gnapse corner

Some friend of mine told me about a possible situation between Cuban blogs and Blogger, of which their authors were being banned access to view and update/modify their content.

I immediately decided to try and see if I was still able to access my old blog at blogger, which I maintained before continuing my personal blog in the web site of the Opera Web Browser, and you can see that I was able to update it as I wrote this bilingual post about the situation. Nevertheless this doesn't prove anything, since Google may have blocked some and not all Cuban blogs. I am not aware of any Cuban blogger in a situation similar to the one described above.

Here's a quiz to determine if you are a blog expert or not. It presents 10 well-know blogs and for each one of them you have to select its tag-line (or slogan or motto or whatever you want to call it).

Although I don't consider my self a blog expert, whatever that means, I seriously object with the kind of results this quiz gave me. I was presented with those ten blogs and I was able to match only two of them with their respective tag-lines (Scobleizer and Slashdot). And this is the conclusion at which the quiz arrived:

You are still very new to blogs. You never subscribed to an RSS feed, let alone understood what it is. But by completing this quiz, you show you are willing to find out more about blogs. Continue reading to improve, 'cause for now you're nothing but a blog newbie.

On what basis can someone assume that by only reading two of these blogs I have never subscribed to a feed? What if I present the author of this quiz with the ten blogs most well known out of the blogs I regularly read? In fact I don't even remember the tag-lines for those and I read them on a daily basis.

Blogs presented in the quiz
Boing Boing
MicroPersuasion
Slashdot
Daily Kos
Gizmodo
Kottke
Waxy.org
Gadgetopia.com
Joho The Blog
Scobleizer

I recently got some feedback from Belkys, the author of one of the Cuban blogs I found, as reported in my previous post. She pointed me some other blogs, and even a directory of Cuban blogs. This is what I found in a quick glance. Unfortunately the results of my rapid research were not so good, but anyway, is better than what I thought a few days ago.

http://blogueroscubanos.blogspot.com/2005/02/directorio-de-la-comunidad-blogs-de.html
Pretends to be a directory of Cuban blogs, but many links are broken. There is no information about how some other Cuban bloggers like me can register their blogs in this self-claimed directory. Also most links don't match the text of the link with the URL.

These are the blogs I found, and the apparent current state. None of this data has been verified and no blog author has been contacted. This is purely visual information taken out of each of the main blog pages by me. Some blogs listed in the above directory do not appear in this list, mostly those that gave me broken links.

http://bettyculturales.blogspot.com/
No posts since February 17, 2005

http://ilberto.blogia.com/
No posts since April 15, 2005

http://cubatrabaja.blogia.com/
No posts since November 11, 2005 and previous posts very far from one another in time.

http://georginatorriente.blogspot.com/
Currently active, but is more like an echo of some newspaper rather than original writings of the author. All posts are like headlines and articles of news related to Cuba. Mostly political news. It doesn't have the natural flavour of somebody writing naturally about what he/she likes.

http://imaginados.blogia.com/
Currently active. Some posts like georgina torriente above, but it's more natural and fresh.

http://venezuelavive.blogspot.com/
Currently active and very young blog about Cuban doctors experiences in Venezuela.

http://cubanisimo2.blogspot.com/
No posts since April 11, 2005. It's like georgina's blog above too.

http://cubasiempre.blogia.com/
Only two posts, and the last one was on February 21, 2005. No comments.

http://mundocubano.blogia.com/
Apparently active, but is not updated so often. It's mostly about the Cuban five. The articles seem too lengthy though, and they seem to be copy-paste from news articles in cuban newspapers and news agencies.

http://havanaonline.blogspot.com/
A single post on February 17, 2005.

http://dcuba.blogia.com/
Three posts, the last one on February 24, 2005.

http://encuentro.blogia.com/
No posts since February 23, 2005.

http://denesleonardo.blogspot.com/
No posts since February 17, 2005. Three posts overall.

http://jrgreguera.blogspot.com/
Four posts overall, all of them the same day, February 16, 2005.

I won't claim this to be an exhaustive coverage but I draw two conclusions from all these. First and most important, didn't you noticed the great amount of blogs with just a few posts, and dead since around February 2005? Well, most of the blogs listed in this directory are the result of some seminar given in Havana around that date about blogs. The seminar was given to journalists and most of the authors of those brief blogs are Cuban journalists. It seems that they started with some excitement, but it lasted for short. This is not my idea of a blogosphere.

The second conclusion is that many of these blogs were limited to copy/paste news articles from Cuban media sources. This conclusion is subjective and not verified at all, but it's my perception.

Although it was more active than I though, specially a year ago, in the end is disappointing. The Cuban blogosphere has a long way to go.

Tim Berners-Lee, considered one of the creators of the World Wide Web, is now blogging. It seems that his original intentions are just beginning to be fulfilled, after more than fifteen years (too much time for this ever-changing world of IT). Anyway, happy blogging and welcome to the blogosphere!

I won't comment much more here so go and read for your self. This will surely be a blog worth of adding into my aggregator. I must also acknowledge my original source. I first heard about Tim's blog in another blog, Read/Write Web, a name that, according to its author, is related to Tim's original goals.

After applying a few weeks ago for an account on Sphere, I finally received one today. For those that don't know what is Sphere, it is a blog-search tool, like Technorati or Google Blog Search. You would normally need an account to access it, and registration is restricted to invites sent by them at your request.

The first thing I did was to test it, and guess what was my first query? Well, gnapse, of course. And guess what I got? Nothing.

Is not that I'm that popular (Jeremy Zawodny is thoroughly indexed of course), but at least I appear in Google Blog Search and in Technorati too. Anyway, they're still in a beta stage, and they also have a "submit a blog" utility, so I submitted mine, and I hope it will be indexed soon. Perhaps when Sphere goes out of beta, this blog will be completely indexed, who knows.

But I hear you asking: why yet another blog search engine? And so do I. But they claim their algorithms give more relevant search results (I would send you to the About page, but is mysteriously restricted, just as most of the site). They say that,

Our new, advanced algorithm:

• delivers the most relevant, timely and authoritative posts and blogs on any topic
  
• indexes and searches the full text of each post, not just the feed contents or the home page
  
• allows you to search by relevance and time
  
• uses content analysis to blend related mainstream media with blog results for a complete picture
  

We're yet to see if this promising tool is as good as it seems, and time will tell. I particularly like the last feature, which is some kind of text mining (read AI) but I'm not sure how they make it work.