An Interview

Migs Paraz interviews me in this cool meme. I’m becoming addicted to these meme-things. They’re irresistable!

Migs: Having built your own search engine, what do you think of Pinoy search engines? Do they still have a purpose given that everybody uses Google anyway?

Andrew: I think Filipinos are always looking for local content and that is why Pinoy search engines are still important. And when I speak of search engines I also mean business directories and yellow pages. More or less, all our services depend on some form of searching. But truthfully there is no local search engine that has the ability to crawl websites on a very large scale as Google. That’s what’s missing. I think we need a search engine that thinks like a Filipino and knows Filipino content. Google’s done a very poor job trying to filter Filipino content on its .com.ph engine. I would love to pursue this idea, but right now my time and resources are too limited to allow me to. And I do have other plans, which leads us to the next question:

Migs: I think you’re building more web apps this very moment. What can you share? If not, what’s your dream app? How do they fit in today’s Internet trends?

Andrew: Right now I have a million ideas floating in mind but I really can’t share them. What I can give away is one of them will be part of Alleba.com and play a major role in the site, if not take over the whole thing. While there are other Filipino geeks like me trying to make it big in Web2.0, I think it’s important to pursue an idea that you think will benefit Filipinos in an area that hasn’t been dominated by someone else. I say “dominated” because there is always room for more. But if you’re gonna try to compete against Friendster, forget about it. Friendster is king. There are just too many Friendster-wannabes out there already.

My dream app is, well, already stated in #1. Again, the lack of resources (e.g. $$$) is what’s holding me back the most. And with Google, MSN and Yahoo! around, it’s going to be a hard sell to venture capitalists, if there are any here in the country.

Migs: As a developer, what’s your platform of choice: hardware, OS, programming language, tools?

Andrew: For work I use my low-tech Compaq Presario laptop — Windows XP Home Edition, Intel Centrino 1.8 GHZ, 512mb RAM. Please don’t laugh.

I program exclusively in PHP. But I’m looking at Ruby on Rails as a possible alternative. My text editor is UltraEdit which for me is the best thing that’s happened to text editors. Sometimes I use Adobe Dreamweaver to code some of my HTML. I also use XAMPP to run my PHP applications on my computer.

For graphics, I only use Adobe Photoshop CS2.

Migs: What can you say to those who claim, “SEO is Overrated.”

Andrew: I think those who agree to that statement oversimplifies the concept of SEO. There’s more to it than just being found in the search engines. You have to be right in the first page of the search results. That’s what SEO practitioners are hired for. If you think you can do it on your own, good luck with that.

Migs: Just how did you reach 1083 (as of this moment) readers in FeedBurner? Wow!

Andrew: The rise began when I got on the front page of Digg.com last November. I saw my subscribers peak at 3,000 at one point. Later on I found out it was a bug. I guess now those 1,000 subscribers are for real. I’m quite happy with that number. Why do people subscribe to me? Blame my tutorials and WordPress plugins. Hehe.

Whew, those were difficult questions Migs! But I had fun answering them.

If you want me to interview you, simply leave a comment saying “Interview me.”

Here are the rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.