The End Of The Global Internet? Google's Blogger Starts Using Country-Specific Domains To Permit Local Censorship

Twitter has taken quite a lot of heat for putting in place the capability to block tweets on a geographical basis. This begins to look a little unfair in light of the fact that Google quietly adopted a similar policy before Twitter. That's shown by the answer to a question on Google's Blogger site about blogs being redirected to country-specific URLs, which at the time of writing was last updated on 9 January 2012. Here's what it says: 

On Techdirt.

Blogger's Massive Fail

I can't believe this. When posting the previous entry, I got this message:

Blogger currently allows a maximum of 10 labels per post, and 2000 labels per blog. To get rid of this message, you will have to correct the appropriate label counts.

It seems that I have exceeded my quota of 2000 labels per blog: how insane is that? How can I limit myself to a set number of labels given that the world moves on and new ideas come along that need new labels.

Time to explore those export options....

Of Blogs and Microblogging

The eagle-eyed among you (everyone, surely), will have noticed the sudden excrudescence of a widget to the right. Since this represents the rude irruption of that upstart Twitter among the peaceful glades of Blogger, I feel some explanation is in order.

I've only been using Twitter for about a month, but I've found a what seems to me a fairly natural use for it alongside Open... and my Open Enterprise blog: posting stuff that doesn't really merit a full-on blog post, but is worthy of a quick mention.

So the idea of including a few tweets on this blog is to offer a few quick links or ideas that might be of interest to readers of this blog, without them needing to subscribe to Twitter or even leave this page.

It's meant to add, not take away, and nothing else will be changing in terms of what I blog about (except that I probably won't be posting anything really short, since that is likely to end up on Twitter.)

I intend running this page in its present form for a while to see how people like it. Please feel free to let me know whether you love or loathe it. I may also tweak some of its parameters - number of tweets etc. - so thoughts on that, too, would be welcome.

UN Accredits Blogger for First Time

A good one, too:

After two days of deliberations, the United Nations officials at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Poznan, Poland, agreed to give media accreditation to the DeSmogBlog, the first time in history that the UN has accredited a blog, according to UNFCCC Public Information and Media Assistant Carrie Assheuer.

"It was quote the ordeal," said DeSmogBlog Editor Richard Littlemore. "The UN system is set up to accommodate mainstream media and it's not an institution that's designed to be flexible or innovative."

Let's hope it's the first of many.

Reed Elsevier Steals Blogger's Words...

...and then copyrights them. Much more here.

Google Desperately Seeking Picasa

What on earth took them so long?

Finally, Google has integrated Picasa Web Albums into Google Image Search. Public albums can be enabled for a public search option, meaning your images will be more likely to come up in Google image results. And that’s a huge improvement, because previously images on Picasa (and Blogger, and Google Docs) were not searchable at all. The other Google applications are still missing out on all the fun, but Picasa images are now searchable. This is limited, however, to a Google image search.

What's the point of having masses of open content if you can't find it? (Via Searchblog.)

China Gets Wired

Indeed, it's possible that the restrictions on press reporting, both on- and offline, is actually spurring Internet use. In the first half of 2003, for example, during the SARS crisis, 9 million Chinese people went online for the first time, and almost 50% of users reported an increase in their Internet usage during SARS. Silencing the press anywhere is likely to pique interest, and despite the surveillance, China's Internet is still a place to sate such curiosity. As blogger Lian Yue said in a recent email interview with your correspondent, "For people who have even just a little Internet experience, you can pretty much get any information you want to know."

Just think about the implications of that last sentence....

Warning: Taggers at Work

As I've noted before, tagging seems to be something people visiting this site find useful. So I've decided to tag all the older posts on this blog that were written before Blogger got around to adding that facility.

Please, therefore, note that most posts that turn up on RSS feeds over the next few days are not really new: do check the date before you get too excited by what is likely to be very old news.

5 Things I've Learned From a Year's Blogging

Today is the first anniversary of opendotdotdot. Since this fact is of little interest to anyone but myself, I thought it might be useful to extract what pearls of wisdom I can from the experience of writing 1,260 posts in that time.

1. Google is your friend

Over half the traffic that arrives on these pages comes from Google. Moreover, the absolute number of visitors directed here by the Google machine just keeps on going up. I can only presume that the more posts you make, the more Googlejuice you generate, and the more you move up the ranks. Indeed, when I take a look at some of the keywords people enter in Google before arriving here, it is gratifying to find this blog pretty highly placed, albeit for some pretty wacky terms (like "wackypedia" and "seed gestapo") as well as a few surprisingly mainstream ones (like "philip rosedale interview").

2. Yahoo and MSN are a waste of time

I'm constantly amazed at how utterly Google dominates the search engine field in terms of the visitors it provides. I had expected MSN to be way behind, but not Yahoo; in fact, I get more visitors from MSN than Yahoo, which barely registers at all. Maybe this says something about the kind of readers/searches that end up at my blog, but it also emphasises the importance of Google. Interestingly, Technorati also generates far more leads than either Yahoo or MSN.

3. People like tags

The first version of the blog had no tags, for the simple reason that Blogger did not offer the facility, and I was too lazy to do it by hand. But when the new Blogger beta came out with tags, I dutifully employed them. I'm glad I did, because people really like using them to search within the blog. In fact, like me, people are lazy: they just can't be bothered entering a search term in the blog search box, but they can summon up the energy to click on one of the tags. One consequence of this is that I intend to go back and tag all of the older posts, since it clearly is something people find useful.

4. People like weird stuff

I am resigned to the fact that I am completely unable to judge which posts will be popular or not. Sometimes I spend ages crafting some witty/profound/novel/hot post, only to have it roundly ignored by almost everybody. Equally, I've often knocked out a trivial/pointless/content-free post only to find everyone and their dog rush to admire its insights. Sigh.

5. It gets easier

In many ways, the most important lesson that I take away from a year's blogging is that the more you do, the easier it gets. This is not just because you learn to type faster, but also because I've found that blogging helps me think faster and maybe even better. It's also a direct consequence of the fact that it's such damn good fun.

Spitting the Atom

If you're using the main/atom feed for this blog at

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/atom.xml

there seems to be a problem with Blogger at the moment. The other feed at

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full

seems fine.

Sorry about that, but short of buying a majority holding in Google, there's not much I can do about it.

Rich Blogger, Poor Blogger

There's a fun thread on Thomas Hawk's Digital Connections blog, where people are having a go at Blogger. And quite right too: it's a dog's breakfast in many respects (even the beta currently being used by Yours Truly.)

What I can't understand is why some Grand Google Pooh-Bah hasn't issued an edict - Fix It - and Lo!, It Is Fixed. I mean, this isn't rocket science, is it? The fact that this fixedness has not appeared, lo-like, suggests some worrying problems deep in the Googleplex.

Under the Blogger Beta Bonnet

I mentioned a couple of weeks back that this blog is now running on the new Blogger Beta (with all the downsides that this implies). It turns out that the code behind the new Blogger is, well, pretty frightening: here's a brave soul who's plunged in. I predict a flood of books explaining it all will follow in due course. (Via Slashdot.)

Opening Up Google

Google exerts its fascination in part because it so opaque. A quintessential Web 2.0 company, owner of Blogger, it also has few outward-facing blogs - and none really worth reading. So any insights into what makes the company tick are always welcome, especially when many of them hinge on software issues, as they do in this Information Week piece.

This is particularly interesting because much of the code that makes Google tick is open source. Surprisingly, this turns out to mesh with that desire for opaqueness rather well:

In fact, one of the things Google likes about open source software is that it facilitates secrecy. "If we had to go and buy software licenses, or code licenses, based on seats, people would absolutely know what the Google infrastructure looks like," DiBona says. "The use of open source software, that's one more way we can control our destiny."

Windows Live Writer - Half Open?

Microsoft's Windows Live Writer, which allows you to post to blogs directly from a WYSIWYG desktop app, is hardly open in the traditional sense, although it is free. However, it's half-open in the sense that it supports non-Microsoft blogs like Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress.

I've not been able to try it, because it requires the .Net framework which I prefer not to have on my Windows boxes since it's huge and really just adds to the software spaghetti. But credit where credit is due: Microsoft is slowly getting the hang of this openness lark. (Via Ars Technica.)

Bloggers Do It Openly

So bloggers do matter after all, according to this Guardian piece. That there exist groups of people who wield a power disproportionate to their numbers is nothing new: it has happened throughout history. What's novel here is that this is being done in a completely transparent way, whereas in the past all the discussions and verbal derring-do would have happened behind closed doors.

So say what you like about bloggers - and heavens knows, I've done my bit - at least they do it openly.

Ozymandias in Blogland

A fascinating post on Beebo (via C|net): a list of the top 50 blogs, six years ago. It's interesting to see some familiar names at the top, but even more interesting to see so many (to me) unknown ones.

"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" was my first thought. My second, was to create a blog called "Ozymandias" on Blogger, so that I could link to it from this post. But somebody already beat me to it.

Its one - and only - post is dated Sunday, January 07, 2001.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Mozart the Blogger

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, I've been reading some of his letters, described by Einstein (Alfred, not his cousin Albert) as "the most lively, the most unvarnished, the most truthful ever written by a musician". It is extraordinary to think that these consist of the actual words that ran through Mozart's head, probably at the same time when he was composing some masterpiece or other as a background task. To read them is to eavesdrop on genius.

The other striking thing about them is their volume and detail. Mozart was an obsessive letter-writer, frequently knocking out more than one a day to his wide range of regular correspondents. And these are no quick "having a lovely time, wish you were here" scribbles on the back of a postcard: they often run to many pages, and consist of extended, complex sentences full of dazzling wordplay, describing equally rich ideas and complicated situations, or responding in thoughtful detail to points made in the letters he received.

Because they are so long, the letters have a strong sense of internal time: that is, you feel that the end of the letter is situated later than the beginning. As a result, his letters often function as a kind of diary entry, a log of the day's events and impressions - a kind of weblog without the reverse chronology (and without the Web).

Mozart was a blogger.

If this intense letter-writing activity can be considered a proto-blog, the corollary is that blogs are a modern version of an older epistolary art. This is an important point, because it addresses two contemporary concerns in one fell swoop: that the art of the letter is dead, and that there is a dearth of any real substance in blogs.

We are frequently told that modern communications like the telephone and email have made the carefully-weighed arrangement of words on the page, the seductive ebb and flow of argument and counter-argument, redundant in favour of the more immediate, pithier forms. One of the striking things about blogs is that some - not all, certainly - are extremely well written. And even those that are not so honed still represent considerable effort on the part of their authors - effort that 250 years ago was channelled into letters.

This means that far from being the digital equivalent of dandruff - stuff that scurfs off the soul on a daily basis - the growing body of blog posts represents a renaissance of the art of letter-writing. In fact, I would go further: no matter how badly written a blog might be, it has the inarguable virtue of being something that is written, and then - bravely - made public. As such, it is another laudable attempt to initiate or continue a written dialogue of a kind that Mozart would have understood and engaged with immediately. It is another brick - however humble - in the great edifice of literacy.

For this reason, the current fashion to decry blogs as mere navel-gazing, or vacuous chat, is misguided. Blogs are actually proof that more and more people - 30,000,000 of them if you believe Technorati - are rediscovering the joy of words in a way that is unparalleled in recent times. We may not all be Mozarts of the blog, but it's better than silence.

Digg This, It's Groovy

Digg.com is a quintessentially Web 2.0 phenomenon: a by-the-people, for-the-people version of Slashdot (itself a keyWeb 1.0 site). So Digg's evolution is of some interest as an example of part of the Net's future inventing itself.

A case in point is the latest iteration, which adds a souped-up comment system (interestingly, this comes from the official Digg blog, which is on Blogger, rather than self-hosted). Effectively, this lets you digg the comments.

An example is this story: New Digg Comment System Released!, which is the posting by Kevin Rose (Digg's founder) about the new features. Appropriately enough, this has a massive set of comments (nearly 700 at the time of writing).

The new system's not perfect - for example, there doesn't seem to be any quick way to roll up comments which are initially hidden (because they have been moderated away), but that can easily be fixed. What's most interesting is perhaps the Digg sociology - watching which comments get stomped on vigorously, versus those that get the thumbs up.

Blogroll, Drumroll

This fellow Blogger blogger is well worth taking a look at if you're interested in science and technology (well, that's everybody, isn't it?). Not so much for the blog entries - which are interesting enough - but for the astonishing blogroll, which includes several hundred links to a wide variety of interesting-looking sites, all neatly categorised. I have literally never seen anything like it - but maybe I'm just provincial.

I found Al Fin - for such is its suitably gnomic moniker - through another site that is worth investigating. Called Postgenomic (well, with a name like that, I had to take a look), it "collates posts from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data" according to the site. The "interesting things" seem to amount largely to collation of data from various source; there is also a good blog list, though not quite as impressive as Al Fin's.

The Blogification of the Cyber Union

I suppose it was inevitable that Google would go from being regarded as quite the dog's danglies to being written off as a real dog's breakfast, but I think that people are rather missing the point of the latest service, Google Page Creator.

Despite what many think, Google is not about ultra-cool, Ajaxic, Javascripty, XMLifluous Web 2.0 mashups: the company just wants to make it as easy as possible for people to do things online. Because the easier it is, the more people will turn to Google to do these things - and the more the advertising revenue will follow.

Google's search engine is a case in point, and Blogger is another. As Blogger's home page explains, you can:

Create a blog in 3 easy steps: (1) Create an account (2) Name your blog (3) Choose a template

and then start typing.

Google Page Creator is just the same - you don't even have to choose a name, you just start typing into the Web page template. In other words, it has brought the blog's ease of use to the creation of Web sites.

This blogification of the Internet is a by-product of the extraordinary recent rise of blogs. As we know, new blogs are popping up every second (and old ones popping their clogs only slightly more slowly). This means that for many people, the blog is the new face of the Web. There is a certain poetic justice in this, since the original WorldWideWeb created by Tim Berners-Lee was a browser-editor, not simply a read-only application.

For many Net users, then, the grammar of the blog - the way you move round it and interact with its content - is replacing the older grammar of traditional Web pages. These still exist, but they are being shadowed and complemented by a new set of Web 2.0 pages - the blogs that are being bolted on by sites everywhere. They function as a kind of gloss explaining the old, rather incomprehensible language of Web 1.0 to the inhabitants of the brave new blogosphere.

Even books are being blogified. For example, Go It Alone!, by Bruce Judson, is freely available online, and supported by Google Ads alongside the text (like a blog) that is broken up into small post-like chunks. The only thing missing is the ability to leave comments, and I'm sure that future blogified books (bloks? blooks?) will offer this and many other blog-standard features.

Update: Seems that it's "blook" - and there's even a "Blooker Prize" - about which, more anon.