Silicon Gulf

There’s buzz floating around that Google is going to build a data center in Malaysia. In a discussion I’m following on Slashdot, some commenters are posting why or why not they should consider the Philippines.

Here’s what they have to say (and comments thrown in by me):

THE YESSES:

1. Filipinos speak impeccable English. - I agree that most of us can speak decent English, but impeccable? Don’t think so. But for sure we speak way better English than Malaysians (peace, la). This is still one of our strongest points over our neighboring countries.

2. Labor is cheap in the Philippines. - Not too sure, because considering the high-caliber engineers they require, Google can also have it cheap in Malaysia and India, if not cheaper.

3. The Philippines is a very Westernized place. It would be easy for them to conduct business here. - I’ll have to disagree with this one. Look at China.

4. Filipinos love Linux. - Ok, this guy is stretching it.

THE NAYS:
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I couldn’t resist it. I’m a bit vain that I google my name every once in a while. If you’re like me, you can check the Google toolbar if it includes your name in its query suggestions. If you don’t have the toolbar installed, get it from toolbar.google.com. The trick is to slowly type your name and wait for the toolbar to give you suggestions.

See your name in it? Kinda cool right?

I noticed a lack of localized gadgets for us Filipinos using iGoogle, so I came up with a few Google Gadgets that deliver the freshest headlines from our top online newspapers.

Click on each image to add them to your iGoogle page. Enjoy!

 I have a cool Google notebook with a built-in Google Earth!

The Google blog revealed that they are currently beta testing a new Google service — Google Knol, which appears to be a direct competitor to Wikipedia, About.com and the much-hyped Mahalo:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

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We’ve got some exciting new features to help you with your seamless migration to Google Docs! File Associations Now you can launch Google Docs just like Microsoft Office! This feature allows you to auto-launch documents into Google Docs should you click on them anywhere on your computer - just like a file association. As long [...]

I’ve been included as a beta tester of DocSyncer.

I don’t quite get it.. that’s why i’m asking this question. I have a facebook account.. but i don’t regularly use it. Well, there’s orkut, multiply, myspace, lots of forums, and other social networking sites. Its hard to maintain them everyday! Hmmm.. some of you my dear readers might not know what the BIG fuzz is [...]

I have signed up on many review or those “pay per post” sites. But as you can see, I haven’t really done a paid review. All reviews that i have done so far are free and I do it willingly. I signed up with Smorty just this month (oh, this is also an unpaid post). Smorty is [...]

I just read this article, and will quote these:

Google’s overall goal is to have a record of every e-mail we have ever written, every contact whose details we have recorded, every file we have created, every picture we have taken and saved, every appointment we have made, every website we have visited, every search query we have typed into its home page, every ad we have clicked on, and everything we have bought online. It wants to know and record where we have been and, thanks to our search history of airlines, car-hire firms and MapQuest, where we are going in the future and when.

now, that is very promising and scary! really, i'm all with google services and applications. everyday im with my computer, and google is always there, not just searching, but also to synchronize my documents and the websites that i'm visiting all the time to all computers that i used. not only that, my emails also...

and it means google knows what i'm up to, at least not anymore with pornos! lols...

but im not afraid. im not afraid what they will know about me.

with all what Google is doing, they want to take control of the world of information, maybe, in some way, it is their intention.

google has not yet released any statement as of this writing.