Dan Makovec’s blog

Google sensors results in China

Much has been made recently about Google’s sensoring of results on its Chinese search engine.

The long and the short of it is that Google are a public corporation, and as such its primary priority is to increase profits for shareholders at the expense of any moral and/or ethical obligations they would otherwise like to meet. So when a government such as China says to them “you will censor your results or you won’t be allowed to operate in our country” - especially a country posessing the largest search market in the world, they have no choice.

The results of censorship you see here. Try doing a search for Tian An Men Square, site of the infamous government crackdown on citizens demanding democracy, on Google Image search.

First, the US version:
http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

Then the Chinese version:
http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen

Ah, corporations

2 weeks left

With the Australia Day holiday tomorrow, I’m two weeks out from leaving Unwired and going off on my own.

The past few weeks have been tough, but we’ve just hit a major milestone tonight. One more goal to achieve next week and I’ll be able to leave on a happy note.

My leaving will mark the end of a year in Sydney with more than its share of ups and downs, and hopefully the beginning of some new adventures. Whether they take place here or not is still up in the air though; we’ll most likely remain Sydney based until November (we like our current house and would like to spend a year in it).

I’ll certainly be bouncing between here and Adelaide a bit this year - and it looks like there’s a strong possibility of travel to other towns. I’m glad I have the car!

In other news, Bloglines is behaving erratically. It just told me Mykro published 4 entries in the past few hours. Actually the oldest of the entries was dated just after his visit in December, but I hadn’t read it until now since I didn’t know it had been written! Myk - I might give Google reader a second glance!

Airport Express 6.3 firmware update

Apple quietly released the 6.3 firmware upgrade for the Airport Express a few weeks ago. I’ve installed it on all 3 of my ApE’s and it appears to have resolved a very annoying problem we had with Airtunes intermittently dropping out. Just in case you’re experiencing the same problems, the update is at http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airportexpressfirmwareupdate63formacosx.html

Search engines have finally caught up

It took four weeks in total, and it was Google dragging its feet. Searching for my name now brings up my blog at number 5 on Google. Searching for my name with “blog” hits it at number 1, with my home page at number 2.

Yahoo puts the new blog at number 2 when searching by name, with my old blog at number 1. I’ve added meta tags to the old blog to stop engines indexing it, so hopefully that link will disappear in a few weeks. Same results by adding “blog” to the search string.

MSN still has the site at number 1. That was easy!

The tricky part is that my name pops up in a few places online, so optimizing the site to lift it above the other pages took a little work. OK, so I think I’ve got the basics of SEO figured out. I wonder how I can apply this now?

Krispy Kremes are THAT good!

Some eagle-eyed spotter found an ad for Krispy Kreme that attests to their sugary goodness.

Making geeks cool

One of the things that amuse me about this time of year is the presentations at CES in Vegas. I spent most of my formative years trying to convince those around me that geeks are cool.

As this photo of Microsoft’s effort posted on Anil’s site shows, the world’s richest geek has just brought in his good “buddy” Justin Timberlake to CES to show off how cool he really is. The result does not help my cause.

Thanks Bill.

Intel Macs arrive

They’re heeeeere! Apple announced its Intel Macs today, starting shipping next Tuesday.

The Powerbook has been replaced with the identical looking MacBook Pro. It’s apparently a bit faster (although nobody’s actually *seen* one of these things yet, so who knows?) with a higher res screen than my baby.

I think I’ll hold onto mine another year or two and let them iron out the bugs before switching.

In the mean time, Gizmodo’s put out a cute video to commemorate the event.

Hot again

Horribly hot and humid day again today. It’s currently 11pm and still 26, and I’m running rivers. I think I need some liquid nitrogen icecream to cool down, or I’ll never sleep!

Engines are starting to see this blog on the new site

Time for an update on getting my blog URL published… For the purposes of not skewing indexing results, I’m deliberately not writing my name here. Substitute firstname and surname for their appropriate values
Since moving the blog to the new URL, MSN was the first engine to catch up. Typing my name, or my name with “blog” after it, brings up my new blog URL first, and my home page second.

So far so good, it looks like optimizing for these guys is simple enough.

Google isn’t so good. Just searching for my name brings up my home page at number 16. Above it at number one is a link to my account profile page on mysql.com, followed by a couple of references to an article i co-authored back at uni in the 90s and some hopelessly out of date email archives from god knows when.

Searching for my name + “blog” brings up my old blog address, some references to my old blog address (some of which I removed about a month ago), then my new home page (not blog) at number 8. My blog doesn’t show up at all. Weird.

Yahoo isn’t so good either. Searching by my name brings up my top level domain home page (my surname.net) at number 26, and various other links. Interestingly, the first listing is my blog entry on Livejournal mentioning that I’ve moved the site to the new URL, although this URL never shows up anywhere in the listings.

Adding “blog” to the search moves my top-level domain link up to number 11 from number 26. I do have the phrase “ramblings blog” in the meta keywords. I wonder if this is affecting things?

For my next trick, I’ll try adding hyperlinks directly to the blog from the top level page and removing the “blog” keyword from the page. We’ll see if that changes anything. In the meantime, if anybody reading this through my old LJ site could update their bookmarks and blogrolls to point to the new address (http://firstname.surname/blog) I’d really appreciate it!

Hot new year

A warm start to the new year. 2005 was officially Australia’s hottest on record, and today on January 1st, we hit 45 degrees in Sydney.

Fortunately for Brian and I, we slept through most of the heat, having been new year’s raving until 7am today. Nevertheless when we went out to his rellies’ at 7pm it was still 39. About 10pm, the cool change came through and the temp dropped about 20 degrees in a couple of minutes.

We’ve just got home and opened all the windows, so I’m writing this while we wait for the house to cool down to a sleepable temperature.

Global warming? bah!