers. Today, there are three!
For the benefit of non Entrecard members, Entrecard is a network of bloggers where members visit each
others' blogs to drop their EC cards, an efficient and effective way to drive traffic to EC carders' sites, especially for upstart bloggers like me. With ab"U Drop, I follow" practice being followed by most EC carders, the innocent EC members will normally check their drop inboxes to see who paid them a visit and reciprocate these with their own visits and card drops.A drop inbox contains the badges of EC members who made the drops. With CPC (Cost per Click) ads inconspicously appearing together with the badges of other EC droppers, the reciprocating EC member will unknowingly click on the badges-cum-cpc ads. And, each innocent click sends revenue to the spammer! Revolting, indeed!
Ted's Izea has a very strict policy against spamming ad clicks on their network's cpc ads and he promised me through an email he sent immediately after my earlier post that he will look for the culprit and ban the culprit forever from his networks. I also sent a notice to Entrecard about the whole incident (which unfortunately they merely tagged with "moderate" importance). I even included the entrecard member id numbers appearing on the spammed badges. But, alas, I still have to hear from Entrecard regarding the matter prompting me to make this post.
Below are the screenshots of the badges of the spammers and the corresponding ads that they link to.
This is my drops inbox for March 3, 2009 that contains ---
Manta Mania and beautiful underwater bubble.
Clicking these badges will lead you to the corresponding Social Sparks CPC ads below- -
Please note that a click on the badges will earn the spammer $0.11 for the manta mania link
and $0.16 for the dolphin bubbles link.
If these badges appear in every EC card dropper's inbox, you can just
imagine how much revenue is being funneled
into the spammer's account every day
by innocent EC carders.
Now, this is my March 7, 2009 drop inbox which contains the latest spam--
This badge, if clicked will link you to another Social Sparks CPC ad below
Which will send $0.27 per click to the spammer'saccount.
Totally abhoring!
I would not have ordinarily noticed these spams. But when I started looking for the EC carddrop boxes in the linked sites, they were not present, indicating that the site owners are not Entrecard members. (Can you imagine Ted Murphy being a member of EC? See my earlier post " GUESS WHO I SAW IN MY ENTRECARD DROP INBOX - TED MURPHY OF IZEA!"- it was titled as such merely to draw attention to the issue!)
Another funny thing I noted about the whole incident is the fact that these badges appeared in my inbox days after I've scanned my inbox. I mean, when I scanned through my inbox on March 3, the manta mania and the dolphin bubbles badges were still not there. When I scorred through my inboxes again on March 4, the badges were already lined up along with the other EC droppers forMarch 3. This has kept me wondering up to this time.
I have also been wondering how the spammer did the whole thing- how he hacked the Entrecard network. All the while I thought he/she must have been an extra ordinary hacker...well at least until a fellow blogger from my BlogCatalog community provided mewith a link that led me to a video tutorial from Traffic Geyser which instructs you how to easily earn money with pay per click ads. The video is entitled Social Media Money Magnets - How to Make Money Fast as an Affiliate Using Video.
Whoever did the Entrecard spam must have seen this videoand adopted the method to create the spam.
This is a call toall entrecard members. If you see the entrecard badges above in your drop inbox, do not click on them. Deny the spammer the chance to earn free money at our expense! Be vigilant and report similar incidents to Entrecard. If you have encountered similar attempts tospam entrecard users, do drop me a line. I will document similar incidents and post it here so others may not fall into the same trap. Cheers!
Today, the whole world is celebrating International Women's Day! This is a global day of celebration to commemorate the economic, political, and social achievements of women worldwide. From1869 when British MP John Stuart Mill made the first ever call for women's right to vote, women have continually proven they are a force to recon with when it comes to handling this world's affair. Unfortunately, only a handful of countries worldwide gives this day its rightful significance.Countries like the U.K. (257 events), U.S. (195 events), Australia (165 events), Canada (130 events), India (47 events) have private and public organizations lining up activities to commemorate this day. Most others just pass off this day as ordinary.
Women must be given the rightful importance they deserve. And, today is the best time to do it. Today is the most appropriate time for us to be reminded of the extra ordinary role women play in this world. To those who are likely to take the issue rather lightly, it might help to remind you (even surprise you) with some important facts about women.
56% of women who voted supported Obama compared to only 49% of men who voted for Obama
Women do two-thirds of the world's work but receive only 10% of the world's income
Women control $14 trillion in assets and this should grow to $22 trillion over next 10 years
Globally women comprise 42% internet users (Italy 37% ... US & Canada 51%)
80% of UK purchasing decisions are made by women but 83% of 'creatives' are men
From 1945 to 1995 the percentage of women MPs worldwide increased four-fold
In the Philippines, sad to say, this day is not being given much attention despite the fact that the current head of state is a woman. However, they have a commendable grass root organization called Gabriela Women's Party, a party list representing women in the country's House of Representatives. Gabriela Women's Party is the political arm of a radical women's organization bearing the same name. (The organization took its name after a legendary hero, Gabriela Silang, who led one of the revolts against Spain during the colonial era.)
Gabriela is the National Alliance of Women's Organizations in the Philippines. With Gabriela, everyday is women's day since their unrelenting advocacy is to champion women's causes 24/7. Among the campaigns Gabriela is taking are:
"The Purple Rose Campaign", a campaign designed to raise awareness on the issue of sex trafficking of Filipino women and children: the brutal control exercised over women and children victims; the high incidence of violence and the tremendous self-sacrifice the women undergo to ensure the economic survival of their families in the Philippines. It shall provide a means by which everyone and anyone can express disapproval and opposition against the use of the sex trade and forced labor as a means of propping up the collapsing economy.
"Free Our Sisters, Free Ourselves", A campaign designed to raise the alarm as recent events in the Philippines witness the attack on women's basic democratic rights. Legitimate expressions of dissent are banned, rallies violently dispersed. Publications and media outfits are raided and censored with threats of government takeover and closure. Our freedoms are curtailed.
Continually, persecuted by government authorities, Gabriela has remained vigilant in its pursuit of freedom and liberation from the oppressive censorship by authorities. From its website, I saw the following entries which are truly alarming! "A GABRIELA member was stabbed and shot to death in front of her four children. Another member along with her husband and 8-year old daughter were massacred inside their own home while they were sleeping. Another one was summoned by the military to their detachment and photographed wearing a placard stating that they were supporters of the New People's Army. One member and her husband were abducted early one morning and later found dead a few meters from her house."
In celebrating the International Women's Day, let the world know that in Gabriela's part of the world, The Philippines, mere affiliation with Gabriela means political persecution from the government! Let the support for Gabriela pour in! Let us blog-swarm our sympathies for these women fighting for their rights in the Philippines.
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