visnum

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

Nowadays, I see posts about Robert Scoble and his blog and his job and his nearly everything here and there. These posts mostly talk about Scoble’s views on certain products that he writes up in his blog. Others are simply hate propaganda against Robert Scoble.

I don’t specially like or dislike Robert. I just think that he is a clever, special guy who likes to initiate discussions in a provocative fashion. His provocativeness is a must as a journalist. And yes, he is a journalist. He does interviews. He does it well, I think.

His provocative posts are generally about comparing two or more products or services. For instance, once he questioned whether Apple imitates Microsoft. There have been 230 comments under this post so far and he made people to come out and talk. Okay, I know that topics like Microsoft vs Anything can be quite intriguing at times but he has the ability to achieve more buzz than an ordinary Microsoft vs. Oranges and Apples kind of comparisons.

Another nice post to play with from Scoble was about why United States will remain dominant in tech. He claimed that United States will remain dominant in tech because Iran and some other countries mistreat their citizens. Robert Scoble knows very well that there are lots of countries on earth that are coming really close in competition on tech. I don’t think that his claim was sincere. I think he just knows how to make a buzz.

For a last example, I will mention his post about how Microsoft is gonna edge in on Google. I am sure that Robert is joking here completely.

Now, more important than all this is how and why people react to Robert Scoble. I feel disturbed by the hate propaganda that some bloggers carry out against him. I just don’t understand why they keep reading him if he discomforts them by his posts.

There must be something else, some other reason that some people hate Scoble and keep reading his posts. This isn’t just a love-to-hate situation.

My opinion is that those people don’t have the guts and the mindset to post like him. I think that is jealousy. Most people that blurbs about Robert Scoble blurb about him just because they think he gains and earns by something they cannot achieve. Those people cannot make something on their own, they feel needy most probably. Or at least, they cannot see the buzz he creates and they forgot that Robert Scoble is a journalist. One of his provocative posts was about comparing Windows Vista and Mac OS X. He needs this to do his job. He needs to and must podcast about odd things sometimes. That happens all the time, all day long with a whole press and media.

Anyway, my suggestion to those suffering from the Scoblenvy: Go try and create your own buzz and content. You are free to add any interesting content to your blogs. Do it and try to make it better than Scoble, then come and blurb about why Scoble makes no sense.

By the way, among the negative comments blurbs about Scoble, the oscar has to go to Yuvi who is a 15 year old Geek wannabe from Chennai, India. He is a VB and C# guy, but is trying to expand his horizons. He is the best representative of people who like to blurb about Robert Scoble.

update: Another post from Robert Scoble that drive people crazy. Now it is iPhone. Well, another reason why I think that Robert Scoble has a playful cleverness. There are many people out there, important names who blog about the iPhone recently. They write down very decent things, evaluating iPhone and the future of Apple, swot of opponents etc. but none of them get the attention that Scoble is getting right now. This isn’t Scoble’s way, that’s just what we call “social psychology” among academic jargon.

I see that Saddam’s Execution Video brought great traffic to many web sites that blogged or posted the video of execution from youtube and google video. Some of those blogs and web sites are about daily news, political stories, catch-all news stories etc. It is very natural for them to seek for the newest and brutal and most graphical video of Saddam’s Execution in Iraq.

However, there aren’t only such blogs and web sites that published this video. There have been many blogs and web sites where two videos of Saddam’s execution was published. Both the formal one and the one taken with a cell-phone’s camera.

Those posts and articles and the video brought a considerable amount of traffic to those blogs and web sites. Unfortunately, not all of this traffic is beneficial to web site owners.

Well, if you blog for the joy of blogging and you like to see the increase in traffic after you post something new, and if financial gain or public relations of yourself and/or your company isn’t your concern, then you are fine. Go for it. You have every right to publish anything that is not illegal.

But if you are a problogger or responsible from a web site that makes money from advertising, or an online shop, then you must be careful about how you provide your website with traffic, especially via content you publish.

Hundreds of thousands of web sites benefited from the huge traffic that Saddam’s execution video brought to their web sites. Most probably, the traffic wasn’t targeted. I have seen many blogs and web sites that published this video regardless of their blogs main topic. If you are after increasing your traffic because you earn money from targeted text links, then this has no benefit to you. Apart from not being beneficial, it would also harm your consistency on your content and thus may result in less targeted traffic than before.

Now, those blogs and web sites that experienced a huge traffic thanks to Saddam are going to experience a considerable amount of decrease in their traffic, if their topic isn’t executions of dictators.

Worse than publishing the video is publishing the video without any comments or your own thoughts or feelings on the subject because you have became the same with hundreds of thousands of other bloggers. No difference. The video can be found anywhere on the web.

By the way, the same holds valid for people that use common popular keywords for increasing their numbers of visitors. I have seen many blogs that put every post into categories or tags like Miss Nevada, Boise State, Google, Jobster, Zune, Edelman. Those are the most searched topics on Technorati. Or they put keywords like “Madonna, Christina Aguilera, Harry Potter, etc.” in their meta tags. I am sure they have gain tremendous amounts of traffic with those keywords. However it brings also a guarantee to failure when it comes to targeted traffic and efforts about earning money from targeted ads. Those blogs and web sites are eliminated by major search engines when somebody reports them or simply automatically as robots get more and more developed each year.

Targeted traffic is very important in terms of online businesses and Saddam’s execution is just an improvement to the world peace, not an improvement to your pocket.