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.
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