Well, this week, Bill Gates was just like the most of us – rejoined Facebook (well, you can be a fan of his Facebook Page), opened an account in Twitter, and, yes, launched his personal website.

Bloggista’s “Website in Focus” this week is  The Gates Notes – Bill Gate’s website which he will use to let people know what’s going on in his world.

The Gates Notes website pops up a welcome message which read:

“Since leaving my full-time job at Microsoft to dedicate more time to our foundation, a lot of people have asked me what I’m working on,” wrote Gates as a welcome message on his new site. “It often feels like I’m back in school, as I spend a lot of my time learning about issues I’m passionate about.

I’m fortunate because the people I’m working with and learning from are true experts in their fields. I take a lot of notes, and often share them and my own thoughts on the subject with others through email, so I can learn from them and expand the conversation.

I thought it would be interesting to share these conversations more widely with a Website, in the hope of getting more people thinking and learning about the issues I think are interesting and important.”

Bill Gates used his Twitter account to spread the word about his new website. The day after he joined Twitter, he sent a tweet “My new website is live check out www.thegatesnotes.com. Excited to share more about what I’m learning, hope you like it!

I immediately checked the site, and indeed it was new – with no Alexa Rank whatsoever (this is one of the tools used  in measuring a website’s traffic and popularity. The lower the Alexa rank number, the popular is a site. Google has an Alexa rank of 1).

Now here’s the part where every common mortal blogger would envy Bill – in just two days, The Gates Notes broke the 1 million Alexa barrier (from 28 million or no Alexa Rank the previous day. After 4 days, the Alexa traffic rank is below 300K and is close to breaking the 100K Alexa rank barrier – a dream rank of every blogger on earth, I suppose.

On January 19, 2010, twitland got this tweet - “Hello World.” Hard at work on my foundation letter – publishing on 1/25. And it was from an account twitter.com/billgates.

Succeeding tweets were all about the aid and fund-raising campaign for Haiti, starting from a retweet of Ryan Seacrest’s tweet on a fund campaign with CNN the previous night. Then Ryan Seacrest twitted – “It’s official, Bill Gates is on Twitter.”

This is where Bloggista learned about Bill Gate’s twitter account so after checking on it – only 2 hours from joining, he already amassed more than 30,000 followers. And I was one of them. Refreshing it every 5 seconds, more than a thousand more have followed him. 4 days later Bill Gates already have 313,000 followers and still growing…

Bill Gates shares on The Gates Notes the things he and wife Melinda do with their Gates Foundation. He also discusses his thoughts on various topics like Climate Change, Social Issues, Technology, Agriculture, Education, Development, Energy and Global Health.

Certainly, Bill Gate’s personal website and his use of Social Media will let him connect with the rest of the earthlings and seems there’s still a lot to learn even if you’re the top tech guy and rich man in the universe. As what he said in his tweet -

“Thanks to you and all the other people who have welcomed me. I’ve got a lot to learn about Twitter but look forward to sharing more.”

Now, this lesser mortal blogger is on Twitter and has a Facebook fan page too. Add me up, why not? LOL…

I like to think spams are the works of spambots, you know, those automated programs designed to register sign-ups, or submit comments to blogs. Spambots are getting more and more smarter – they can even break most captcha and anti-spam codes. But many spams are also the works of real humans, even dogs can spam.

Over the weekend, I thought of this really very silly idea of fighting back Spammers – create a spam submission site, let them sign-up and submit their articles or domains. Regular users who are sick of Spammers can also sign-up and submit spam domains, blogs, article scrapers, spam emails, spam IP addresses to share to other members.

Members can vote, then once a certain number of votes are reached, these spam domains are published and sent to the front page (yeah, works like Digg).

Then I will submit the RSS feed to anti-spam sites and to other sites who register and fight spams. If you are interested in helping out grow its database of spamming sites, check out Spamdomains.org – it simply helps in making the web get rid of spam. And there’s an adsense sharing scheme as well.

Moving on, for this blog, I am using Antispam Bee on top of the other anti-spam plugins. This plugin is extremely powerful, being able to screen most spam messages – and you got the option to send screened comments to moderation, or dump all ’spam’ comments by automatically deleting them, thus sparing you some extra unnecessary database space and loads.

It’s not perfect though as there are legitimate comments which are also screened, just like TWG’s comments. Antispam Bee probably considers anything that has something to do with Third World are spams, or perhaps, it doesn’t allow to have another Geek in its system (LOL).

Reading those spam messages sometimes can make your day  – and they are really funny (although still very annoying). In fact I made a post not so long ago why I had fun reading spam. And I’m adding some to the list.  Just like this one:

After searching for this information, I will have to say most people agree with you on this topic.

It would have been a good comment, but the dude’s commenting on a post about Board Exam Results. Darn. Another one:

I’m always excited to visit this blog in the evenings.Please keep on churning out good content. It’s very entertaining.

Very entertaining? What the $@&$!. The post was about Cory Aquino’s death for crying out loud. Still some more:

In truth, immediately i didn’t understand the essence. But after re-reading all at once it became clear.

And still more:

This is a very informative post! I was searching the internet for great topics like these and I was sent to this blog. You have done a great job. Buy botox.

And how about a thinking, logical spambot or paid hack commenter?

This post made me think.

Have you seen a great Orator lost in your blog?

I come here today humbled at the content of this very impressive post. Kudos to bloggista.com admin!

Several of my Social Networking sites are not spared. Many spambots and human spammers register an account and even post blogs. To help me in determining if the user is a spammer or not, I put a required field in the sign-up form with a caption: “I Am a”:

The instruction is simple – the answer should be the word formed when the words ‘blog‘ and ‘Gista‘ are joined. Some answered right, ‘blogGista‘ (bloggista is acceptable).

Other answers of the “I Am a” question:

• Gibberish like a combination of words and numbers. They must be spambots whose interests are swimming and shopping.
• “Human” – well probably they are humans (and so I deleted them).
• “Dog” – oh no, even dogs are spamming websites nowadays.
• “What do you like?” – clever huh. (deleted!)
• “Gay” – hmmm, further investigation revealed he/she is indeed Gay as he/she blogs about the third sex. (Okay, not deleted I am a bit considerate – LOL).

I just hope that someday there would be better way for us to fight back spammers. You may want to join me at Spamdomains.org – this is a brand-new site though but will need the help of a community of bloggers and webmasters to report spam domains, spam sites, spam blogs, article scrapers and eventually become a community-driven database of spam a-holes.

See you there.

BentaOnline.com has been “re-modeled” lately, migrated from complex Joomla CMS to the easier Wordpress CMS platform.

While there are a lot of free online classified ad websites available, BentaOnline.com boasts of its cool free online classified ads features. Some of the features of BentaOnline.com are:

1. Easy and fast registration process. Only registered users can post ads which minimizes frauds and spam ads.
2. Ability to Edit/Manage ads through the Dashboard.
3. Users/visitors can report spam or fraudulent advertisements.
4. Visitors can view the profile of an advertiser and all ads posted by the advertiser.
5. Visitors can respond to an ad easily using the Contact Ad Owner box conveniently placed in the sidebar of every ad.
6. Ad images are viewed easily using the Image Gallery browser.
7. Better looking interface and navigation using the familiar Wordpress platform.
8. Ads are optimized for search engines which give advertisers more organic traffic.
9. Integrated Social bookmarking tool that can be used to share ads in many social bookmarking sites and get more views to posted ads which can increase ad conversion.
10. Google Maps integration.

Check out BentaOnline – Philippines Free Online Classified Ads and Marketplace let me know what you think about the website.

If you like your website or blog be featured here, hit the contact page.

Every week, I’m going to dedicate a post “spot” for bloggers who want to showcase themselves and their blogs. A blogger can introduce himself, talk about his chosen niche, his thoughts on blogging, how and when he started blogging and share some blogging tips like creating content, traffic generation and SEO.

He may share a story about his make money online ventures, or simply talks about the latest buzz in entertainment or politics.

Featured bloggers will be given a maximum of two links to their blogs. Interested? Hit the Contact form – first come first served – .

Over the long weekend, I finally had the time to work on a new free job posting and job searching site for Filipinos in the Philippines and overseas.

It’s been a while that the site has been there but finally, my idea of a job seeker and job poster – friendly job site came to a reality.

Thus, Jobjoints.com – the Pinoy Online free job posting and searching site was re-born with cool search features, user friendly interface and better back-end system.

Users can search and apply to jobs without the need to register. Companies can also post jobs without the need to pay anything. Job advertisers are reviewed and approved first before their jobs can be viewed on site.

To minimize spamming, it has a built-in anti-spam tool Recaptcha. However every webmaster knows that spammers are also very creative, thus Job advertisers are encouraged not to post their emails in the Job posts. Even the anti-spam tool can be tricked at times.

More jobs will be posted soon as more Job Advertisers will be joining. Also, more cool featured will be rolled out in phases, like the ability to submit CV/Resume, and the ability for registered Companies to browse the CV/Resume database.

Featured Companies or Job Advertisers will also have their own special pages and can take advantage of the social network functionality.

If you have some Job Requirements and would like to support this endeavor, visit Jobjoints.com and post your jobs there.

Bloggers and webmasters may display the most recent job listings on their sidebars by simply copying the widget codes.