The Flickr block was very very odd - in that it was so easy to get around both by the webmaster and by the user for websites where the webmaster was too damn lazy to adjust.

Basically, the 'Flickr Block' was a block against the servers (farm1.static.flickr.com and farm2.static.flickr.com) Flickr photos were stored on (with URLs as subdomains of Flickr) rather than the root, flickr.com.

Late last week reports that the Access Flickr plugin was starting not to work began to circulate. At the beginning of October Flickr introduced the farm3.static.flickr.com server - essentially a new server farm. The Access Flickr plugin was updated to re-write the URL of a Flickr request. Then the plugin designed to allow one to freely view a site stopped working again. Checking out the problem made it obvious... Flickr have started blocking access to photos via IP address, but at the same time the GFW dropped it's objection to Flickr. Nice co-incidence.

So, to allow visitors to view Flickr photos, drop those Flickr server re-writes and the Access Flickr plugin, at least that's what it seems like this evening.

International domain names are coming. I've covered this briefly before but it is time for an update.

On the 9th of October, ICANN announced the launch of a test internationalised TLD. In short, .test has been translated into 11 languages. TLD is the part of a domain name after the final dot. On the 15th ICANN will open example.test - a single website accessible in a variety of languages. Both example and .test will be translated into the 11 languages.

This is interesting, and not soon enough in my opinion. International domain names are already available. The bit before the dot being internationalised is not unusual, but the bit after the dot, so for example youtube.com and youtube.公司 actually resolve to the same website hasn't been done yet, well not properly.

Background

To understand the current situation properly, we should look at a few examples and understand some of the techy side.

CBA Logo: China Blog Awards Logo.The idea of a China Blog Awards has arisen and I'm pleased. I have no chance of winning, but that's cool because even in IT I'm focussed only on a small niche - running China-related websites (and apologies, my business with actually doing so has resulted in the neglection of this site).

What is a Blog?

I have discussed this question with Chris and Rick recently: what is a blog? And how do blogs impact those in/interested in China?

There's Feedburner, there's Feedsky. Which one should you use?

I've commented before that it's a little silly to stick to one provider without a get-out option: Don't Get Burned. It's much better to take advantage of Feedburner's service via a 302 redirect, so should anything ever happen to Feedburner one can switch RSS providers and users will never have to update their bookmarks, and never notice otherwise.

When I saw this story about a virtual economy for China I thought "Uh-huh. That's interesting."

This morning I came across a new map website for Dalian. The company behind it, Aladdin Information and Technology don't just do this for Dalian, however. It's no usual map. It's 3D. Click on a building and a photo of that building appears For every building on the map, which is most of urban Dalian. [I understood some pretty funky maps were being worked on - an acquaintance in a Chinese IT company was working on some kind of walk-through map a while back - not live yet (perhaps never, it all seemed to fizzle)].

Here's a screenshot of the Dalian map:
Virtual Economy for China - Downtown Dalian

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Cheers,

Alex

Sohu are apparently considering legal action against Google for the release of Google's Chinese IME (a method of inputting Chinese into a computer using a conventional keyboard)

Confusing? Yes.

"Shortly after Google Pinyin IME's release, Chinese Internet users began to notice similarities between the dictionary used with Google's IME and a popular offering from Sohu's Sogou search engine."

Chris sent me this link. It's a topic we've spoken about before, discussing different websites and (my, more than his) level of jadedness regarding how they treat their users.

As the article mentions, contribution is nothing new. Linux, the operating system that drives much of the Internet, big business, science and academia, has it's principals in volunteer development (and interesting link discussing who actually paid for an developed the most recent kernel patches here). In reality being an expert in Linux, and contributing to the kernel, is something that can enhance one's CV as well as gain/reinforce one's reputation and network of contacts - there is monetary benefit from being a volunteer.