Read an article from Yahoo’s internet section regarding China’s censorship of websites for the duration of the olympic season.  China’s internet law includes even foreign journalists, teams and even tourists… they would all find it a little hard to open what once was just accessible sites.

OpenNet Initiatives published a study on China’s internet censorship law based on the 2004-2005 period.  While access was restricted to basically blocking topics that are political by nature, sensitive and controversial, it has evolved to include many other topics a little less trivial.

“China’s Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world. Compared to similar efforts in other states, China’s filtering regime is pervasive, sophisticated, and effective. It comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control. It involves numerous state agencies and thousands of public and private personnel. It censors content transmitted through multiple methods, including Web pages, Web logs, on-line discussion forums, university bulletin board systems, and e-mail messages. Our testing found efforts to prevent access to a wide range of sensitive materials, from pornography to religious material to political dissent. Chinese citizens seeking access to Web sites containing content related to Taiwanese and Tibetan independence, Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama, the Tiananmen Square incident, opposition political parties, or a variety of anti-Communist movements will frequently find themselves blocked. While it is difficult to describe this widespread filtering with precision, our research documents a system that imposes strong controls on its citizens’ ability to view Internet content. ” - from OpenNet

What I am curious of right now is how this will all work with a worldwide media event.  Traditional media is one thing, the blogging media is another.  Tourist flocking the games will surely be a little frustrated that they may be restricted to visit their own blogs to post their time in China.  That is, IF their blogs have phrases or keywords that the Chinese government deem as “controversial”.

I would be interested to find out the impact to the blogging world.  I would probably venture a “free the blogs” campaign in the offing?  Who knows, it is likely to happen.

You can see more info on China’s internet policy here, here and here.

Comments?

A recent Wisdump commentary describes how marketing campaigns are asking people to search using keywords rather than type specific URLs.

I am sure you have at least one friend or loved one who has not grasped the concept of URLs and remains highly dependent on Google for finding their way around the web. If you’ll take a closer look at their web browsers, you’ll see why it really isn’t their fault.

…

The very nature of URLs seems to be another major stumbling block. Ordinary people don’t understand the use of a “www” and a “.com”, or that the “@” symbol is used only in e-mail addresses. They don’t know how to share websites through URLs either—unless there’s a button with explicit instructions that tell them how.

Add to that the explosion of all the domain suffixes like .me, .travel, and even .xxx. Not to mention all the malicious parties that wish to take advantage of their ignorance—stealing and spoofing personal information through misspelled URLs, search keywords, and deceptive e-mails.

For me, the analogy would be this. Using URLs to go to webpages is like giving an exact, specific street address. Like Number 5 Main Avenue, Gotham City, or the like. Going to a website via a search engine would be like giving landmarks and asking people to look for signages. It’s like telling a friend to go to Main Avenue, look for the big brown building across City Hall, with the green revolving door. At the ground floor of that building would be your shop, which is right next to the florist’s.

Complicated, eh? My point is that I agree with Ia’s commentary that this would involve some search optimization on the part of the website owner. What if the florist closed shop? What if the building administrator painted the revolving door red? Then your friend would have a hard time finding you. Two years from now, the building might even be grey or blue-colored.

Accessing sites via search engines works this way, too. Today you might be number one for the keyword blogging pro on Google. Tomorrow, we may not be.

Another analogy would be the use of telephone numbers. You can call or SMS me on my exact, specific phone number, complete with country code, area code and number. You can also search for me by calling a directory service or 411, but that doesn’t always work the way I would want it to. The phone company might have several people named “Angelo Racoma.” Or I might not be listed at all. And of course, some people would rather be able to contact me directly.

So are URLs here to stay? Of course they are. It’s just perhaps that a lot of people are increasingly finding it convenient to just key in a phrase or keyword onto that ubiquitous search box at the top of the browser window. No more keying in WWW or .COM. Even that causes confusion, with the multitude of top-level domains.

In the future, URLs might just take a backseat, with more and more people doing searches than directly keying in web addresses. I can liken this to AOL and Compuserve. Remember the old times, when companies asked you to key in AOL keywords to access their portals, rather than URLs?

Modern blog platforms, like Wordpress, make it easy for anyone to write content for a website without much knowledge of HTML or CSS. You can simply use a WYSIWYG (the Visual part to HTML/CSS code) editor. It is definitely a great way for non-technical people to write and format content. Here are a few tips that will help you stylize and format your content, so that your posts really draw attention:

Image Sizing and Positioning

It’s no secret that images are an essential part of making a post interesting and visually stimulating. Patrick Winfield wrote an extensive post about finding images online.

After finding your image, it is important to resize it to fit your post. Here is an example of a guy who has some technophobia:

Resize Images offline

When using the WYSIWYG editor, you are able to upload huge resolution images and then specify the size in the browser. However, resizing the images inside a browser is almost never a good idea, for the following reasons:

1. The browser still has to load those huge 2000px images before it resizes them. If you have 10 of those on one page, it will take a while for people to load the page (even though the images appear small.)
2. The images will not appear in the best quality. They may look distorted or pixelated depending on the browser.

Bottom line is, try to resize your images offline using a graphic program like Photoshop, or even MS Paint.

Use tools to quickly sketch the size and positioning of your image

If you need to insert an image into existing text, sometimes you don’t know where to start with the sizing. How large should your image be? Well there are ruler tools out there that help you draw inside your browser. My favorite to use is the Web Developer Add-on for Firefox. It has many useful features in addition to the ruler tool.

Once you bring up the ruler tool, you can draw a square on top of the browser where you think the image will be positioned. The tool then displays the width and the height in pixels. This shows you exactly which size your image should be. Now you can go back to your graphics program and make it that size.

This makes the process much easier. Otherwise you would need to resize an image, insert it, resize it again, refresh the page, repeat… That process gets annoying fast.

Note the image size - 186 x 165. After we insert and align the image to the left, we get something like this:

Instead of the ruler tool, you can also take a screenshot of the page, paste it into a graphics program (such as Photoshop) and try to draw on top of it to figure out the size in a similar manner.

Use Horizontal Space to separate from the text.

Most WYSIWYG editors let you add horizontal and vertical space to the image. I usually use 5px of horizontal space to the images aligned to the left, so that there is some separation between an image and text. Similarly you can type in HTML text right into an img tag of the image. For example:

<img src=”image.jpg” hspace=”5″ />

Use Vertical Space to wrap more lines of text

You can use vertical space trick if there is one line of text that doesn’t wrap anymore. It makes the text wrap around the image + the vertical space.

I usually use this to wrap one more line of text. Otherwise it may get a bit ridiculous from visual standpoint. But this example merely shows how the technique works. The aesthetic quality is up to you.

Colors

If you are using a predefined wordpress theme, the colors will most likely come with it. However, if you want to try some different ones for your text, headings or links, here are some tips.

Use Color Picker tools to get hex value.

Each color that you see on a monitor has a hex value assigned to it, which is a 6-digit number. To get that number you can use Color tools. I use ColorZilla Add-on for Firefox. You can also take a screenshot and paste it into Photoshop, then use the color picker tool there to get the hex value of the color. Let’s say our color number is 1A2D89. Once you know that number, you can use CSS to assign that color to any attribute (heading, link, etc) you want, by adding to that attribute.

color: #1A2D89;

Usually you want to stick to the colors within your theme, so you can use the color picker tool to get the color from the images within your theme and assign them to headings, links, etc.

You can also experiment with some accent colors. Best part is if you see a color you like anywhere on the web, you can grab it by using a color picker tool.

Another useful technique is to get new colors that are in the same “family.” So let’s say your theme is all blue, but you want to add a red color that’s in the same “family”. An interesting thing to experiment with is to start with the color you have, and only change the hue of the color, without changing anything else. You can do this in Photoshop.

For example, let’s start with our theme’s blue color, which is 1A2D89. I want to change it to red. What I would do is open the Color Picker in Photoshop and paste 1A2D89 in there, which brings up the blue. Then only move the Hue marker up or down to get to red. You will see that the hex number changes. My red is 891A1A. Now I can note that number and use it in my stylesheet. Here are the results:

THIS IS MY BLUE

THIS IS MY RED

Since the saturation and brightness of the color is the same, they seem to go perfectly together.

Use CSS inside a stylesheet, unless you will never need to use it again

If you are using a wordpress-based blog or a customized blog, a CSS stylesheet already exists. If you want to change colors or font sizes for your text, headings, or links, it is easier to edit that CSS stylesheet. Applying the color and size inside each post separately every time you need to make a change, will be a total waste of time.

Sometimes people with technophobia just do not want to think about dealing with CSS code. They would rather just use WYSIWYG editor’s built in color and size tools. But here are some reasons why dealing with CSS directly will actually make your life easier.

1. If you want to change a color of a heading, you just have to do it only once in a stylesheet; as opposed to do it 20 different times in your posts.

2. If you want to change that color in the future, guess what? You will need to change it 20 more times… AND this time you will actually NEED to change it 20 times even if you smarten up, since now the heading is taking its color from the inline code, not from the stylesheet anymore. So not only do you have to do more work now, you will also screw yourself (or another developer) in the future.

To keep everything organized, my advice is limit using the WYSIWYG editor’s color and sizing tools. It will only insert the CSS code directly into your post, as opposed to the central stylesheet. It’s best to edit your styles in the stylesheet, and then use WYSIWYG list of Styles (which reads from centralized stylesheet) to assign those styles to headings, text and other formats you may need.

How to do it

If you run a wordpress blog, then go to Design -> Theme Editor and open the style.css file. This is the file that has all the styles for your theme. There are many styles available in there, but here are some that you would probably look to edit:

• body refers to the entire page. This is basically a default style for everything. Usually the default text color and size would be specified here.
• h1, h2, h3, h4 are headings. You can edit the size and color to each one separately.
• a is a link. The ‘a’ tag also has 4 versions (a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:active) which corresponds to the 4 states a link can be in. Each one can be changed separately.
• p is a paragraph. This helps keep paragraphs styles universal

All the styles that have “#” or “.” in front of them were custom created and can be edited as well.

Word of advice: Before you start editing, save a copy of your original stylesheet as a backup. It is easy to make a mistake. If you do, you can reupload the backup, and your styles will go back to what they were before you started.

I would suggest that you don’t touch anything but colors and sizes, if you are not familiar with CSS. If you are interested in going more in depth, pick up a book on CSS or read some CSS tutorials on the web. There is plenty of information out there. Once you are confident you know what you’re doing with CSS, you can try to adjust other CSS properties to your liking.

Here are the lines dealing with colors, fonts, and sizes that you can edit.

color: #29303B; Feel free to edit that hex number using the techniques described in the color section

font-family: Garamond, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; These are the fonts being used. You can use more than one font separated by commas. If a person doesn’t have the first font installed on their computer, it will go down the list until it finds the font that is installed.

font-size: 12px; This is the font size. It can be specified in pixels (14px), points (10pt) or em (1.6em). So when you edit that number you can experiment of going higher or lower and see the results until you like something.

The example code below will specify the color, font and size of the text by default:

body {
color: #29303B;
font-family: Garamond, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 12px;
}

No for Crazy Fonts

Many bloggers want their site text to have a crazy font they spotted somewhere on the web. Please note, there are only a few standard fonts that are used on the web. A web page can only display that font if it is installed on your computer. If you go with a font outside that list, it is not guaranteed that everyone will have it, and some people will see your page in a different font. You can theoretically use non-standard fonts combining them with standard ones. However, if you do this, you better test all the fonts to make sure that your page looks good for each one of them.

Using Tables to position the content

This is a picture of a guy who is afraid to open a CSS stylesheet.

There are many ways to use tables to position the content. In fact, in the early days of the web, this was the most common technique used. CSS positioning has taken over, but you have to be somewhat versed in HTML/CSS to be able to apply CSS positioning techniques. If you are a non-technical blog writer and you want to have some freedom over positioning there is nothing wrong with using tables, as long as you don’t go way overboard.

One example of where a table would be useful, is if you have an image and you want to add some caption under it and then align the image and the caption with the text. This is commonly seen in web pages.

First thing you need is make sure is that your WYSIWYG editor supports tables. Wordpress has a great plugin, TinyMCE, that adds more WYSIWYG features to your editor, including the ability to create/edit tables. You may also use a visual program like Dreamweaver (please don’t user Frontpage, as that is the worst program for HTML editing).

When using any WYSIWYG table editor, insert a table with 2 rows and 1 column. The top row will hold the image, and the bottom row will hold the description. The width of the table should be the width of the image. Leave the height blank, since that will expand depending on the content. You may also add 5 pixels of cellpadding to the table so that there is some spacing all around. Align the table to the left or right and hit insert.

Now you can insert the image in the top row. And type in the caption in the bottom row. This is a simple example, but you can use tables to position different things. For example if you have to display 4 pictures in a 2 by 2 setting, etc.

Do Not Paste From MS-Word

Some people like to type their content in MS Word and then copy/paste it into the WYSIWYG editor. This procedure is not recommended as it can cause some unpredictable behavior, depending on what formatting was used in Word.

Even though most WYSIWYG editors have the ‘Paste from Word’ button, that button tries to preserve some of the MS Word formatting, but it is not perfect. Some of the formatting may get messed up causing you to go and try to make adjustments. Even when there seems to be no problem, it may carry a lot of extra code that will become a problem in the future.

So do yourself a favor and write your blogs starting from the WYSIWYG editor. You will more than likely spend more time trying to re-edit it later if you decide on copy/paste from Word.

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Not really sure if you’ve noticed the persistent “image caption” feature that WordPress 2.6 has developed.  I was happily blogging this past week when I’ve noticed that some of the images I posted vis a vis the blog posts have defaulted to a “nil” caption.  I do love this improvement, but was a little “blind sided” as there was no announcement regarding it until now, well I read it just now, hee hee. So I had a bunch of images with “nil” captions in them.  Had to manually remove it to blank (thankful they allow blanks).

It has gathered about 185 varied responses from “that stinks!” to “oh ok, it would take getting used to”.  But nonetheless I think it is best practice to put captions to photos to make your blog posts a little friendlier and much understandable.

To add a caption to an image, press the image media icon just above the editor buttons:

In the same pop-up window, you can see there are other image fields to complete like “title”, “description”, “link URL”, “alignment” and “size”.

Problogger wrote a short post regarding the importance of blog images:

• to enhance posts by giving a visual point of interest
• to engage people to read (imagine talking about a celebrity minus the juicy photos!)
• to emphasize the message
• giving your blog a more personal touch

From experience, my family blog (sorry, no URLs for privacy) gathered more hits and lesser bounce rates (from Google Analytics) WHEN I include a set of photos.  When I posted that I posed with a python around my neck, guess which album they clicked through and browsed often.  Or when I held a croc in my hands like so…

I RSS read my boss’ personal blog and when I saw a blog pic of him trying a spaghetti noodle up his nose I stayed on and watched the video even! haha.. that was a laugh.

So any crocs in your area that needs taming???

LinkedIn habla español. Estas in?

Desde el blog de LinkedIn anuncian el servicio en español de la red de profesionales mas grande del mundo. Esta es la informacion que se encuentra en la pagina web de la famosa red social en español. En las propias palabras de LinkedIn te explican que es y para que sirve.

¿Qué es LinkedIn?
LinkedIn es una red en línea de más de 25 millones de profesionales con mucha experiencia en todo el mundo, representando 150 sectores.

Cuando te unes a LinkedIn, creas un perfil que resume todos tus logros profesionales. Tu perfil te permite encontrar y ser encontrado por tus colegas de trabajo, clientes y socios. Puedes aumentar el número de conexiones que tienes al invitar a nuevos contactos de confianza a que se unan a LinkedIn y se conecten contigo.

Tu red está formada por tus contactos, los contactos de tus contactos, y la gente que ellos conocen, uniéndote a miles de profesionales cualificados.

A través de tu red puedes:
• Encontrar posibles clientes, proveedores de servicios, expertos en una materia, y socios recomendados
• Ser encontrado para nuevas oportunidades laborales
• Buscar empleos fantásticos
• Descubrir contactos dentro de empresas que te pueden ayudar a conseguir un empleo y cerrar tratos
• Anunciar y distribuir anuncios de empleos
• Encontrar candidatos pasivos para empleos de primera
• Conseguir que te presenten otros profesionales a través de la gente que conoces

Unirse a LinkedIn es gratis. También ofrecemos cuentas pagas que te ofrecen más herramientas para buscar y encontrar a la gente adecuada, ya estén o no en tu red.

LinkedIn participa en el Sistema de Privacidad Safe Harbor de la Unión Europea y cumple con las estrictas pautas de privacidad de la Unión Europea. Todas las relaciones profesionales que aparecen en LinkedIn son confirmadas mutuamente y nadie aparece en la red LinkedIn sin conocimiento ni consentimiento explícito.

LinkedIn se ubica en Mountain View, California, Estados Unidos y recibe fondos de inversores de primera como Sequoia Capital, Greylock, European Founders Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners, y Bain Capital Ventures.

Este es el video de bienvenida al servicio en español de LinkedIn.

Leading Search Engines - June, 2008

สุดยอดเว็บ Search Engines ที่มีผู้ใช้งานมากที่สุดแบ่งการตลาดกันตาม % ที่แสดงครับส่วนของไทยนั้นมีติดอันดับคือ sanook.com หากวัดจากสถิติ truehits.net แล้วประมาณ 5% ของ Search Engines ที่คนไทยใช้กกันครับ

Top 20 Websites - June, 2008
จัดอันดับสุดยอด 20 เว็บไซต์ ที่มีผู้นิยมใช้งานมากที่สุดทั่วโลก ซึ่งแบ่งการตลาดกันตามจำนวน % นั้นวัดออกมาได้ดังต่อไปนะครับ

If you’ve been on the Web long enough, you would’ve probably heard about domain squatting, which is basically a third party registering the domain of some entity with legal rights to that name or trademark. The intent is to either resell the name at exorbitant prices, or put up malicious websites or sites that are commercial in nature (but not owned by the trademark owner).

Domain squatting or cybersquatting is big business, and the legal implications are not always as simple as black and white. There are intellectual property laws that apply, or even dispute resolution policies, but jurisdiction is not always clear. So it’s usually common sense for businesses, trademark name owners and even individuals to register ahead their desired domain names, to avoid potential conflict.

Now, with URL redirection services becoming popular (such as with Twitter and other microblogging services, which allow only limited characters per post), redirection URL squatting can also be a problem. While previously tinyurl and most other redirection services only offered random or sequential extensions, nowadays you can customize the few characters that come after tinyurl.com/ . And with such customization comes the potential for abuse.

LouisGray.com reports of URL redirection abuse. tinyurl.com/dell has been redirected to a porn site. tinyurl.com/amazon, meanwhile has been redirected to an affiliate site, with the intent of the owner earning affiliate commissions from Amazon sales. Sure, the latter may be a grey area bordering on the legitimate, but the use of the /amazon extension might be questionable.

So if you intend to protect your tinyurl “name” then now’s the time to register.

[via ByteBurn]

Performancing.com has launched its advertising network, Performancing Ads. I’ve been playing around with the system for much of the latter part of development, and I can say I’m impressed. It’s simple and intuitive enough for anyone to easily use and understand, and yet you have the essentials of a good ad server, network and marketplace.

You can check out Ryan Caldwell’s Performancing post on 10 reasons why you should try Performancing Ads. A recent post by Darren Rowse on problogger.net threshes out some details, and David Peralty gives his opinion on the upsides and downsides of Perf Ads on XFEP. Jeff Chandler has a collection of links and reviews over at performancing.com.

Personally I really like the fact that you can book your own ads into your own sites. This means you can practically use Perf Ads as your ad server, or at least to fill in for those times when ad sales are slow.

Perf ads supports both image ads and text links, so you have the best of both worlds: image ads for brand marketing, and links for search optimization and to get a message across. Performancing also promises early, synchronized payout, and will pay out 60% of revenues. Perf Ads also has an affiliate program, where members can earn $10 credit from every successful referral, and 5% residual commissions from each sale by referrals.

Disclosure: Blogging Pro and Performancing are both owned by Splashpress Media

When I blog I literally have a lot of IE or FireFox tabs open.  These tabs would normally be my info sources, a few research items, a dictionary tab, the search engine, my online bank access, paypal page… the works.  You guessed I’m too multi-tasked a person to be limited to just one tab!

Fortunately, and I’m still on my blogging tools roll, we have a FireFox add-on to make your tabs world a little less awkward, specially if you’re too quick to press the ctrl-w button to close a tab you’re using.  Instead of doing the standard step to hit your browsers history-today window… check this out.

Undo Closed Tabs Button 3.0.3 was recently updated June 20, 2008.

Click the image one time to undo the last closed tab. Three times to open the last three closed tabs and so on. Click the drop down arrow to see the list of last previously closed tabs and select which one you would like to undo.

If you find yourself blogging too often while in the office, hey, this works as a quick hide-the-blog-tab from the boss.  Just don’t you dare rat on me when he finds out where you got the tip ayt? :)  Kidding.

You might want to check out Tab Mix Plus if this is too basic for you. 

Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager.

A version for Firefox 3 is found here:http://tmp.garyr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7031