i.PH Downtime on Thursday, September 22

In order to serve you better, i.PH will conduct regular server
maintenance on Thursday, September 22, 2005. During the maintenance,
the system will be temporarily down between 9:00PM to 3:00AM GMT +0800.

Please be informed that the i.PH website, blogs, multimedia galleries,
and related services will not be available during the downtime. Normal
operations will resume upon completion of the maintenance.

We regret any inconvenience this may cause.

Thank you for your patience and continued support of i.PH.

i.PH now free! For life!

i.PH is now a free service!  Yes, you read it right.  Subscription for the entry level or Blog.Starter package is free for the life of the service.  We won’t ask you to pay anything.  The free blogs are ad-supported.

And what’s great: no more expiring after a few months’ trial! 
Your free account will auto-renew at every “end” of the subscription
period.

We also increased the disc space and monthly bandwidth allocation
across all accounts.  Blog.Starter now has 100 Megabytes of
storage space and 1 Gigabyte of monthly transfers.  That’s good
enough for a fairly active and popular blogger to live by!

Premium accounts are still available for those who want to make the
most out of their blogging experience.  We’ve narrowed down the
new packages to Blog.Pro and MindBlogging.  Here’s a plan comparison sheet.

What you get with a premium account:

• Password protect your Blog
• Ad-free blogging
• Flash-based Photoblogging
• Earn from your own Adsense Channel
• Change of Domain

So spread the word! i.PH is free, free, free.

PCIJ i-Report now available for download

Hot off the presses: Mr. Alecks Pabico of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ - homepage, blog) has put up the Center's latest i-Report eMagazine for subscription thru i.PH Pay4Access.

This recent issue is a mix of current and less timebound stories. In our cover story, we revisit the issue of jueteng. Given its deep roots in Philippine village life, jueteng is a popular entertainment and distraction. At the national level, however, it is fodder for political scandal and ammunition that can be used to oust presidents.

Links to the articles:

• Announcement at Inside PCIJ
• eMagazine Description at pcij.i.ph

Download it now, and get to learn more about the intricacies of Philippine politics and society!

- jangelo

What people are saying about i.PH

Part of the i.PH blogger program, which we wrote about in a previous article, bloggers, both i.PH and non-i.PH alike, were invited to write about the service on their respective blogs.

For more information on the program, and links to the bloggers’ entries, please visit the i.PH Blogger Program Weblog at http://bloggerprogram.i.ph.

Earning from the i.PH Blogger Program

i.PH has recently come up with a blogger program, in which we
invite a handful of bloggers to blog about i.PH in exchange for a nominal
compensation.

We basically operate on a full-disclosure arrangement because, well, we
feel that it’s the honorable thing to do.  Hence we are posting
updates here, both to inform bloggers, i.PH and non-i.PH alike, who may
wish to join.

The initial run is for four weeks (one month). 
So far, we have two active bloggers who have agreed to participate:

• Ka Edong of Technobiography, and
• Earthangel of Elegantly Wasted.

If you are interested, please send an email to jangelo@domains.ph so we
can evaluate your blog.  We are currently only accommodating
active and regular bloggers who have a reasonably good following (i.e.,
blogging for at least six months, with at least two blog posts per week
on average).  But if you think it’s worth a try, then we’re just an email away.

Here are the mechanics:

• Blog posting.  Participants
  are to post 2 quality articles about i.PH per week.  Length should be
  at least 2 paragraphs each.  These may be in form of a review or any
  commentary about the service.  This is to be done in the
  participant’s main blog (whether hosted by i.PH or other
  services).  The blog post should likewise clearly identify and have a link to the i.PH homepage.
• i.PH Logo - Participants
  are to display the i.PH logo (with an active link to the i.PH homepage)
  prominently on their sites (i.e. on the sidebar). We shall provide
  participants with a choice of logos you may include in their blogs.
• Comment posting. 
  Participants are to post at least 20 comments each week
  on other blogs (may or may not be friends or contacts) referring them
  to the articles posted on their own blogs, and to i.PH as a service as
  well.  So as not to be tagged as spam, these should be relevant and
  specific to the blog posts being responded to.  An example scenario
  would be a participant responding to a post with photos, and commenting
  that i.PH has a built-in photo gallery and photo blog, and that the
  participant has written about it in his/her own site.
• Full disclosure. 
  Participants are to disclose that they are part of the program; i.PH
  shall likewise name, and link to, participants and their blogs. 
  This can be viewed as a mutual publicity/traffic-generation between the i.PH site and the participants’.

The i.PH team will be sending the participants information packets and
links to relevant sites, for reference.  The participants shall
likewise touch base with the i.PH team on a regular basis to provide
links to new blog posts and comments.

Why are we doing this?  It’s because we feel it’s high time people
learned more about the i.PH service, spread the word to their friends,
and earn some money while they’re at it.

G-Cash gateway still down

Please be advised that the Globe G-Cash gateway is not yet
available with our Pay4Access feature.  Globe is still undertaking
some routine tests.

We shall make an announcement once users can already receive Pay4Access payments and remittances through G-Cash.

For more information on Pay4Access, please visit this Knowledge Base article.

Earn from your Blogs with Pay4Access

We are pleased to announce that you can now earn from i.PH blogs with Pay4Access!

Pay4Access is an innovative
feature we developed so you can earn from your blog. You can publish
your content on a pay-per-access or subscription basis. Say, you’re an
artist, musician, writer, photographer or expert in some field, you can
now sell your writings, music, photographs, and images to readers who
will pay you for a subscription to your blog.

Click here to read more on how you can earn with Pay4Access.