I noticed the increase of sub-companies and new portals made by or in affiliation with Google. This company apparently has its own interest of multimedial world domination. An obscure incident was described on this article:
I was astonished to see that the „Invite 1 friend to Gmail“ link now says „Invite 6 friends to Gmail.“ See, when Google PR first gave me an account, that link said „Invite 4 friends to Gmail.“ I gave three of the precious accounts […] and saved one for emergencies. Like everyone else, I could only guess when Gmail would finally be public and open to all comers.
The author David Pogue expresses this strange event found at Google’s email service „Gmail“ simply – Google spreads like a virus:
It’s doling out a handful of free accounts to existing members, letting them each invite another handful. The result: a slow, controlled, viral spread of Gmail accounts.
But when will Google stop? Gmail is only one way to obtain control of global emailing, as every other software developped by the company. Google Deskbar is used to observe users, Google News means to filter and manipulate the media, Orkut will create elite communities, Google AdSense and Google AdWords control advertisement, Blogger (ahem!) controls the freedom of publication and content, Froogle centralizes the search for products, Google Labs allows cheap beta-testing of their own software, and last but not least Google Toolbar monitors our searches. The sad thing here is my own responsibility – because I use Google on my own.
Update: Against Googles Methods
BlogkulturAs previously mentioned in GoogleBlog: Preventing comment spam, the search engine built up a major cooperation with various blog hosting providers. Nevertheless, it appears to be a neat trick by Google to establish a new content-filter only to recognize websites as websites or in specific as weblogs. I cannot advise to integrate the rel=“nofollow“ attribute to any blog software as it clearly identifies the majority of weblogs. It would only grant Google the perrmission to recalculate the pagerank for paying customers – to raise their pagerank and lower the pagerank of any weblog.
I decided to implement a special CSS snippet by Phil Ringalda to lure everybody on any rel=“nofollow“ link:
Update: Creative Commons Deed
BlogkulturLast night I updated my Creative Commons Deed (CCD). I advise every blogger, especialy those here at Blogspirit, to include his or her personal Creative Common Deed. Everybody is advised to keep in mind the following (as excerpt from the original CCD):
Remember the disclaimer of Creative Commons, as you are in no way receiving an attorney-client relationship.
Further information on Creative Commons can be found at the CC’s weblog.
Robot Trouble
BlogkulturI was quite amazed as I noticed a total of 84MB traffic for this blog. I was the prancing pony, not someone else, but just me. Seen through pink glasses, it definately appeared as if many people visited my blog in the past days. But then the kickback to reality threw me off the fence: More than half of the traffic was created by robots, especially „slurp“ hit the road with 42MB! I hope Blogspirit will raise the montly limit of 250MB, because I am afraid of unavailability of my content in a few weeks as people become more and more aware of it, especially as it is indexed in the search engines or directories. I modified the revisit-after tag to be set for 7 and 14 days on the permalink/comment and archive/categories pages. Hopefully, this setting will come into effect as soon as possible. I figured my blog’s start page creates roughly 40kb-70kb, but I do not wish to destroy the whole layout to save space…
The Google Virus
MedienThe author David Pogue expresses this strange event found at Google’s email service „Gmail“ simply – Google spreads like a virus:
But when will Google stop? Gmail is only one way to obtain control of global emailing, as every other software developped by the company. Google Deskbar is used to observe users, Google News means to filter and manipulate the media, Orkut will create elite communities, Google AdSense and Google AdWords control advertisement, Blogger (ahem!) controls the freedom of publication and content, Froogle centralizes the search for products, Google Labs allows cheap beta-testing of their own software, and last but not least Google Toolbar monitors our searches. The sad thing here is my own responsibility – because I use Google on my own.
First Time: Freedom Blog Awards
MedienThe organisation Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) is newly inviting for the nominations for its first Freedom Blog awards. As dot journalism reports, the main focus of the awards is to explicitly draw more attention to authors (and blogs) which express an alternative point of view concerning news. Within many countries, writers are persecuted by the government and the media is in general under authoriative control. Personally, I am amazed by the idea to support and help these authors to express their thoughts openly and publically without limitation. Nevertheless, one may not forget that a certain control by the government helps in the process to obain a level of „freedom of speech“. But how much the awards will bring opposing views into the light of the media is questionable as it appears to be quite difficult to relevate persecuted authors to potential terrorists…
Weird Problems
BlogkulturI don’t know why, but apparently I have a few problems with the blog… its content won’t show up on the first page, a few categories and -even worse- … it affects the rss feed. I remember Thomas wrote an issue concerning the caching of the database and server, however by reloading or refreshing my posts, the problem won’t be solved. Nevertheless, I hope by posting a random entry like this one the problem shall be no more… I’m just going to start to keep track of it – I think!
GoogleBlog: Preventing comment spam
Blogkultur, SpamTo fight the increasing problem of comment spam has become a priority for blog hosting providers, software developpers and even search engines. Google itself has introduced a new method to disable advertisement links found in the comment pages. As these spammers attempt to multiply their website addresses to increase their google-pagerank, the company has set up a new filter for their spider robot.
Major service providers plan to cooperate with Google. Blogspirit itself probably does not need to worry about the rel=“nofollow“ attribute as the comments are permitted to use html or actively link to other sites. Nevertheless, you may edit the permalink page to implement strings.
Edit: I discontinued to publish how to effectively (?) modify Blogspirit’s code…
Grafedia: A Live Reality
Social MediaGrafedia is an amazing idea to merge ourselves with other people to overcome the limitation of the digital world of the internet and the complete physical environment.
Created by John Geraci, a New York artist and student for Interactive Communication, this software allows interactivity with three easy steps. Since anybody can become a „Grafedia artist“, you just have to send a word with the media file (images, videos or sound files) to their server. I created an entry for the word „sichelputzer“, and you might want to look at it by mailing sichelputzer@grafedia.net – a few other fellow bloggers did it here and here, too.
Criterias for Weblog Service Providing
BlogkulturMarkus K. Westner, the co-founder of Blogigo.de, published his Master Dissertation on weblogs, especially on the identification of functional requirements and evaluation of existing weblog services in German and English languages.
He evaluated 77 weblog services to create his criterias based on the detailed features and functionality implemented into the different software packages.
„Humankapital“ as Misnormer 2004
KuriosesThe term „Humankapital“ has been selected as the Misnormer of the Year 2004 [Unwort des Jahres] by German jurors. Out of 1218 different proposals, the linguists and literates of Germany voted for the term „Humankapital“ to explicitly express the harsh discrepancy between the word itself and the describing matter. The term does not only degrade the work force of a country, but places all human beings into general and only economically interesting values. The nominations for the Misnormer of the Year exist since 1991 in Germany and reflect the current world events. Previous decisions brought the words „Peanuts“ (1995), „Tätervolk“ [committer nation] (2003), „national befreite Zone“ [national freed zone] (2000) oder „Gotteskrieger“ [God’s Warrior] (2001) to medial focus.
Above can be understood as a summary of the information found in the (more or less) official press release. My personal definition of „human capital“ is similiar to a thought of Prof. Dr. Mike Friedrichsen on Medienmanagement. He mentioning the term „human capital“ during his summary of our lecture on normative, operative and strategic management. There we figured even jokingly, once we justify ourselves as being inherited with human capital, we must consider this as being the most important factor for our personal advancement and enrichment. We may not rely anymore on our aggregated value added found in assigned values of our daily life, but should concentrate on our skills and knowledge found in our mental abilities, inner strength and skill of the mind. Once we distinguish between the specific and general human capital, all skills or knowledge is useful only to a single employer whereas general human capital is useful to all employers.