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Blogger.com (Blogspot) banned in Turkey

Osman S Borutecene — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:16:12 +0000

UPDATE: Engelliweb commented: blogger.com was banned according to the order of Diyarbakır 1. Peace & Crime Court, 20.10.2008 of 2008/2761.

I don’t think that those bans are related to Adnan Oktar, because he was suing in Istanbul courts, however this one was a decision of Diyarbakir court.

UPDATE: ~~(see above update) There is still no information~~ about the cause of the ban but everybody suspects Adnan Oktar who is responsible for most of the bans in Turkey. He is bringing any content on the net to the court which supports Darwinism and mentions his name as a creationist. But whether he is involved or not in this recent blogger.com ban is still a suspicion.

Blogger.com is censored in Turkey. I’ll keep with details posted later. The ban created a huge response in Turkish bloggers almost immediately. We just see this when we try to reach blogger.com or any blog on *.blogspot.com:

blogger.com censored in Turkey

image credits: Aylin Özdemir

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Using Blogspot for pro-blogging

Osman S Borutecene — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 11:54:30 +0000

This is a remaining question and there aren’t any detailed views on that when I make a search on Google. Why not to use Blogspot or Blogger? Is it okay to use blogspot for a money-making blog? Does Blogger eat my share over adsense? What are the disadvantages of using blogspot as a free blogging service?

Well, those are the questions that remained unanswered. There has been a couple of weeks now that I host one or two blogs on blogspot and there is also adsense installed. As with the adsense share, I can clearly say that Blogger doesn’t have a share on your adsense income. You can see this in your adsense control panel too.

For any web site or blog, whether it is intended for making money or not, navigation is an utmost important issue. I can clearly say that blogspot is weak on navigation. Of course there may be third party templates for blogspot that provide a decent navigation but not everybody has the reach and technical knowledge to use them. The most ugly thing with any Blogger blog’s navigation regardless of which template it uses is the “older posts”, “newer posts” navigation. The url you get to when you click those navigation links are pretty ugly. They are neither user friendly nor search engine friendly.

On one hand, it is a fact that there are no use in such navigation in terms of search engine optimization because they are not time-less. Every second or third page of a blog is being changed constantly and there is no meaning in indexing them as page 2, page 3, etc. On the other hand, for the sake of usability, every url at this time should be readable by naked human eye. And this is a problem with blogspot.

Moreover, blogspot forbids to index labels for search engines by its robots.txt file. Look at any blog on *.blogspot.com/robots.txt and you’ll see that access is denied. What I told in the above paragraph is also valid for labels though.

Apart from those navigational issues, I can say that any blog on blogspot doesn’t have less chance than any blog hosted elsewhere. Blogspot itself is a competitive domain and so are blogs hosted on it. Fear not, you will be indexed quite normally when you blog on Blogspot.

As with the monetization part, it is extremely easy to put adsense on any blog on blogspot. However that doesn’t mean they are optimally placed. For instance, it is a huge trouble for an html/javascript illiterate person (who consists the majority of blog users) to place adsense within the blogpost, for instance under the title or under the post body. You have to use escape characters and there is a big chance that you end up with messing adsense code which is against the TOS.

Having said that, for people who can optimize adsense placements and are html/javascript literate, there is no reason not to suggest blogspot for a profitable money making blog on the web. At least it is a whole lot better than wordpress.com at this time where you cannot put ads on your blog in wordpress.com.

Hence, 6% percent of the Technorati top 100 blogs are on blogspot. Advantages are you are always ready to get dug, you are at the hands of Google.

Moreover, Blogger team is constantly making improvements in the overall quality of Blogger. You can see some of them in the Blogger Draft. On nice example of this is the comment box embedded below the post.

In the final analysis, there is no significant difference in terms of pro-blogging between blogspot and a blog hosted elsewhere.

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How to choose a hosting service for your blog and why?

Osman S Borutecene — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:39:46 +0000

Recently, I moved a couple of my blogs from wordpress to blogspot. The main reason for this was my hosting service. It has been nearly one month that I started using blogspot often as a blog service. Now is the time to make some comparison as well as suggestions on how to choose a host for your blog.

Well, let’s look at what you want to do with your blog. If you trust your creativity and believe that people will enjoy reading whatever you write, there are two options in my mind. You should whether choose wordpress.com or blogger.com. Here is why: both services are very easy to maintain. If you want to monetize your blog, blogspot is the way to go because it is very easy to implement adsense on your blogger blog whereas this is not difficult but impossible on wordpress.com. Wordpress.com doesn’t allow publishing ads on your blog.

If you say that you are not creative up to par, you will need tools and facilities that will make it easier for people to visit your blog and read more and then come again. And this is usability. Usability in navigation, usability in content creation etc. In this case, I recommend you a self hosted wordpress blog. For a self hosted wordpress blog, I can suggest you liquidweb.

Blogger is better than a self hosted wordpress blog based on some criteria. If you are good in coding, then I would suggest you to use Blogger because they are also very scriptable. However, with the introduction of new Blogger layout system, you have to be en experienced coder because you need to know how to “escape” some of the characters between two blocks of Blogger layout tags. This is difficult for a beginner and very prone to syntax errors. Wordpress is not the same. On any self hosted wordpress, you have thousands of different documentation in your hand and even if you are a beginner you can mess with code as much as you want without harming your blog too much.

And this is needed for any blogger because there is always the need for customization. You may want to display ads only on certain posts in certain categories on your blog or you may want some archive pages to look different than ordinary pages in your design. Then a self hosted wordpress is the way to go.

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Creating original content

Osman S Borutecene — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:27:16 +0000

Are you concentrated enough to create original content for your blog or website? Creating original content is difficult, not because people aren’t creative enough but because people are bombarded with a standard perception. Many talented people set up a blog and then go research “big blogs” and look for what they do. This usually leads to procrastination and prolongs the process of a new, creative blog. People look at famous blogs and say “yes, I should look similar to them”.

This is far from being original. This may sound naive to you but you are already original because each individual on this planet is unique enough to create unique, original content. However, there is this conformity surrounding us only to prevent us from creating the original content that in fact we can create easily.

Most people get stuck with blogging just because they are too busy with visual design, web standards, what other people are posting, etc. If you want to create original content and stay away from the crowd (which is a good thing because it’s a professional way and success is a higher probability) then you should pay less attention to what the blogosphere is mostly concentrated on.

If you take the time to have a different look, a different perspective on many famous blogs, you can see that they did not fall into the trap of conformity. Most of the time, they are very bold and audacious. Of course many corporate blogs do not fall into this category. I am talking about individual work. If you look at the blogs of weblogs inc, you cannot see this original content and approach because there is the anxiety of saving investments and this makes them far from being original and conform to norms that they have in mind.

Individual blogging is not bound with such norms. Take PostSecret as an example. It is a very original blog. Yet it doesn’t look like professional to many people because they are accustomed to see blogs like engadget and this is what they find and count as professional. So, originality doesn’t depend on professionalism. PostSecret is very famous, it gets many hits, many unique visitors. Because it is an original peace of work.

Moreover, PostSecret is on Blogspot, which is a fact many people with a naive realism would argue that this is not a professional look.

Well, if you want to create original content and think that you should have a blog similar to many famous blogs out there, think again.

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Annoying Technorati Search Results

Osman S Borutecene — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 22:14:23 +0000

I like visiting Technorati and look for what is hot. However, especially in the last couple of weeks, some bloggers abuse Technorati search results by both tagging their every single post with the most searched 15 topics in Technorati and using these as keywords in their posts. That makes it really difficult if something you really need to search is on Technorati’s popular searches list.

I am sure that the Technorati team is working on that and I hope they come up with a solution soon. A feature such as being able to vote for search results would be interesting and help build a cleaner better Technorati search.

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Got Blog?

Osman S Borutecene — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 10:09:48 +0000

So you want to have a blog. Start with choosing a topic and a blogging platform. If you intend to post on a personal blog, then it’s not of great importance of the topic and the publishing platform because personal blogs usually do not create massive amounts of traffic. But anyway, for such a personal nonprofit blog I suggest you WordPress.com which is a free blog hosting platform by the people of WordPress and Automattic and its free. Moreover, it has great features and it’s real fun. However, if you aim to start a blog in a certain topic, or a blog for earning money with adsense then there are points that you should take into consideration.

If I were you, I would prefer blogspot. Blogspot allows you to tweak the theme you use and you can also add scripts which enables certain features as some free statistics, adsense code, etc. Blogspot has a nice, good tutorial on its features.

If you have enough budget to host your own installation of a blogging or cms software, then I suggest you to consider using WordPress, seriously. WordPress is most probably the best publishing platform, especially for personal publishing on the net. By an enough budget, I mean something around $20 would do it.

If you intend to engage in problogging, you should choose a main topic and try to be consistent and coherent on that topic. If you want to earn money through your blog then that means you have to serve something to the public and in return you will either earn from advertising on your blog or commissioning from affiliate programs. So, in order to maintain a reasonable amount of traffic, you should pay attention to what you give your visitors as your content. This isn’t hard to achieve (not the traffic I mean, the content). Put your visitors’ shoes on and try to look for something on your blog. If you are at least moderately pleased with the results then you are on the right way.

There are plenty of success stories and how-to like articles on the net so make sure you check a couple of them.

By the way, what not to do is also crucially important. Don’t trust automated problogging software. This is a digital world and you will get caught as fast as the speed of the internet and you’ll surely lose credibility.

What I tell you here is just a mini start. Dive into your favorite search engine and you will find plenty of meaningful reading about blogging.

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Shonfonfe for Blogger

Osman S Borutecene — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 13:14:51 +0000

We are only hours away from the Shonfonfe theme for Blogger. See it in development here: http://kerizettin.blogspot.com and here: http://goddess-artemis.blogspot.com

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