China shuts access to Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live, Hotmail, Blogger via the “Great Firewall” filters
China is closing down access to various internet services as they approach they anniversary of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in 1989. The early report from TechCrunch says that Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live, Hotmail, Blogger have all been made hard to access via the “Great Firewall” filters. I did notice when in China last year that there are various programs like ‘Great Ladder” that allow people to bypass these filters, but obviously not many are going to have the combination of nerve and savvy to do this.
I believe that China’s censorship policies are probably counterproductive *even to the Chinese Government’s goals* in the long term, and I’d sure like to find a way for the internet community to make this clear to China’s leaders. Ironically China’s leadership has done a remarkable job transitioning away from the bulky, centralized, bureaucratic economy that had been stifling progress for decades. China’s citizens now enjoy a higher level of prosperity and *economic* freedom than they arguably have ever had in history. Much of this prosperity is the result of producing goods for the US market. What exactly does the government think will happen if they allow more open dialog in China? I’d suggest they’ll find this would tend to reduce the tensions created by unhappy citizens rather than increase them. Suppression of dissent in Tibet routinely brings international scorn to China, where a more open dialog will bring praise, respect, and support.
China needs to realize that the world’s fascination and respect for China’s culture and international influence will be enhanced by free speech, not reduced.
TechCrunch UK is reporting on this and I’m looking for more direct information now.
More from China’s CN Reviews
Sue the bloggers!? [gulp]
Thanks to Paul for pointing us ot this interesting article about blogger liabilities. I’d be interested in how folks here view this topic. Do I need “blog comment insurance”?
Wall Street Journal on Blogger lawsuits
Bloggers are increasingly getting sued or threatened with legal action for everything from defamation to invasion of privacy to copyright infringement. In 2007 — the most recent data available — 106 civil lawsuits against bloggers and others in social networks and online forums were tallied by the Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, up from just 12 in 2003. There have been about $17.4 million in trial awards against bloggers to date, according to the Media Law Resource Center in New York, a nonprofit clearinghouse that tracks free-speech cases.
Google Social Search Wiki Launches
Today’s tech blogOsphere buzz is about Google’s new wiki search feature that allows users to rank their own results. This appears to me to be a splendid idea although I agree with some who say it won’t get used much.
However, for those who use this it may eventually allow a kind of search ranking we have never seen, where user defined preferences trump the mysterious algorithmic magic mistakes, gradually giving the user a great set of results well optimized to their needs.
I’d suggest that “perfect individualized search” may only require two basic steps – the first is a *discovery* part where you surface content relevant to your particular query and then plow through that manually to determine which sites best fit your needs. Google does a pretty good job of facilitating that right now. However a second piece would allow you to build on those “personally filtered” results in various ways – some as simple as just listing them in rough order of relevance to you as Google is now doing.
Is this a good Google idea? Yes! Will anybody much use this? Nope, because our habits as humans don’t incline us to be this organized. I had a great conversation a few days ago with the developer of Reuters Calais semantic search – a brilliant tool designed to surface relevancy and meaning from massive document archives. We were noting how difficult is is to simply break the habit of using Google search, even when it’s not the most appropriate tool for the job at hand.
Funny primates we !
Death rumors of blogosphere are greatly exaggerated
Nick Carr is usually insightful over at Rough Type, but he’s missed the point of blogging if he thinks the best of the medium is behind us. On the contrary I think the real promise of blogging – as well as the web in general – is yet to come.
Why are the rumors of the death of the blogosphere greatly exaggerated even while the medium is still improving? Because things are not happening in the structured way articulate and/or elite information folks often prefer.
Rather we see regular folks sharing their observations, sometimes in inspired ways but often just as part of a growing amateur and untuned symphony of insights. Although it is *certainly* true to note how much more crappy material there is out there than there was a few years ago before blogging went “mainstream”, it’s also true there is much more good material – it’s just become harder to find.
The good stuff is now distributed across such a large space and within massive comment streams that we need to build better blog search rather than a big blog mortuary.
I think folks like Nick are also correctly noting that the big blogs – thanks to big money – have become much worse because they now pander to large audiences with a lot of fluff pieces and filler. Often the original writers with unique and interesting voices are eclipsed at their own blogs by hired hacks who offer either quirky irrelevant views or inferior insights to the original. Part of the problem here is that writing has become commoditized at money blogs such that the spoils are reserved for the owners not the current writers. Ergo, formerly first class blog writing becomes…second class.
These speed bumps in my view will ultimately work themselves out and we’ll see the “real” voices (Nick Carr’s blog above is a great example) gradually gain more of a following at the expense of those who simply push out more information for the sake of a larger footprint. For me, blogs that have lost their appeal even as they gained in theoretical “valuations” were Searchblog by John Battelle and TechCrunch by Mike Arrington. Both remain “good” sources of information with “good” writing, but before these were *great* blogs with great new insider voices. I think this is the problem Nick and many others are worried about without justification. On TV you can only change the channel so many times before you are back at the same old junk. On the internet there are more channels than minutes in a lifetime.
Wales: Internet Collaboration Still in Infancy
Speaking in London Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made an obvious but important observation: the collaborative aspect of the internet – what many would call a key aspect of “Web 2.0″, is still in its infancy.
Although Wales seemed to focus on video collaboration and how that could improve I’d suggest that the real power of the online medium will *not* be video – rather we’ll find that many different combinations of photos, videos, and community will evolve into the next key style of web interaction.
This could be along the lines of a more powerful and more ubiquitous Flickr, acting within loose alliances of connected niche sites connected by Facebook and Myspace and Google Social and Open ID.
The niche aspect of the internet is already clear in Politics, where you find blogs and commenters and social networkers sticking pretty close to home, preaching to their own choirs and repeating the same themes throughout loosely connected social networks dominated these days by either Obama supporters or Obama bashers (who generally are McCain supporters but almost never talk about McCain!).
Obviously there are many, many exceptions, but if you look at many of the most successful major blog efforts it is interesting how partisan they are and how uninterested they are in providing more than ideological fodder consistent with what their readers already think: DailyKOS, DrudgeReport, Huffington Post, WorldNewsDaily are a handful of commercially successful sites that add little to an informed discussion but remain more popular than the far more balanced views you’ll find elsewhere. It’s encouraging that CNN and other major news outlets are looking more to interactivity and blogging, though I predict they’ll find it very challenging to monetize these social media assets in the amounts to which they are accustomed. As with Yellow Page websites, I think major media blog sites may struggle with the difference between advertising costs and expectations online and off.
Sergey Brin is Blogging
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has just started a new blog which promises to offer some interesting insights into one of the most influential people in the technology world.
His first post details something incredibly personal – Brin’s predisposition to Parkinson’s Disease. He learned this from an examnation of his DNA by 23andMe, the company co-founded by Brin’s wife Anne.
Matt Cutts from Google
Matt Cutts at the Google Dance
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck
It’s always great to get a chance to talk to Matt Cutts at search conferences though I didn’t have any good complicated search questions to bug him about this year. Matt is one of the early Google folks and arguably the most knowledgeable search expert in the world since he’s one of the few people who knows the Google algorithm inside out. Matt’s actually listed on the key Google search patent.
Today I noticed that Matt’s post about Google Chrome is near the top at Techmeme after some early reports suggested Google was going to nab all the info people created via use of the Chrome browser. Although I do not worry about Google stealing the content I create using their tools I was surprised in the discussion at Matt’s blog to see how people probably do not understand how much of your data from searches, emails, and other online tools is analyzed by search engines, ISPs, and probably at least a few government agencies. I wrote over there:
Well, I’m sure folks like Marshall knew that Google was not out to steal content. What people should be as concerned about is how the Chrome datastream will be processed now and over time, and how open will it be to examination by companies for advertising purposes ? Personally I’m OK with that but I think many people are not, and the lack of transparency in this area bothers me.
Somebody even suggested I was foolish to think they’d use Chrome data to target advertising, to which I replied:
Josh – you are naive to assume Google does so little with the search term data they explicitly say they have the right to collect. In Gmail, for example, some portion of your header is read by Google (probably just the title and not the content) so that ads can be targeted to you on those topics. Google Toolbar collects a lot of information and my understanding this helps target PPC advertisements though I’m not sure about that. As i noted I’m personally OK with this level of snooping, but I believe Google should make it much clearer what they do with the data they collect and probably also have options so users can delete any information they created – including their search streams – as they see fit.
SES, SEO, Blogs
Blogging the conference has been a great way to test some ideas about blog ranking and watch Google struggle to bring the most relevant content into the main search (they’ve done pretty well with blog search, not so well with regular search which will have all the blog content listed in a week or so, basically too late to be all that helpful to users). More importantly the stuff from *this year* will probably be ranked above the SES San Jose 2009 information that is likely what people using that term are searching for effective next year. I’d think they could simply increase the value of ‘freshness’ for listings tagged as events related.
I had a nice discussion about this “events” ranking challenge with Jonathan from Google at the party. The problem is that to combat spam Google does not push out blog content immediately, meaning that if you search for “SES San Jose”, especially a month ago or so, you would have been likely to get old, dated content rather than the current SES page you’d normally want to find. This appears related to linking issues (newer has fewer), but also I think the regular engine is allergic to new content, which is why you’ll often find the most relevant Google stuff at the blog search if it’s a topic that is covered heavily by blogs such as SES or CES Las Vegas where I noted the same issues of “stale content” in the main search with “great content” in the blog search.
I remain convinced that some of the challenges faced in ranking could be solved by a combination of more algorithmic transparency from Google combined with greater accountability by publishers who’d agree to provide a lot more information about their companies so that Google can get a good handle on the credibility of the online landscape. This webmaster ID is happening now in several ways but I’d think it could be scaled up to include pretty much everybody publishing anything online (ie if you don’t register you’ll be subjected to higher scrutiny).
SES San Jose – Lee Siegel Keynote
Lee Siegel is about to speak here at SES San Jose. He’s the author of “Against the Machine” and a senior editor at The New Republic, and a noted critic of the new media, primarily because he feels anonymity is a threat to intelligent, enlightened conversation.
Although I’m sympathetic to Lee’s points about how abusive the online world can be, and how foolish it is to consider as sacred the hate speech and the junk banter that passes as conversation, he’s missing two key features of the new conversational media that effectively sweep away much of the significance of his legitimate concerns.
First, the high tolerance for abusive and threatening language has become something of a new standard, especially for younger commenters. I don’t like it either, but for many writers this does not reflect the type of threat it would under other circumstances. It is not appropriate to apply old interpretations of this language to the modern usage.
Second is that focusing on the defects of blogging and new media distracts us from the profound and positive changes in communication – changes that represent the early stages of truly democratic and massively participatory conversations.
I don’t think Siegel is so much *wrong* as he is making fairly insignificant points about the new media. I’d certainly agree that there is a danger whenever people are stifled. For me the outrageous online treatment of Kathy Sierra, a noted blogger,is the exception that proves the rule. These cases are very few, and in a broad sense are eclipsed by the thousands of new voices coming online *every day*.
So, is there value in paying attention to these problems? Sure. Should this drive our understanding and appreciation of the most profound transformation in human communication history?
Nope.
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