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Updated: 5-03-2006; 16:20:07
Paolo's Weblog.
 Martedì, 28 febbraio 2006
Starting today 516 web sites are no longer available to Italian web surfers.
It's not a move to prevent some nasty type of porn to offend anybody or to block any illegal activity, it's a way for the national gambling monopoly to prevent international competition from stealing their business.
Technically it's done at DNS level, basically all ISPs are supposed to redirect DNS entries for these 516 web sites to a page saying that the site is not available because it's not licensed in Italy. It's easy to route around this configuration by choosing a foreing DNS server, while most users will not know how to do it real gamblers will just keep gambling.
This is the first censorship of this kind in a western country. How long before others will join in and also start blocking other web sites?
Tags: Censorship, Italy
Some 15 years ago I was a big fan of Guy Kawasaki, I had read his books and he was my evangelism hero (I still like him and subscribe to his blog btw). In one of his books I found a fax number and I send him a message.
And he replied! It was a message sent directly from a computer (a very modern thing back then). I showed the message to everybody, unsuccessfully trying to explain my enthusiasm for the reply, then carefully folded and put it in one of Guy's books.
Recently, after moving to the new house, I was putting books back on the shelves and I found the book, which still contained a folded perfectly white sheet of paper.
Words on thermal paper don't last forever. :-)
Tags: Guy Kawasaki Venerdì, 24 febbraio 2006
I would like Google (when they will reopen the site) to let me invite other users to edit some of my pages, make it an extremely easy to use wysiwyg/wiki application.
Add RSS and some type of API, and let a thousands flowers bloom.
Tags: Google, Page Creator Giovedì, 23 febbraio 2006
Ben Hammersley: We went through the early stages of the web building our toolkits and learning technique, and now it'stime to stop talking about how we'd build stuff, and go on and actually do it. Validation porn has had its day. Enough about the brushes already: give me some beauty.
Mercoledì, 22 febbraio 2006
 I'm like about Technorati's new Favorites feature, but I'm still not sure why. It definitely has something to do with Reading Lists, and since they have just announced OPML support for Blog Finder categories, maybe we will have an OPML version of Favorites too. Favorites pages are displayed in river of news mode (mixed sources, reverse chronological order), but they don't make very good reading pages since they only contain part of the post (I like full posts in my aggregator, but that might be just me). Since Technorati has a copy of everything written in the blogosphere since the beginning (well... almost), I should be able to go back in time and check old conversations, something I can't do this easily in my aggregator (also if the back/next links at the bottom of my favorites page don't seem to work). Knowing what I write and what I read, Technorati is in a very good position to offer very interesting services to its users, and this is definitely an important step in that direction. A feature request: I would like to have more than one favorite page, for example not to mix Italian and English friends. Tags: Technorati Domenica, 19 febbraio 2006
Jon Udell writes about his often misspelled name and search engines. My name is misspelled quite often too (790 hits for "Paulo" on google), but google is still offering the correct spelling. Sabato, 18 febbraio 2006
During this week I updated both my dual processors G5 and my PowerBook with version 10.4.5 of MacOS X via the built-in update tool. While updating the G5 the installer crashed. It happened while it was doing the disk optimization and, upon restaring, the Finder kept restarting every few seconds. The solution was forcing the updating of the prebinding via a terminal command. The update process on the PowerBook went smoothly, but upon restaring it would not recognize my login password anymore. I had to start with a system disc and reset my password. A windowsy week. Lunedì, 13 febbraio 2006
I have been thinking about blog comments recently. In the last week Russel removed comments from his blog and Dave added them back.
I do have comments on my blog but I have never particulary liked the idea, while thinking about it I remembered a discussion we had in Vienna with Matt and Mark Bernstein and a post that Matt wrote a few days later. I asked Matt to make a shorter version, so here it is, "Mower's law on comments", it's the ultimate metaphore:
It's relatively easy to come to my house in the dead of night and daub "Matt Mower is a total asshole" in bright yellow paint on my (or my neighbours) walls for everyone to see, but you must truly believe it to paint "Matt Mower is a total asshole" on YOUR own walls!
Tags: Comments, Mower's Law
This morning I found the new Gtalk-Gmail fusion features in my Gmail window. I'm not sure if this is very useful feature in the Gmail window, I don't spend much time here. But an IM client working well in any browser is an interesting toy, it could be nice to include it in weblogs to have quick live conversations with readers.
Google should let anyone include an IM window in any site just like they are doing with ads now.
Tags: Google, Gtalk, Gmail Martedì, 7 febbraio 2006
Sunday morning I played a little with the new version of GarageBand and I recorded my first podcast (MP3, in Italian). While I was checking my log files to try to figure out how many people dowloaded the files, I noticed that googlebot has downloaded the AAC podcast. Maybe the spider was confused by the .m4a extension... or maybe google is indexing podcasts.
Tags: podcasting
Apparently Microsoft is the last of a pretty long list of companies coming out with a product that support RSS without really getting the whole point.
Or maybe I have a distorted vision of how RSS feeds should be consumed because I have been using Dave's readers for the last years. My problem is that I'm not getting what I would really like from any of the available readers. I'm using bloglines now, which has a good number of the features I want, but not all of them.
So, here's my list:
- I want a "River of news" approach. I'm perfectly okay with very long web pages. Actually I love scrolling quickly trough long pages with lots of news coming from my sources, I have become very good at spotting what is interesting for me.
- I want to be able to divide my reading list in groups. There are some feeds that I want to read more frequently then others. I usually hit my "friends" group several time per day while the generic "news" group only one or two times
- I want web access. I work regularly with 2 computers at the same time, I want to be able to check my feeds from both. And even when I'm at home. And when I'm visiting friends.
- Mobile access. I'm reading my feeds from my cellphone quite frequently in these days. It allows me to be updated every time I have a few seconds available. I want a version of my rivero of news page optimized for cellphone browsers
- Reading lists. Reading lists are a good idea, I want my aggregator to support them. The way I would like to see them integrated is by having special kind of groups which are automatically updated by OPML reading lists
- POST button next to each news item. This is one feature I miss most from Radio: I want to be able to send anything from my aggregator to my blog editing tool in one click. Regardless of what blog editing tool I use.
Tags: RSS, RSS Readers Sabato, 4 febbraio 2006
Yesterday I got iLife 06, which contains the new web editing tool from Apple. Here's my first iWeb page. Giovedì, 2 febbraio 2006
A friend of mine is working in Abu Dhabi in this period. While we were updating each other on our life I sent her to Flickr to check my latest pictures but she reported that she cannot reach Flickr (and many other sites) because of the strict internet censorship.
The United Arab Emirates, one of the world's wealthiest and most technologically modern countries, officially blocks access only to X-rated content, anyway all web surfing in the country is done via a government run proxy service and direct access to the web is illegal.
I wonder how image search works on Google.ae (from here results don't seem to be restricted).
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