Google Tunes / Blogging Methods / WordPress

Analyst claims so: “We believe that Google is in the midst of creating its own iTunes competitor, which we’ve dubbed ‘Google Tunes. We think this is a logical step, now that the nascent Google Video product has been introduced.”

read more | digg story

Hmmm. Does anyone know of a non-evil, non-megalomaniac search engine I could use?

This is my first post from digg, and it seems pretty cool. digg puts the links (the ones inside the quote) right at the bottom of a post, but I think I prefer them inside the quote, certainly above my comments, which means an edit. Still, I have to do that anyway to add in the categories, and the real time saved is in copying and pasting the links.

This is going to mean I will hardly write any original posts in the WordPress editor at all! When I am at home I tend to use the Performancing Firefox extension for writing posts, when browsing with FeedDemon I use BlogJet. Both these products automatically quote text and links for me, speeding up the process a good deal.

In fact, while I am at it, something that annoys me about the editor in WordPress 2 – when I select text and hit the link button to make that text a hyperlink, it doesn’t automatically add in the http:// bit for me, which was a real time saver in previous versions.

Also, it would be good if you could define a set list of links, which if that word was used in a post it automatically parses it into a hyperlink. You could make is case dependent, so camel-casing would prevent many mix-ups. So, everytime I typed WordPress, on publishing the post, that word was made to link back to wordpress.org everytime, meaning I don’t have to bother. That would be cool.

News Round Up

Plenty going on this morning – Today kept my attention for the whole 2 hour journey…

Blair apology to Soham parents

Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair has apologised to the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman for comments he made about the Soham murders.

Sir Ian Blair told the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) on Thursday that “almost nobody” could understand why it had become such a big story.

He called the media institutionally racist in its coverage of murders.

If Ian Blair hadn’t already convinced us all that he was a complete nitwit with his sophistry immediately after the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting, he certainly has now. To infer that race plays any part in the hysterical media coverage over the Soham murders is absurd: Blair admitted himself that the coverage of the Damilola Taylor murder was an exception to his theory. He asked why the “murders of white lawyer Tom ap Rhys Pryce and Asian builders’ merchant Balbir Matharu” didn’t received a similar level of publicity that the Soham ones did. The answer to this is so obvious I can’t be bothered to type this.

The shame is that Blair has a point, only he is too dim-witted to make it properly. The hysteria that engulfs the media after a tragedy like that which took place in Soham should be moderated in some way, but only because it is distastful, irrelevant and unhelpful. Not because it is in some way racially motivated, which it clearly isn’t.

Hughes to launch leadership bid

Simon Hughes is to formally launch his campaign for the Liberal Democrat leadership, a day after admitting he was “misleading” about his sexuality.

Good. To be honest, I don’t think he can, or should, be criticised for being ‘misleading’. I think many commentators have been too harsh on him, and treating the issue far too frivolously. I would imagine that coming out is not an easy thing to do, no matter what one’s personal beliefs on the matter, and, given that Hughes has had heterosexual relationships as well, there is clear evidence he had some sort of inner turmoil on the issue. That he feels the need to make statements about issues such as this shows that the sad state of affairs the media is still in in this country. Who cares, really?

The only way this could be of any significance would be if it somehow emerged that Hughes played a more active role in the shameful campaign for his election in the infamous Bermondsey by-election, the conduct of which he has apologised for.

Israel rules out talks with Hamas

Israeli interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ruled out any talks with “an armed terror organisation that calls for Israel’s destruction”.

International mediators have urged Hamas to renounce violence, as efforts begin to form a new government.

Near-complete results gave Hamas 76 of the 132 seats in parliament.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas – who also heads the ruling Fatah party – has said he remains committed to a peaceful settlement.

This seems a fairly reasonable line for Israel to take, all things considered. Hamas’ election raises so many interesting issues: the rise of Islamists and their popularity with the Middle Eastern public; the fact that they are the first terrorist organisation to jump straight into power by passing most of the democratic ‘pyramid’ (to use a kind of footballing analogy); their commitment to a referendum to introduce sharia law.

It’s pretty frightening though too. Let’s hope that Hamas can be pulled towards the centre ground as Ariel Sharon found himself.

Links 26/1/06

Stuff from MJR

Couple of interesting points from MJR:

Annoying blog comment misfeatures: letter images

Just tried to leave a comment on Sasquach wears a yellow hat at blogger.com – it has one of those annoying “type the letters from the distorted image” screens (which don’t work well [w3c]). Even when I switch images on, I can’t get the letters accepted. I don’t know if it’s a problem with the site or my eyes, but it’s really annoying.

Quite right! Though what is worse is blogger blogs that will only let you comment if you register with blogger. That really is just rubbish.

Google Problems: China; and World Economic Forum TV

25 Jan 2006: google is taking a lot of heat online for agreeing to Chinese government content requests. I won’t criticise the actual decision too much, because it’s typical corporation behaviour: follow the money, like the rest of the World Economic Forum. If you’re buying Chinese products just because they’re cheaper, you’re part of the reason they have the money and part of the reason that google is following them – corporations are seldom held accountable. If you don’t like that, maybe you should Boycott Made In China as well as google?

I think most people’s problem is that it is such hypocritical behaviour – MSN and Yahoo! have had this sort of thing in place with China for ages, and no one batted an eyelid – but perhaps many people – naively – expected better from Google. At least Bill Gates never pretended to be anything other than evil… And fine, it is typical corporation behaviour. But isn’t it nice that at least once people kick up a stink over it?

More censorship news…

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Iran blocks BBC Persian website

The Iranian authorities have started to block the BBC’s Persian language internet site, for the first time.

The BBC says the level of traffic to the site from within Iran has dropped sharply over the last three days.

No official explanation has been given. The BBC has expressed concern at the action, saying it deprives many Iranians of a trusted source of news.

The BBC said it would be approaching the Iranian government at an official level about re-instating access.

BBC Persian.com is the most popular of the BBC’s non-English language websites, receiving about 30 million page impressions a month – about half of which are from inside Iran.

BBC World Service radio broadcasts in English and Persian are being received by audiences in Iran as normal, as are the BBC’s international online news services in English.

When entering the BBC’s Persian site a sign comes up saying “access to this site denied”, says the BBC’s Frances Harrison in Tehran.

It is not clear if the filtering will be permanent, but many websites are routinely blocked in Iran, our correspondent says.

The BBC says readers from Iran have begun emailing them to ask for help with what are known as filter-buster sites, which enable access to banned sites.

Google censors itself for China

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google censors itself for China

This is a very disturbing news story indeed, and is starting to convince me that maybe MJR is right…

The company is setting up a new site – Google.cn – which it will censor itself to satisfy Beijing’s hardline rulers.

Google argued it would be more damaging to pull out of China altogether.

Critics warn the new version could restrict access to thousands of sensitive terms and web sites. Such topics are likely to include independence for Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Currently, the Google search in China acts very slowly and is disrupted quite a bit as a result of Chinese government attempts to censor it.

The company argues it can play a more useful role in China by participating than by boycotting it, despite the compromises involved.

“While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission,” a statement said.

Utter nonsense. Google is a search engine, and is measured by it’s reliability and accuracy in searching. If they are deliberatley providing a hamstrung performance just to please an authoritarian government, then they are going directly against their very reason for existance. I am not claiming that Google should act as an agent on behalf of subversive groups in China, but to exclude results because of their political content is a disgrace.

I can only assume that this comes down to revenue. For Google to earn the revenues they can in China they must provide an always-on, reliable service. They are putting money ahead of ethics.

Its e-mail, chat room and blogging services will not be available because of concerns the government could demand users’ personal information.

I am sure they could demand that information. And if Google can deny it to the US government, why can’t they take a stand against China? Because they already have the market share in the US, and have to do everything they can to grab as many users as possible in the emerging markets like China.

Shel Israel offers a good perspective on this.

Performancing’s Blog Improvements

Performancing: Quick and Easy Blog Improvements

  1. Put up a “Post not found” error 404 page – if someone tries to visit a broken link on your blog does the visitor get a nice friendly message or “error 404 file not found”? Even better for you, do you provide handy links to your top content, a search form and some adsense ads? It is surprising the difference just this small thing can make to your blogs usefulness and bottom line!
  2. Offer more feed choices and a dummies guide for RSS novices – many of your visitors will not have a clue what RSS is or why it might be useful to them. If you give them a helping hand they will not only subscribe in greater numbers they might remember you favourably because of the nice thing you did for them.
  3. Take off nofollow link condoms – I have never believed that nofollow did any good any way, blog spammers told the search engine reps it wouldn’t do any good and they were true to their word, but now it seems search engines index nofollow links and ignore the very solution they came up with. Thankfully the message is getting out that link condoms are bad, just say no to nofollow!
  4. Show your most popular or best posts – a new visitor to your blog needs help in deciding if this is going to be a blog they want to return to. Show them your best and brightest content. There is code available for WordPress and it is really easy to do on Drupal using the statistics module, others will have plugins or you can hard code it into your template.
  5. Provide comment feeds or email subscriptions – if you want really great discussion on a only semi-loyal trafficked blog you need to attract visitors who comment back. Many blog platforms have comment RSS which is a partial solution (see above) but I much prefer to use email subscriptions. There are solutions for WordPress and Drupal in the form of plugins.

The Global Id

Great article on Google by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books:

Google is the only multi-billion-dollar company in the world that is also a spelling mistake. Back in the palaeolithic era (that’s the palaeolithic era in the internet sense, i.e. autumn 1997) its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were graduate computer science students at Stanford. They were working on an insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story, tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10100: google. They looked up the name on the internet, found that it wasn’t taken, and registered their brand-new brand, google.com. The next morning they found that the reason the name hadn’t been taken was because it should be spelled googol – and that googol.com had, of course, already been bagged. (It belonged, and still belongs, to a Silicon Valley software engineer and home-brewed beer enthusiast called Tim Beauchamp: ‘The links on this page are a mishmash of eclectic destinations that may be of interest to you. Actually, they may only be of interest to Tim but what the heck. It is his site!’) Lesser men might have considered that a bad omen, but Larry and Sergey are not bad-omen kind of guys. Just over eight years later, Google is the fastest-growing company in the history of the world – with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $138 billion. Larry and Sergey, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10 billion each.