Category Archives: blogging

Blogger.com troubleshooting – ghs.google.com IP fix

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Posting a blogger.com fix I just struggled with for some time.  This sounds more complicated than it is but I could find little online to help me, so hopefully I’ll save somebody future time with this post.

I wanted to run my Airports Blog as part of AirportCityCodes.com, hosted at Verio.    Blogger (owned and run by Google) has a great IP redirection feature that lets you run a blog off your domain by creating a CNAME record that directs to ghs.google.com and accesses your blogspot blog.    Normally this works fine, but Verio’s DNS system will reject ghs.google.com because it in turn is an alias for ghs.l.google.com.    Verio claimed that Google using improper DNS protocol by telling people to use ghs.google.com.

The blogger fix at Verio is to use this:    ghs.l.google.com.    

Note the period at the end which is needed at Verio to keep them from appending your domain name to the record. 

If this does not work, or at some other registrars (Network Solutions was mentioned somewhere), I think you’ll want to use the IP address for ghs.l.google.com which is this:    72.14.207.121

I hope this works for you, and if not let me know as I use this feature for many blogs and I’m always interested in Troubleshooting tips, especially for blogs.

Current TV filing for $100,000,000 IPO. Initial PE ratio = infinity!

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Today Current TV, with Al Gore a prominent investor, is filing for a big IPO.    But there is a problem.   They lost a lot of money “making” their 64 million in revenues last year.     Will they ever be profitable?  Global warming or not, I’m guessing they will be profitable about the same time that hell freezes over.

I still just don’t get it.  I understand why video clips are fun and a significant development online, but I don’t get those who express *economic* enthusiasm for online videos produced by … you and me.   As I’ve noted before about online video, I don’t understand why people think video sites can make money.   Youtube cost Google 1.6 billion but doesn’t make money.   Podtech had a brilliant, well executed, forward vision of the online video landscape.   They even had the ultimate forward looking blogger spokesmodel Robert Scoble (who has just moved to FastCompany.com and is right now hanging in Davos with the uber-economic-elite).  Despite this Podtech failed to deliver on the promise of monetizing quality content to the larger user base.   I had a chance to talk about this with John Furrier at CES.   John told me he’s still very bullish on video, but Podtech is going to focus more on a model where they’ll be producing company videos for corporate clients, helping them to leverage social media advantages.   We also talked about how hungry many big companies are for those who understand social media and want to leverage that power to their corporate advantage.    This, in my opinion, is where you’ll see most video and podcasast production efforts moving over the next few years.   The money is in leading corporate clients into the uncharted social media waters rather than trying to build website visitation and monetize clips.   The latter is a very dead end in my view.

So, should you invest in Current TV’s IPO?   Sure you should, right after hell freezes over.

Scoblegate? No – Scobleizer ads are NOT a sellout.

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Mike Arrington, hanging in Davos with the global power elite, has a great title today with “Scoble Sells Out“, a fake jab at his pal Robert Scoble who is finally putting ads on his hugely popular blog (and is also lounging in Davos with the power elite!).

No big deal in my view – Scoble has been good about disclosure and perhaps even more importantly is a basically stand up guy, so I hardly worry that he’s going to start misleading readers in favor of sponsor B.S. 

That said, the blogging community would be well advised to develop disclosure standards if people want to maintain credibility and avoid the huge ethical gray areas that come about when socializing, economics, and blogging come together as they have over the past few years.

My view on corruption in politics (and blogging is similar) is that the challenges don’t come from basic dishonesty or payola – there is some of that, but the key problem is  more subtle.     In systems where economic support flows to those who *already* share the set of opinions with the money folks you don’t need any dishonesty to have a major distortion of the process in favor of those groups that can fund the people who share their ideas.    Often people wrongly suggest that votes are “bought”, when this is rare.  Rather support flows to the candidates who share the views of the supporters.     This system would actually work OK if the contributions were small, but loopholes have allowed certain groups to have hugely disproportionate impact on our system.    

This is why the conversational marketing model is bogus.  Bringing businesses into the conversation is a good general idea.  But if it only involves those businesses who can afford to buy a conversation  it’s just a step away from basic advertising, yet disguised as real dialog.   That isn’t corruption, but it is distortion.