Google has accepted to censor its search results on its chinese version.

Here is an example of what it means:

• See the image search on "tiananmen" on Google.com
• Same search on Google.cn
• Apparently, they are not filtering out typos quite yet. Try "tienenmen"

[Via

The government is apparently after porn related searches made on google and other search engines. Not good since the request is not motivated by nothing more than just "research". See the discussion on memeorandum.

Google is fighting it while other engines just gave in.

As Batelle says: this is a major, major moment.
privacy, personomies, user data

Anybody noticed how printer unfriendly most blogs are? I wonder if there is a meaning to this. I spend a great deal of time reading blogs online but, typically, right before leaving the office, I print a bunch of articles and posts that i either received through email or bookmarked to my toread tag. It's my metro reading. The problem is that 9 times out of 10 printing a blog post is actually impossible. Tonight, for example, I wanted to print this post from Jarvis who, ironically, has printing presses as a header image. I hit print and not only did it chop off a bunch of text but it also printed all the comments (13 pages total). Frustrating.

Am i the only one experiencing major let downs from del.icio.us? It seems that my page is up 50% of the time and virtually none of the items I added over the past few days are there. The last entry on the blog is titled "yet another power outage" but is 2 weeks old.

Come on del.icio.us! It's not like you dont have money.

delicious, personomies

The Google pack reminded me of the excellent NGO in a box project. The NGO in box is just a tad more comprehensive and not commercially oriented.

On December 1st 2005, I attended a speech made by Jimmy Wales on wikipedia and global development. Thanks to my friend Lawrence MacDonald, whose organization sponsored the event, I got to go to lunch with Jimmy and a bunch of other people. Because those were development minded folks, most of the discussion was centered around how can wikipedia contribute to global development. Inevitably, the $100 laptop came up. Jimmy was keen on seeing it take off and empower students, teachers etc.. in developing countries. Jimmy also said that Wikipedia gets about 2.5 billion page views per month. Putting two and two together, when it was my turn to introduce myself and ask Jimmy a question, i said: why dont you monetize your traffic and use the cash to buy a bunch of laptops? (or, for that matter any other charitable purpose?). And the unthinkable happened: Jimmy replies that he had never thought about it and that is might be a good idea. I was pleased with myself. Next thing I know, today, a friend sends me this post from Steve Rubel. In there Jimmy says there will be no ads on wikipedia but leaves the door open:“The question is going to arise as to whether we could better pursue our charitable mission with the additional money [ads would bring],” he said. “We have never said there would absolutely never be ads on Wikipedia.”