solanasaurus.com

I wrote a post with the word c-a-l-m in it and now the comments section is being bombarded with Valium spam. Only for that post. How weird. What’s weirder is I just visited my blog and got a pop up ad for some travel company. Did you get it too?

Something less serious; which on a serious note is evidence of a particular kind of collaborative content production on the internetz. Pictures and text. All the kids are talking about it.

cuteoverload.com
stuffonmycat.com
overheardinny.com

It sounds violent, but a Google bomb is when a group of people trick the search engine into responding to a search query in a certain manner. Try searching for “miserable failure” and you’ll see what I mean. Now, a group of bloggers (now including myself) have ganged up to Google bomb on behalf of Egyptian blogger and political activist Alaa Ahmed Seif El Islam who has been cruelly detained by the Egyptian authorities. If it works, searching for the word “Egypt” will eventually bring up the Free Alaa! website.

“Some governEgyptments think they can trampEgyptle the rights of those that oppEgyptose them and noEgyptone will notEgyptice. Well, that fact is changEgypting and we are changEgypting it.”

This wouldn’t be a real blog if I didn’t link to Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. All the other blogs did. Frankly, some parts are funny, some are not. My pal James B. Martini is probably Colbert’s biggest fan. It was thanks to him I once saw a live taping of his show. It’s also thanks to him I’ve discovered thankyoustephencolbert.com where more than 50,000 people have registered their appreciation for the presidential prank. Very neat use of Google map, in case you care.

Elections are coming up in Colombia, but Bloggombiano has gone all zen-like with the acquisition of a new virtual llama. So I gots me one too. You can feed him by clicking ‘more’. Pet him three times, and wish for Colombian president Alvaro Uribe to lose the election. Because he is an s.o.b who gave new political status to drug-trafficking, human rights-violating paramilitaries.

The blog search engine Technorati now indexes 35.3 million weblogs. There are 60 times more blogs than there were three years ago. That means the blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months. Incredible. Every day 75,000 new blogs are created. To be fair, only 3.9 million bloggers update their blogs at least weekly. But that means there is a whopping 1,2 million blog posts a day. That’s 50,000 new blog posts every hour.

Did you ever want to be one of those people who manages to read everything interesting everywhere? If you’re an ordinary person, you’ll never succeed without a Feed Reader. Pick one, load it up, and start reading. I’ve been using Bloglines for about a year, but I overloaded it and now I get e-guilt just looking at it.

If you have a blog, you should spend some time on Feed Burner. They help you do neat things like make it possible for people to sign up for email updates to your blog (see upper right hand corner of mine) plus a bunch of ‘ping’ tricks. If you’re using standard blog software you already have a run of the mill RSS feed. Feed Burner claims theirs is better…

Logins can be so tedious. For those who wish they could dip into online newspaper subscription and premium content without paying or registering there are a few ways:

Bug Me Not was the original pioneer, letting people share usernames and passwords for more than 100,000 sites. But they no longer enable access to paid content.

The NY Times Link Generator creates blog-safe links that bypass registration barriers and sometimes payment barriers, but only on the most popular articles.

Finally, a snazzy legal option: Congoo.com offers introductory free access to more than 300 premium sites through a toolbar that lives in your browser.

In retrospect, I remember thinking how strange this message sounded: “Due to unavoidable reasons with which everyone is familiar, this blog is temporarily closed.”

WSJ: Chinese Bloggers Stage Hoax Aimed at Censorship Debate

“In an interview, Beijing-based journalist Wang Xiaofeng of Massage Milk says he shut his blog down to make a point about freedom of speech — just one directed at the West instead of at Beijing. He calls the Western press “irresponsible” and says that the hoax was designed “to give foreign media a lesson that Chinese affairs are not always the way you think.”

“Reporters Without Borders issued a correction to its statement on March 9, calling the incident a “joke.” But Julien Pain, who runs the organization’s Internet Freedom Desk, says he doesn’t think Mr. Wang understands the consequences of the incident.

“If some bloggers start crying wolf this way,” Mr. Pain says, “nobody will listen to us when we try to support those who really need help. Censorship exists, as well as repression against Internet writers.”

Doesn’t seem like a very constructive campaign. I don’t get it – are they pro government censorship or something? It’s a fair enough point that no one really knew what was going on before the story was reported. Looking forward to the blog debate about this. Perhaps something positive (albeit unintentionally) might come out of it yet.

UPDATE: Former China correspondent for CNN and founder of Global Voices, Rebecca McKinnon offers her analysis of what the hoax was all about. Interesting quote from the prankster, Wang Xiaofeng: “I just wanted to make fun of Western journalists? [content] doesn’t need to be serious on the Internet. I don’t like it that Western media take a distorted view of China, though China does have problems.” It’s a good reminder how different people’s approaches to blogs are. Some do their best to side up with professional media, and others use it for something entirely different. Makes me despair at all the broad generalisations you hear of blogs being this or that. It’s a web publishing tool, right? And it is whatever you use it for.

In Argentina, there is a new blogging network for local and national legislators to discuss their daily work. A dozen legislators have signed up already, reports Global Voices, and their individual posts appear collectively on Diario de Gestión.