March 21, 2012 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
My URL shortener, 4.l.to, is down because all the .l.to subdomains, managed through FreeDNS, are down too. There’s little information available and all I know is that the subdomain is broken since 19th March, as said on the FreeDNS subdomain management page.
There aren’t any planned times to have the service restored – as I hope you understand, this is completely out of my control. In the meantime, all the links shortened with 4.l.to, which were over 500, are broken.
If you have any information that can help find what’s the future for the l.to subdomains, don’t forget to write a comment in this post. And, if you happen to have a short URL which you don’t mind donating for URL shortening (I can share the advertisements profits), I will consider moving/renaming 4.l.to while preserving all links (since the server is up and with daily backups).
December 27, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Do you remember the OpenID standard, that aims to describe “how users can be authenticated in a decentralized manner, eliminating the need for services to provide their own ad hoc systems and allowing users to consolidate their digital identities.”? Well, if you happen to frequently authenticate on a service or website that supports it, or if you happen to run or maintain one of these websites or services, most likely you remember. But the surprising part is, OpenID is used in more things than you can imagine.
Till some time ago, I don’t recall seeing much opportunity for logging in with an OpenID – except on the websites of the ID provider themselves. The first OpenID authentication method I recall using was using Twitter IDs, although in that case I could as well have used Google or Facebook. But people use OpenID without actually recognizing it as an implementation of that standard. Yes, OpenID is that “Login with Facebook” or “Login with Twitter” thing. These login methods are usually just not (visibly) branded as being OpenID.
So basically, that represents a win for OpenID, right? Well, in theory yes, but my opinion is different. While many websites carry out OpenID in such a way that it is comfortable for every user, others simply don’t. What do I call a “comfortable usage” of OpenID? An implementation of the standard in such a way that it allows you to choose the ID you want to use. Eventually, it also lets you not use OpenID, through the creation and authentication of a traditional account, where the chosen authentication parameters are isolated to the website or service in question, like we’ve seen before the OpenID boom.
This “comfortable implementation” fits the most users I can think of: by assuring authentication using accounts on the most popular OpenID providers, such as Google, WordPress and Facebook, and using simpler, standalone (i.e. not tied to any service in particular) and/or less-known providers such as chi.mp, claimID and myOpenID, the chances of the person willing to be authenticated having an ID with one of the providers supported is way bigger. But because not everyone likes the OpenID idea, or they might simply not have a registered account with one of the IDs supported, an additional “traditional” authentication method should also be provided, so people can create an account with the website or service in question, and not tie that account with an OpenID.
The advantages of what I call a “comfortable implementation” are very noticeable in my opinion: it increases the user base of a website, since if people find it easy to login with an account they already have on other service, it’s very likely they’ll login on that website. It also makes the act of engaging with the website a breeze, because people don’t need to go over the hassle of maintaining yet another user/password combination, there is no signup form, captcha or email validation. While this may change depending on the OpenID provider and on the service or website implementing OpenID authentication, in most situations the OpenID login process is easier. We just got to recognize another advantage: if users find registering and logging in easier, the website or service will not only get more users, as it will have its users more satisfied. As I said, for the user there’s not the hassle of not remembering the specific password and having to reset it, and for the website management, there can be also a reduction in the number of support requests, assuming OpenID is properly implemented. All I did here was point some of the advantages of OpenID, but it can also have a lot of disadvantages when its implementation is not so comfortable for the user.
A website that I remember having a proper implementation of open IDs is Blogger, at least when posting a comment on a blog – it allows you to choose which profile you want to comment under, from a Twitter, WordPress or Google account to a OpenID, discussed here.
But what is an “uncomfortable implementation”? From my point of view, OpenID can become a very negative thing if, for example, the website the user’s tying to authenticate to doesn’t offer the ID provider on which the user has an account. It is also possible that an OpenID implementation fits most, but not all. A very clear evidence of this problem is given with websites that offer “Login with Facebook” as their only authentication method – I don’t think this can be called an OpenID implementation, even though Facebook is an OpenID provider. But why is this a problem? People just start based on the premise that all the internet users have a Facebook account. False. I can illustrate this with personal situations… it’s not happened once nor twice, but dozens of times: *le me browsing the ‘net*, *le me finds a website he likes*, *thinks he should signup*, *looks for the signup link*… oh crap, looks like all we get is this:
Call me stupid, “forever alone”, or whatever you want: I might even have a Facebook account, but I may not use it and even if I do, I don’t want all dozens of websites being authenticated with that s*ht Facebook is, and eventually with these websites being able to post to my Facebook wall, access my status, photos or other things “normal” people put on Facebook.
I’m giving this example for Facebook, but the problem goes for other ID providers. There are websites that support open IDs, and a few even say they support OpenID (the standard), but then you’re presented with a “Login with XYX” link where XYX is a single ID provider of their liking. Sometimes you’re lucky enough and you have an ID from this provider, other times you just need to go registering for yet another ID, defeating all the purpose of open identification and OpenID.
Although, there are cases where requiring a login with a specific service is mandatory. For example, on services that are dedicated to changing your Twitter profile background with a generated one, a Twitter account is of course required, so a Twitter-only login makes all sense. Same goes for Google/Blogger/Facebook/WordPress dedicated services, but please, if it’s not required to be tied into a specific service, then just let people use whatever ID provider they want, or provide a traditional signup and login method. Else, open authentication and OpenID might become hassles that drive users away.
Other things can be discussed about OpenID – I can argue that it is unsafer than traditional user/password logins, because if the OpenID provider gets cracked and authentication information gets exposed, then all the accounts authenticated with OpenID on other websites are open to the crackers – much like an user that always uses the same password and username on multiple websites. We can also discuss about these shiny buttons provided by social networks and the like, that allow you to authenticate using your account on them, to “like” or to “share” posts – these are used for user tracking, and seeing what the crowd likes, helping on creating even more directed advertising. There are plugins that block these trackers, and usually some hosts file or iptable rules work well, fortunately (if you don’t use the service from which the shiny trackers are coming).
I do not represent the OpenID foundation, Facebook, Google, Twitter or other OpenID provider. I am not encouraging their use or otherwise; I’m just exposing my very irrelevant opinion on the subject. If you spot any factual or spelling mistake, please contact me or comment below. Thanks for spending some minutes of your life reading this post!
December 2, 2011 / gbl08ma / 3 Comments
Let’s keep things short as I have lots of things to do. On 30th November, this website was working functional as it had always been since April 2011. Then suddenly, in the morning of 1st December, the server had been reloaded.
At first I thought it was because someone with admin powers at cheapvps.co.uk, the provider of my previous server that hosted this website, reloaded the VPS. But after some searches, I ended concluding the VPS, which luis123456 had given to me in April 2011, was still owned by someone else – and that someone was trying to make use of the VPS.
I found the email of the real VPS owner (in fact, I used it for logging in to the VPS control panel, but I always had thought it was just some random address, because it only had two letters and five numbers!). I sent an email to that address, and some hours ago, I got a reply from David W. – the real owner of my previous gbl08ma.com server, to which I called “hydrogen”. So what happened in fact? According to David, he told luis123456 to “maintain” (and no more than that) the VPS. luis123456, whose real name is Luis A. (so we talk about real names here) was not authorized, to use the VPS. Still, (and I repeat, this is the saying of David), Luis gave me the VPS. Luis never said anything about this: I thought the VPS was some kind of sponsored VPS which the sponsor forgot about.
So, the old server was reloaded. But things were worse for my side: I was supposed to have an automated backup system, but it was broken and I had no time to fix it. Shortening: I have no backups of the old server, except Google cache, which didn’t cache one or two blog posts. Apart from the text of the posts, cached by Google, I lost everything on the server, that is, all files, images, configuration files, scripts, WordPress plugins, themes… hosted within the server. This also includes the few Anti-Aliased fonts for Rockbox, which I’ll have to upload again some day.
I just finished restoring all the blog posts I could. I’m still wondering how to restore comments done by other users on the various posts. But wait, I missed one part, right? How did I get this new server?
Indeed, this is a new server. I say the website keeps being the same only because the matter and intention of it keeps being the same, but in technical terms, this is a whole new WordPress install, on a whole new server. While this has some advantages, it also has lots of disadvantages – you can compare this to formatting a dog slow Windows computer, without making backups first: after re-installing the operating system, you get a clean system but most of your data, configuration and software is lost.
This new server was given by Humza Bobat, Infinity at freevps.us. So yes, now I have two server provided by freeVPS.us; since I know other users will get angry with me by having the admins of freeVPS opening an exception of the one-vps-per-user rule, I must provide some good argument to it.
In fact, I need two server for various reasons. One of the reasons, is that since the virtual servers I own are not very powerful (they are low-end boxes), they can barely handle two websites on the same server – note that we are talking about WordPress on this website, and while WordPress can run on fairly modest setups, I want some speed both for me and for the sometimes 10 concurrent users of the websites (it happens, for example when my stories get featured on Slashdot).
The multiple virtual host configurations, while they work well if you never touch the configuration files, are harder to maintain, in my opinion. But the main reason why having multiple servers is necessary is the following: being servers provided for free, you never know when one goes offline or you loose it forever (OMG! It just happened!). If one goes offline, you can still use the other for temporarily hosting an additional website or at least some informational page. Plus, you should never put all your eggs in one basket: the server that served gbl08ma.com went away with its data, but the situation could be worse if all the things were on it. If I had what I have on my “helium” server, the one that serves 4.l.to, on the server I lost, then I would have lost some hundreds of MB of information that is important (some of it even a bit confidential).
A interesting thing is, I have automated backups of the helium server working, although it gets much less visitors (not including short url clicks) than gbl08ma.com gets. The Murphy’s law regarding backups applies: even if you have backups of your things, they will never include what you just lost.
What about naming conventions? The “hydrogen” name now refers to this new server, while I’ll call the old one from on now “deuterium” 🙂 . The 4.l.to server keeps being called “helium”, as ever. I also have one testing server called “lithium”, but it isn’t used for anything permanent – as I said, it’s a test server.
If you have any questions regarding the data loss on this blog, please post on the comments. I’ll be busy for the next days/weeks/months trying to restore more of what was lost.
October 7, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I was really fed up with Apache on this server. It would use huge amounts of RAM, even after all the visitors left the website. Having done all tweaks to the memory usage of Apache and PHP, the amount of RAM used would never get below 450MB (out of the 512MB this VPS has). Hell, Apache was consuming even more memory than MySQL!
For those who don’t know, nginx is an alternative, lightweight webserver which is generally used (by many popular websites) as a load balancer. However, it can also act as the single web server on a system, like what Apache and Lighttpd do. I had worked with nginx before on some small websites on low-resource servers, and I was quite satisfied with it. As I explained with an earlier blog post, nginx is great as long as the website you want to serve with it does work with nginx – that is, doesn’t heavily depend on Apache rules or some Apache-specific thing. Sure, those rules can be converted to nginx config options, but I never succeeded on making eyeOS 1.x work fully with nginx.
WordPress is one of the scripts that works best with nginx. Since this website is mainly powered by nginx (although I have some custom scripts laying around, mainly the scripts providing alternative WiiMC internet media), I made my mind and decided I would go through the hassle of switching from Apache to nginx. It wasn’t a big hassle after all: apart from having to restart the server at some point due to a RAM outage, the website wasn’t offline much time, and there was no data loss.
After putting Apache off-use and starting nginx, the server was still using 300MB of RAM. I though nginx couldn’t be using so much RAM, and there was another problem laying around. Turns out to be a problem in MySQL config: I don’t need InnoDB functionality, so usually I add a “skip-innodb” line to my.cnf. The problem was, this line needs to be added under the [mysqld] section and in my case, it was somewhere else. So I moved skip-innodb to the right place, restarted MySQLd, and that’s it:
The server is now using 240MB of RAM, which still fits inside the dedicated RAM (256MB), so I’m not taking any of the burst RAM, which resides in the server swap space. The RAM usage is still high, because I have other things running such as dovecot for mail delivery.
It also looks faster to load pages, but probably someone with a faster connection than me will notice a bigger difference.
October 6, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
So the last times have been strange again. A lot of events which somehow hit me harder, for the good or for the bad, have happened recently. Some are more personal than others, anyway. Here are the ones I can remember and talk about in public, ordered in chronological order:
- My cat is really sick 🙁
- dmmcintyre3 got me a .com domain – I wasn’t expecting that in any way, thanks a lot! 🙂
- Steve Jobs had his last kernel panic (must I explain?). Let him rest in peace.
- It’s hot like hell in Portugal, hotter than in the Summer, and it’s already 6th October
- Last night (during the Steve Jobs thing, perhaps) I got a bunch of twitter followers. Funnier: most of these users have their following and follower counts on the hundreds, but never posted a single tweet. One word: spam bots.
- And some more things I can’t remember! (I forgot about them while I was writing this, and now I can’t remember. Seriously!)
October 5, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Following the latest changes in this website domain, it looks like it will have to edit the URL for this website in wordpress settings again, in no more than a week.
But this time, unlike last time, I’m incredibly happy. No, my birthday is only on 8th October, but the owner of http://freevps.us, dmmcintyre3 has registered for me the domain “myself on .com”, that is,http://gbl08ma.com . Yeah! That’s myself on a .com domain – in case you haven’t understood.
Goodbye malware-false-markings due to the use of crappy free domains! Now I only have to make sure my real TLD is not marked as malware itself.
Now I can freely post URLs for posts in my blog without fear for supposedly containing malware! This is an huge step!
Remember, the Bitcoin donations thing is still valid; at the end, I want to renew this domain next year 🙂
An huge thank you to dmmcintyre3! And to Namecheap for providing cheap domain names.
September 29, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
First of all, sorry for posting nothing on this blog for more than a month. The truth is, school has started, I’ve got to study, after studying I have lots of other things to do, and, in general, posting on this blog has been the last of the priorities. It’s also true that during this month I didn’t come with something worth a blog post. However, in the last days some online events made me direct some attention to this blog and the server it is hosted in.
Some days ago, Pingdom started reporting that gbl08ma.cz.cc was down… and down… and down… not only gbl08ma.cz.cc, but also all the cz.cc domains were down for more than 48 hours – and continue to be, and will never come back up – I explain later. After more than 48 hours of consecutive downtime (and an email inbox full of Pingdom alters), I decided it was time to “wake up” and take some action.
So, I went searching. I knew that everything cz.cc was down, that was a fact. After no more than 30 seconds of Googling, I see the expressions “takes offline”, “cz.cc domains”, “Microsoft” and “Kelihos Botnet” on the same headline.
Before we continue, let me explain: I knew Microsoft and its “secure internet” partners had taken the Kelihos botnet down some days ago, I just didn’t know how that was related to cz.cc subdomains. So don’t take me for as so uninformed as you might think.
…turns out that Microsoft and its partners took the cz.cc domain service down along with the Kelihos botnet. OK, I had assumed this would happen anytime soon, the point is that it just happened before I thought it would be, and it happened before my eyes. So, cz.cc was taken down, after being considered as being a Kelihos partner and containing other multiple issues (we all know the lots of spam and scams operated from cz.cc domains, right?).
Well. Yesterday I was a bit angry with Microsoft, but now I think it was a great thing after all: they shut a bad thing off the internet, while forcing me not to use that horrible domain service anymore. For me, the biggest hassle is updating the URL of this blog on all places I left it. The ideal solution to this free domain problem was to buy a real top-level domain and get off with gbl08ma.com or gbl08ma.net, but as I don’t have enough money to buy a TLD yet, I just moved to the very-reliable and reputable freedns.afraid.org (unlike cz.cc, it isn’t associated with badware or spam).
Plus, afraid.org has some great points compared to cz.cc: since Google banned them from search results, this blog could not be listed on Google; now with afraid.org, I’m still not listed on Google by default, but I can bother Joshua Anderson, the FreeDNS admin, to whitelist this website and allow Google to index it, like he did with my 4.l.to URL shortener. (to Joshua Anderson: if you’re reading this, smile 🙂 ).
There’s even another great thing, apart from not being associated with the “dark side” of the ‘net. The FreeDNS domain I chose is even shorter than the previous one!
Conclusion: The URL for this blog is now http://gbl08ma.l.to. (not anymore, read last update)
I’m progressively updating all references to gbl08ma.cz.cc on the internet to gbl08ma.l.to, as long as it’s under my control; if you ever linked to this website, please update your links; remember to update your bookmarks too, if you had any. Starting now, forget gbl08ma.cz.cc and update your mind to use gbl08ma.l.to. I thank you for not associating this little blog with Kelihos, since it was never associated and never will.
See you!
Gabriel
EDIT: I was trying to configure WP to Twitter plugin to work with the new URL, and at the Twitter developers center, I just discovered that Twitter thinks that l.to domains are malware, too. Damn! What free domains aren’t considered as malware?! I need a TLD… please… oh damn, I can’t pay.
EDIT2: As you should be noticing, the blog is now on a .com domain. So the accurate URL is http://gbl08ma.com
August 18, 2011 / gbl08ma / 1 Comment
Letting anyone who might read this know that I’m accepting Bitcoin donations of any amount at the Bitcoin wallet:
1Kw1ACWYy7YdoNsSKH6jig5Bqi1J9Y9F8f
Any amount you donate, even if very, very small, is appreciated 🙂
August 11, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Today I was going to add one of my new websites, http://webshuff.uni.cc , to Google webmaster tools and for my surprise, right after I verified the ownership of the website, it showed this message at the top of the dashboard:
[Image not available anymore due to data loss when forcibly changing servers on 1st December 2011]
Well, this exact same message is shown for this website gbl08ma.cz.cc I added some months ago. The message started appearing two or three weeks ago.
I thought immediately it was due to the fact that this website has a .cz.cc domain. I submitted a reconsideration request, after making sure this website was following all Google Webmaster guidelines, and some days ago Google said it had been processed, but so far this website, which previously appeared on Google search results, doesn’t appear anymore. Click for proof.
I didn’t bother much. nic.cz.cc started to give problems some time ago, when the first episodes of Google marking all the cz.cc domain and subdomains as containing malicious software or content. I thought: easy, just switch to another domain name like uni.cc. And I decided to myself: from on now, I will use uni.cc for new websites I create – even because uni.cc seems much stable and less abused than cz.cc.
So, for one of my new websites, Webshuff, I chose uni.cc network for my free domain service. From the part uni.cc is responsible for, I have no complaints… however, I only realized Google was also hiding uni.cc websites from Google searches when today I saw this warning on Webmaster Tools. I’m not even going for submitting a reconsideration request: all the uni.cc and cz.cc websites are being hidden from Google’s search results, and most likely any reconsideration request is being suppressed, because all these websites are just cz.cc or uni.cc subdomains and the rules not for showing these websites apply to all subdomains, and Google doesn’t seem to open exceptions.
Summing up, what’s the current state then?
- cz.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
- uni.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
Sure, there are many more free domain and DNS services. We have, for example, the old and very abused co.cc. But… Google is blocking co.cc since long ago (by long I mean, perhaps since the start of July this year). co.cc I perfectly understand because: a) when I used it for the first an last time, it sucked so hard… their website made it look like it all was a scam, not to talk about some of the websites the subdomains pointed to. From phishing websites to all the kinds of online scams and spams, they had of everything bad in great amounts, at that time… “at that time” was like two years ago. Things didn’t get better since that time (instead, the opposite happened), and Google kicked out co.cc of search results because 90% of the subdomains pointed to dangerous and not worthy websites.
Summing up again…
- cz.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
- uni.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
- co.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
By other words, all free domain services are not listed by Google except two… dot.tk and co.nr. Click for proof. If Google lists any more, they don’t have enough PageRank to appear on the first page. So, let’s analyse dot.tk cz.cc and co.nr in greater detail…
dot.tk
I used them with the first websites I created. My experience with them was great until to turned horrible the day one of my domains got lots of hits – turns out Google had just indexed it, and as I offered unlimited cloud space on a online desktop powered by eyeOS, lots of people visited the website. The day that could be a change in the way of my webservice and of my online reputation (not that I spend all my life thinking about online reputation, but whatever) turned out to be the day dot.tk pointed the domain goonawebtop.tk to SedoParking (yep, that horrible website where dead domains are parked to). Following goonawebtop.tk, all my dot.tk domains were pointed to SedoParking in a few hours.
Although the domains were pointed to SedoParking, they were listed on my dot.tk account as being pointed to the correct IP. I’m sure I followed dot.tk TOS/AUP. I tried deleting my domains to add them again, but when I tried to add them, they weren’t available anymore.
Other people have reported this behavior on high-traffic domains by dot.tk.
Conclusion: dot.tk points domains with a great amount of traffic to SedoParking in order to make money out of them, and doesn’t allow people to point them back. cz.cc has also pointed my domains to SedoParking-like websites for multiple times, although the IP in the A record was explicitly changed and I could change it back (and the admin of .cz.cc also promised me multiple times it wouldn’t happen again).
I’m not going for dot.tk after my first experience with them. And personal experiences apart, I’m not going for a domain service that drives traffic away from my website once I get many visitors. Would you? If yes, sure, go with them, you might be lucky and they might not point your domain anywhere (like what happened with freevps.tk). But if they do… don’t say you were not warned.
nic.cz.cc
I started using them when dot.tk failed. They have even more features than dot.tk, and they also have a way to pay for premium accounts and additions to domains internally, paying with “My Balance”. People could earn balance without spending money by doing paid2surf on cz.cc websites. I made more than “$30″ (with quotes) using this method, and bought myself a cz.cc VIP account.
cz.cc was great for some time, like four or five months, but after that, Google started marking all the subdomains as containing malicious content, without exceptions. Problem was solved some days later, and it was good for a month. But, in mid-June, Google was marking all websites as containing dangerous content – again. And more recently, cz.cc was kicked out of Google search results like what had happened with co.cc before.
co.nr
I never used them, and I don’t think it’s worth a try now that Google is motivated kicking free subdomains out of search results. I think we only need to wait some time until more spammers/phishers/abusers start using it more, and it will also be kicked out of search results like what happened with co.cc, cz.cc and uni.cc. Note that I don’t think this last one, uni.cc, is very abused, but anyways, Google doesn’t think, it computes. And thinking is completely different from computing.
So what?
Google seem to want us to buy a former TLD (top level domain). The question is, where in Google do I fill a form applying to get a free domain? Yep, because not everybody has the money to pay for a TLD, or sometimes we have the money but no way to get it online. Or else, people younger than 16 or 18 years old are denied from publishing their content on the web on an independent website, on a independent server, using a free domain service.
But are you so sure nothing will save us? [people cry]
Well, there’s the free DNS service by freedns.afraid.org. Yay! But wait, weren’t these blocking Google bots? Yes. In this case, Google doesn’t block them but they block Google. No chance your afraid.org-created subdomains will ever appear on Google except… if you contact the owner of afraid.org, Joshua Anderson, with a working website that isn’t likely to get abused.
I contacted the admin of freedns.afraid.org using the email at the bottom of their page (yep, that one for reporting abuses) asking him if he could move my subdomain 4.l.to to the separate DNS set that allows Google access. After some email exchange, and after I made sure my new URL shortener (which is what is at 4.l.to) wouldn’t get abused and would stay around for some time, and also after explaining I couldn’t pay for a TLD (like I explained to so many people on the web…), I finally got that nice blue “G” near the 4.l.to domain on my list of subdomains!
But, this doesn’t mean you are so lucky. You might not get Google access to your afraid.org subdomains. Anyways, afraid.org still seems better than those abused co.cc and cz.cc.
Summing up for one last time…
- cz.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
- uni.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
- co.cc website and subdomains not listed in Google’s search results. None of them. Click for proof.
- co.nr is listed on Google, but I’m not sure it will be listed for much time until Google decides to kick them out too.
- dot.tk is listed on Google, but a) I’m not sure for how much time that will remain that way; b) I have had a bad experience with them and c) they point some of the high-traffic domains to pages with sponsored links in order to make money from the visitors you gathered – not nice.
- freedns.afraid.org is free, stable and has not much abusers (if any), but they block Google access and you must ask the admin personally to let Google go your website’s way.
I hope you have liked this giant blog post! Hopefully it will be of some use to those looking for free domain services. Now the only problem will be getting people to this blog post, because this website is (like all the other .cz.cc websites) kicked out of Google’s search results. (Editor’s note: not anymore since I got myself a .com domain)
August 2, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I enjoy reading xkcd in these times I’m bored without anything to do, but at the same time, not willing to shutdown the computer. So basically, I get to xkcd, and go hit the Random button until it is so late that it’s mandatory to go to bed (in order to wake up soon early to still catch users from “distant” time zones online). I tend not to read the comic very often so the “Random” button still delivers me some unseen comics (hey, I haven’t seen all 900+ comics yet!).
Today the “Random” button delivered me a comic from Spring 2007. Its number is 256 (heh! the amount of MB the VPS that runs this blog has of guaranteed RAM). Here it is, click to see bigger:
Look at how much has changed to nowadays. To make this map more actual, I think Facebook and MySpace should swap positions. Orkut would need to be smaller (unless you’re considering only the accesses by Brazilian people, and even that is decreasing). We would need another fairly small island for Google+, and a bigger one for Twitter. Second Life would disintegrate. Sourceforge island would get smaller and an island slightly to the left of it would accommodate GitHub along with smaller islands for all the recently-born git-hosting websites.
Other interesting point is, The Icy North would get smaller (global warming? 🙂 ) and the Mountains of Web 1.0 would be renamed to Mountains of copy-cat Web “2.0″. And let’s not forget, the IRC isles would certainly keep the same size or even be bigger, but they would be much more idle and abandoned (IMHO a island for dead/98% idle IRC channels and users should be created, and another one for malfunctioning IRC bots).
And as I am really jealous, I’d also like a small island for this blog on the Blogipelago. 🙂
The “Gulf of Youtube” would get an island on the middle divided between Next New Networks, sorry, I meant YouTube Next Lab and Audience Development Group[¹] and VEVO (size based on watch count). And etc. This is just my view of the actual www vs. 2007′s www. You certainly disagree with me in some points. But, there’s something you must agree: in four years, the web has changed so much, and we only notice when we look back with wide open eyes and mind.
Now go read xkcd. Or go outside getting some Vitamin D (not really possible at the moment of writing of this post, as it’s midnight here).
[¹] I could write an entire, long blog post with my critic, perhaps skeptic, thoughts on the acquisition of Next New Networks by YouTube. Instead, let’s abbreviate and simply say that before, they were a successful independent project, now, they’re Google.
