06/16/2004
Today Six apart announced their new pricing for Movable Type, the most effective changes are in personal edition.
Free edition allows one author and three blogs, and the paid personal edition allow three authors and unlimited blogs. and there is a unlimited personal edition which offered unlimited author and blogs, the price is $99 which I think are making more sense than the old pricing. It seems not bad for Chinese Blogger who are using MT system, the free edition still allow users to create at most three blogs. Although the Author limitation still effect some bloggers to make decision for upgrade to 3.0, but for most of existing individual users, this offer should fill their needs mostly.
126 Comments
06/15/2004
Combining the matching capabilities of online dating and the detailed profiles of social networking sites, roomster is an online community that connects people and allows them to find roommates in tune with their personality and interests.
Testimonials from friends give even more insight into the character of the "candidates". [ via Smart Mobs
As"-ster" with a word seems very popular over the internet, The most numerous "-ster" is Friendster which is the first and biggest social networking service right now. also we have Feedster, a useful RSS search engine.
8 Comments
06/ 8/2004
Google indexes more than 4.2 billion webpages,
Google spend $173m on maintain date centres and is expecting to spend about $250m in 2004
Google datacentres range from 10.000 to 80,000, concentration of computer power could be addressing more than 6,000 terabytes of data.
1164 Comments
A lot of confirms from Chinese Bloggers confirmed that Chinese Wikipedia was blocked in China. Through my refer system, I saw a dutch weblog "wikipeida benutzer" quote my previous post. Although I couldn't understand what he/she was talking about, I find a good link from his blog: Chinese Build Free Net Encyclopedia. After some of interviews with active contributors in Chinese wikipedia, the article point out why wikipedia was not blocked in China at that time, and predicted potential risks of blocking by Chinese censors.
One reason why Chinese Wikipedia has not been blocked by Chinese censors may be the site's insistence that all entries reflect a neutral point of view, a policy that defines all Wikipedia versions in other languages. The neutral point of view is intended to avoid editing wars between contributors competing to impose their interpretation of various subjects on other readers.
As Andrew Lih said:
"The site is not blocked en masse at the site level because its not obviously pro or against anything because of the neutral point of view policy,"
Another reason Chinese Wikipedia has not been blocked by Chinese censors may be its low profile and relatively small group of regular contributors. As the site gets more attention and attracts more contributors, Chinese censors may decide to block access to the site, giving an indication of how much exposure censors are willing to tolerate for a site like this,
I saw plenty of debates on
shizhao's
comment page (who is a pioneer Chinese wikipedian and a administrator of Chinese wikipedia), Some Taiwan contributors complained his arbitrary deletion on their works, most of them are caused by sensitive topics such as:
definition of Republic of China,
Taiwan's WHO bid etc. Actually here is a big culture conflict between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. There just only one version of Chinese wikipedia called "zhongwen" wikipeida, its include both two kinds of Chinese characters. So it's mean no major Chinese character was preferred on site. The problem is mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese have different practice to write in Chinese. It's kinda of complicate.
Another debate wave is on the political issue, These topics easily drive contributors lost their patients. Obviously, at this point, contributors (even visitors) were missing one of most important principle in wikipedia: Reflect neutral point of view.
Wikipedia is a very attractive project, I do appreciate they efforts on thousands of Chinese entries. I hope to see that more and more contributors join this project to represent professional information, But if people are focusing on debates to define what kind of major Chinese should be used in Chinese wikipeida, The project couldn't widely participate by others.
23 Comments
06/ 6/2004
Normandy Jun 6th 1944 which is the Milestone of WorldWarII
Ronald Reagan passed away yesterday Jun 5th 2004 who is preisdent end the Cold War.
11 Comments
06/ 4/2004
Shizhao (one of the most active Chinese wikipedia contributor) had post a news on CNblog.org was asking bloggers to visit Chinese verison of wikipedia see if it was blocked or not, through those comments, It's seems that wikipedia was blocked in most of location and network. So far, Beijing, Shanghai, these major City's network can't visit zh.wikipedia.org.
Since this is very senstive period that 15 years anniverary of Tiananmeng affair. Chinese Goverment is reinforce their regulation over internet to control the senstive topic about Tiananmeng and "6.4". I hope it's not a long-term block for wikipedia in China.
Update: ITworld article - Chinese censors block access to Wikipedia
29 Comments
06/ 3/2004
I caught a news from CNet.com said Firendster hired a new CEO, the new CEO Scott Sassa, who has been president of NBC Entertainment for the last three years. The previous CEO Jonathan Abrams remain company chairman position.
Since more and more social netwoking sites had released, Frienster's competitors were getting more stronger than before. inculde google's orkut.com, lycos, even Microsoft's Wallop, although they are focusing on different fields, the concept are the same, the goal is the same too: let more internet users join their Social networking service. No doubt, these SNS service are too much for me, maintain one social networking service is ok, but when I recived 20 invitation emails a day from different services, it drives me crazy to deal with. Also, keepping update my profile in different service is hard because of there no standards, each service has their own focus and functions, to update in various versions of my profile is annoying.
More service, more chioce. but eventually, just few of them would survive after the phnomenon.
901 Comments