Digital Coloring by Alodia

One of the young Filipina bloggers we should watch out for is gamer-blogger-cosplayer Alodia Gosiengfiao. While she hasn’t put up her own site or adopted Creative Commons yet, she shows a remarkable aptitude for online media and — this is important — a healthy independence from offline media. Filipino SEO expert Marc Macalua once called her “a work in progress”. I call her the Filipina Shocotan.

Here’s her latest work: a time-lapsed Photoshop digital coloring screencast.

Google Bans Essay-Writing Ads

Having an army of Ph.D.s on its staff, Google doesn’t look kindly upon academic cheating. That’s why they’re updating their AdWords policies next month to ban ads for “academic paper-writing services and the sale of pre-written essays, theses, and dissertations.”

Good on Google. Cheaters don’t deserve advertising. Universities are happy.

“Making life harder for these cynical web ‘essay mills’ is a step in the right direction,” says Professor Drummond Bone, president of Universities UK.

“We welcome this move. Essay writing sites claim that students pay hundreds of pounds for model answers – but do not then submit these as their own work. We all know this claim is absurd.”

Some of the people writing for these essay mills are Filipinos. Hope they’ll be forced to find honest writing jobs (problogging, perhaps).