NYT article on Internet Blackout
Yet on Wednesday this formidable old guard was forced to make way for the new as Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts and cascading criticism, sending an unmistakable message to lawmakers grappling with new media issues: Don’t mess with the Internet*.
*Or football.
Much has been written about the negative effects of url shorteners on the internet, and I agree that their net benefit may well be destructive, but I’m not getting into that. (And anyway, if zth.rs cost less than $500 per year, I’d be all over it.)
My issue with shorteners is their unnecessary use. Twitter for mac is my pet peeve culprit. It’s view of this tweet is simply the string ‘http://t.co/1vdl3Tx’. Even the web interface currently shortens the visible url to ‘kottke.org/11/04/your-tas…’. Even though the regular URL, ‘http://kottke.org/11/04/your-taste-is-why-your-own-work-disappoints-you’, falls well within the 140 limit!
But shouldn’t I be giving more context to random links I drop? Well not really, your service doesn’t let me define the link text to give context, and when if you’d left the damn thing alone it would have said enough in itself!
Webmasters spend a significant amount of time crafting good, understandable, URL schemas. So don’t shorten my damn links if you don’t have to.
In a just published blog post, Google strongly suggests that it is holding the Chinese government responsible for a recent spate of hackings of Chinese dissidents’ GMail (and other non-google services) accounts. As a result Google is changing its policy vis-a-vis its relationship with China. It will no longer serve censored search results.
The post further states that Google realizes and is prepared to accept that this may be the end of its business within the country.
Purely from a user’s perspective, it’s great to see the internet behemoth making an effort to stick to its principles. Whatever the motivation, and even if Eric Schmidt still doesn’t understand the importance of privacy, this is a reassuring point towards the “don’t be evil” tally.
Edit: Laughing Squid reports that Google has already stopped censoring google.cn.
Edit: Some Chinese reactions.
This is an email from Facebook. After I switched my language settings it started sending me mixed language emails.
And this is a terrific feature that I just noticed. I’m probably way behind the curve. Clicking the button downloads an ICS file which contains all the events invitation and opens with your favourite calendar program.
I'm a helpful soul. Stroke me.
My blind reliance on Google Maps sent me on a 2 hour wild goose chase in the pouring rain this week. I was searching for an engraver in Providence RI to add a name to a hip flask graduation gift for a member of my fencing team. I eventually found an address and a phone number, online but via a friend, and gave the owner of ‘Impressions’ engraving a call. She offered me her address but i turned it down as i was in a rush and believed i already had it.
On the plus side, i found out that it is possible to edit locations in Google Maps, however if you change the address by too large a distance it is not immediately updated. I wonder how Google sorts fraudulent updates from good ones?
So i guess the moral of this story is that nothing is more authoritative about a business than the person who stands to make money from it.
As part of setting google apps up to work with the zethrae.us domain, I had it offline for a couple of days. This happened because I changed the connection between the godaddy situated domain and the bluehost hosted site from being linked by nameservers to being linked with an A record. This way, only my actual site is dependant on bluehost. Email sticks with google and godaddy, two rather more reliable companies.
Setting up google apps was really easy actually. I simply had to add a Cname redirect to them in the advanced domain manager at godaddy, and add a couple of rules for email redirection.
Now I just wish that google apps had google reader attached to it so i could mover everything away from [old google account] to adam at [this domain]. It would annoy me to have my email, calendar and docs in one place (apps) which didn’t function as a proper google account in other ways. Does anyone know a bit more about how that works?
My hosted account at Bluehost.com (on box194) was down for about ten hours today. I’m not hugely fussed as I wasn’t hosting anything of particular importance, or that I needed to rely on at the time. This is however the day on which I launch the twitter grouping bot, so it served as a fair reminder that I probably shouldn’t be relying on Bluehost for something which needs to have a 24/7 presence.
Apparently there had been an error with one of the hard disks in the server (I found this out by checking the server status myself), and I had been affected. Anyway, I lost nothing.
The factor which bugs me most here is that Bluehost did nothing at all to get in touch with me, apparently opting instead to hope that I wasn’t in the habit of actually checking or using my web space.
Is there any web host which you would care to reccommend? I know Alex Muller hosts at Nearly Free Speech, and would recommend it.