Blog Flak

A group of nearly 200 bloggers joined together to plead for the life of an American journalist named Jill Carroll who was captured by terrorists in Iraq. Many people are crediting the bloggers for helping to gain her release but there are still 3 more journalists being held captive. There were other efforts involved in the campaign for her release including people from all cultural and religious backgrounds that pleaded for her freedom in letters and on television.

Reporters Without Borders reports that 86 journalists have been killed in Iraq since March of 2003.

Source: Tech Web

Talk about this in the forum…

tags: terrorists, journalists, Iraq, Reporters Without Borders

I decided to change the front end of the site to Wordpress publishing. It should help make everything more searchable with better archiving, categories and commenting than what I had before. I would appreciate a heads up if you notice any broken links or problems with the site.

As a result though, the Freebies on Fridays feature will be a bit late, sorry about that kids!

Thanks!

The Iranian hard-line government is enabling ever tighter restrictions on what bloggers in their country can say on their personal blogs. A number have been detained, imprisoned and sentenced with prison time for various infractions concerning Islamic laws and culture. Before you are allowed to even get internet access you must sign papers promising that you will not access non-Islamic websites.

Their filtering system is second only to China in the world as far as restrictions go on what you are allowed to see on the ‘net. The ironic thing is that they rely heavily on US commercial software to do the filtering with!

A Canadian blogger that was recently detained and interrogated in Iran wasn’t allowed to leave the country until he signed an official apology for his blog writings after writing articles explaining how to set up personal blogs in Iran.

When you read things like this it makes you appreciate the freedoms we have here in the US, doesn’t it?

Source: iWon News

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tags: censorship hard line Iran blogging regime

What a way to go! G00gle accidentally deletes it’s own official Blogspot blog! At first they suspected that the site had been hacked and the name stolen by a hacker, but after a short investigation they determined it was their own fault! A blogger somehow noticed that the name was available and registered it for himself. Everything is all back to normal now, G00gle has it’s blog back and they’ve listed a short explanation at the official G00gle Blog.

Talk about this in the forum…

tags: har kiri google blog hacking suicide

There’s a swirling controversy going on over at Live Journal involving their abuse teams allegedly arbitrary suspensions of both free and paid accounts where they have used very broad definitions of “abuse”. The Terms of Service, or TOS, appears to be vaguely worded in many areas with double talk definitions that include a number of “weasel words” that allow very broad interpretations of the TOS. The abuse teams consist of a group of volunteers made up of both paid and free members that are allowed free access to all Live Journal users entries including the ones marked “private”.

If you were considering moving to Live Journal for the “private post” features available to their users, you might to want reconsider!

More info: Exposing LJ Abuse

Also: Live Journal Abuse

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tags: abuse live journal abuse sixapart blogging harassment

Put up a couple new pages today to get the Blogging Help section rolling. I think you’ll find it informative and easy to follow along with how to do several basic things to your blog like inserting links into your posts and putting your own video or music player on your blog. Especially useful for newbie bloggers! Even experienced bloggers may learn a thing or two!

Talk about this in the forum…

tags: blog help technical assistance posting editing

Technorati’s report “State of the Blogosphere” claims that they are tracking over 75,000 new blogs every single day. And, that the blogosphere is now over 60 times larger than it was only 3 years ago. That’s a helluva lot of new blogs, who’s reading all that material? A growing problem with the Technorati service is they get tons of update “pings” from blogs every hour and that up to 60% of them are of the nuisance variety, or what they like to call “spings” from blogs that are set up solely to create link farms for click fraud. Technorati currently tracks over 1.2 million posts each day which equates to 50,000 posts each hour!

I know that a number of the free blogging service providers has instituted some strict measures to control the number of spam blogs and link farms being created on their servers but is it enough? On the other hand there are quite a few outcrys from bloggers protesting about their legitimate blogs being shut down by overzealous efforts to control this sticky problem. It’s going to be interesting to see how this all pans out in the future…

Talk about this in the forum…

tags: technorati splog ping sping blogosphere liposuction

I’ve put up a new review and a small tutorial on using Streamload file hosting services. This service makes it easy to upload, store and share video, music and PC files for your convenience! You can use this to display your personal video files and music directly into your blog posts! And the service is absolutely FREE! How cool is that? Here’s a short take from the review:

“Almost everyone knows where to go to get their pictures and images hosted for display on their blog, but what if you’ve got a video you’ve made and want to play it in one of your posts? Let’s say you made some home movies of your last vacation, or scenes from your garage band playing it’s first gig or video scenes from your kids last birthday party stored on your PC but don’t have a clue how to show them off? Almost any halfway decent digital camera these days can shoot video scenes and can easily be uploaded to your PC. The problem is that you can’t run them on your own PC for display on the internet. That’s where Streamload comes to the rescue. Streamload is a file hosting service that allows you to upload many different types of files to their servers and from there you can direct link to them for quick and easy posting to your blog.”Read More…

Technorati tags: video, streamload, music, fileuploads, hosting,

Here’s a quick excerpt from the review:

“Does Blog Mad live up to the hype? How does it compare to the well known and very heavily used Blog Explosion? I can tell you right off that it doesn’t in some way and does in others. Personally I do prefer BE over Blog Mad for a wide variety of reasons. I tried Blog Mad out this past week and even surfed during the 2 for 1 credit day which earned me 2 credits per blog viewed. A nice bonus actually, considering that it’s normally 1 to 1. BE’s surf ratio is 1 to .5, meaning for every blog you surf you only get one half of a credit to use to run your blog in the rotation. That’s quite a difference to be sure.” Read More…

Talk about this review and Blog Mad in the forum…

tags: reviews, blogmad, blogsurfing, credits

Ahh, here we go again, more Google news, what can I say? Google, or more specifically the folks at Blogger claim that the story about the blog poster that was asked to remove the MSN brand search box from his blog was false. They claim they have no policy on what type of search engine you use on your blog and the man’s claims that he received an email asking him to remove the search box never happened. You can read it straight from the horses mouth here at Blogger Buzz.

To be fair here’s a link to the guys explanation about what “really” happened at the Tech Journal.

What do you think? Is someone lieing here or what? Something is smelling rather fishy here…

Toss it around in the forum…

tags: blogger, buzz, searchbox, controversy