Yesterday I went to visit one of my favourite blogs and found I couldn't comment. I figured out the issue pretty quickly: I was being redirected to a .ca site and his comments are provided via a third-party outfit that wasn't dealing with the change well. I got where I wanted to go fairly quickly, so in a way, problem solved for me, but not for bunches of others who aren't as quick with the technology. I still want to complain though.The "Why I Left Google" bit is via Brendan, the blog that got fucked up for me is Roy Edroso's. Any blogspot link can be fixed by attaching /ncr to the end of the link, but why the fuck should you have to?
I don't know a single user that asked for these changes, they do not help anyone I know, and it ties into how crappy Google's search is getting (I have a research job and search's localization has really buggered up international searches). Moaning about free stuff is pretty ungrateful, and I've gotten many dollars of use value out of this free stuff, so many thanks to all at Blogger and Google for the value provided. I am nevertheless starting to feel pretty icky about the strategy of dividing the internet into a variety of little internets for control purposes. It's why I don't do Facebook or Google Plus. I'm a lazy sort, so I probably won't do anything about it for a bit, but I guess I should shop around for a nice free .com service that wants to show itself to the world rather than section its functionality and content and relevance off by country.
I enjoyed this article a lot: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx
1) Blog Address: http://houseofsubstance.blogspot.com
2) Browser(s) (ex: Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome):Firefox
3) Geographical Location (ex: San Francisco / USA): Vancouver Canada
4) Are you using the new Blogger interface? no
5) Description of the problem: nobody asked if I wanted to see all blogs via .ca
Someone has posted that the changes were made for legal reasons. My answer is no they weren't, certainly not in Canada's case. Nobody demanded it.
17 comments:
As much as I seem like a Google fanboi, I applaud you for your thoughtful critiques.
I should have given you a mention.
It turns out that on The Lovely Daughter's iPad Blogger links do crappy things too.
Since it is all about censorship now, the ears will be deaf.
Yes. The free and open internet is to be destroyed.
It is interesting that you can solve the problem by invoking the name of a long-defunct Point-of-Sale hardware company.
Interesting historical fact. Well, for specific values of "interesting":
The very first computer I ever interacted with, the beige box that changed my life and allowed me to earn a living in a place that still looks like a bad cartoon was an NCR Tower. These were VERY powerful departmental computers at the time (1980s), utilizing Motorola's 68020 processor, with TWO MEGABYTES of RAM and running AT&T UNIX SVR3.2. They drove a bunch of serial terminals at 9600 Baud.
And because there was nobody there to tell me I couldn't, I learned UNIX sysadmin, basic scripting and even SQL on that box - mostly just screwing around.
So I'm ultimately down with /ncr...
I remember those NCR towers. Well, I remember putting them on a skid and shrinkwrapping them and sending them elsewhere.
I only wish I could sing y'all my buddy's rewrite of Jesse Winchester's song 'A Showman's Life', reworked into 'A SysAd's Life'. Heartbraking I tell's ya.
Here's Buddy Miller doing a decent version of the original. Raht cheer.
The utter disdain of it all is what rankles. No announcements or explanation just a Tommy Friedman "suck on this".
I've been thinking of hiding a Tor server on a machine or two at work. Our IT guys are pretty cool and nobody else would be able to figure it out.
those Moto 68xxx processors actually kind of rocked.
Is there a free e-mail service that frees one from the grip of Gazoogle without creating new problems?
AFAF
Big brother totally freaked out when the IT guy found the program on my laptop. Not even running at the time.
Ours won't be so bad. Someone in the office got in trouble not because they were running BitTorrent but because an American company traced the IP and complained.
Gmail is not so bad because it does POP and IMAP, so no web sign-ins necessary. I don't do a whole lot of "crucial" stuff via that address. My local ISP's address is the main one I use.
el Manquécito, you might want to check out Zoho. They were the first web-based productivity suite, before teh google, and they have a fairly nice mail interface and even an database, fer cryin out loud...
long-defunct Point-of-Sale hardware company
Ahem.
Post a Comment