Singapore Web Hosting Blog

Yes blogspot.com is dead, blocked, again, in China.

Many of my friends in China told me that they have been not able to access blogspot.com from 20 Mar afternoon. Users of all most all ISPs, China Telecom, China Netcom, China Tietong, CERNET, are all experiencing difficulty accessing blogspot.

Looks like a nation-wide block.

Trace route timed out from certain core router of China Telecom.

I don’t think it’s permanent block as this is not first time that Google services are blocked in China. Even google.com are blocked every now and then.

It must be a tough time for those in China who’re using Google blogger. But seems like people are used to it now…

Hey, PR (not PageRank) guys in Google, it’s your showtime !

i just turned on comment feature of this blog yesterday.

it’s common to have comments enabled on most blogs. when i read other blogs, i find it very interesting to read comments as well. those who read blog are serious about the business. heck, you won’t read my blog if your not serious about your web site, will you? i do not post gossip, hot pictures, hot topic in town, etc. just internet stuffs. and it can be boring reading such blog unless you want to build a profitable online business.

anyway, back to topic. the comment feature was on by default when i started blogging last year. however before i found any human readers from stats, i saw tens of comment spams here. well that was fast.

spammers use software to scan all type of things they can spam, email addresses, forums, blogs, guestbooks, newsgroup, etc. then they spam you with those commonly seen spam messages nowadays, burn fat, drug, get rich quick, poker… the list goes on and on and on.

at that time, there’s not much real readers to my blog. it’s just kind of fun stuff for me, i have no plan to promote my blog. i don’t have much readers even now, but there are some coz i can see from server log file.

although i don’t really get what is web2.0, however experts say blog is part of web2.0, and one of the core spirit of web2.0 is community and interactive. so here you go. i added security code and turn comments on. your welcome to post comments.

the anti-spam plugin works fine so far, no blog spam received in last 12 hours. finger crossed.

looks like google never stops.

they keep launching new and fantastic products in the past year.

google earth, you can see the roof of your house! full of fun.
gmail, when all other free email providers gave 6 MB, google made a stir by giving 1GB mailbox.
google talk, google instant messenger, although not popular yet, it may imply google’s plan in VoIP, which is hot and there’s billion dollar potential here.
google video, they host your video clips, you can charge a fee from viewers or present for free.
google desktop, local desktop search tool using google search technology.
blog search, blog search engine.
google analytics, web site traffic analysis service, free of charge, known as Urchin before it’s bought by google.
google page creator, a new one just launched a few days ago, they host your web pages for free, and no ads! my god, we web hosting providers cannot survive anymore! luckily they do it on subdomain only, currently.

also, don’t forget applications that have been there for long time, i mean, 2 or 3 years, such as adwords, adsense, google toolbar, google PR, blogger, froogle…

then i heard news about gdrive, they provide hard drive to you!

in a presentation, google says that their philosophy to new product development is “no constraints” and they initially ignore “CPU power, storage, bandwidth, and monetization.”

they say that they should be able to “house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)” which leads to a world where “the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache”.

two concerns pop up when i read the story. first, privacy. yes i have been putting my trust in google so far from their very beginning. since we’re using so many tools from google, they can collect tons of information about us, some of the information might be down to personal level. they “do no evil” so far, from what i see.

but make my hard drive accessable to someone else? i have to think twice.

on the other hand, google has yet confirmed the gdrive concept, let alone any details, so let’s wait and see.

the other concern is, how will they monetize it? although they could ignore monetization initially when they develop the ideas, but they’re business, a listed company, they must think of their bottom line no matter what they do. so they must monetize it somehow.

put advertising on your desktop? not likely, coz it’s really annoying. charge a fee for the storage as backup? then why not just burn it on DVD?

anyway, they’re way smarter than me…