Hmmm….I tried to warn you guys…

Anyhow….been trying to cycle about the afternoon check-in of favorite blogs and…the Blogger guys are Tango Uniform. Like the dreaded 404 error “not found”/MIA type TU.

The Salamander, Steeljaw Scribe, and the Capt/Lawyer.

They were there before lunch…it’s now about evening chow time. Maybe we need to call to Quarters for muster, and tell the OOD to review his Williamson Turn procedures.

“XO to the Bridge!”

(psst: get your own domains!)

I’ve been thinking lately about the empire building of Google. Taking the capitalistic way is sure proving “fruitful” for them.

So the acquisition of YouTube had me crank up the way (not way, WAY) back machine and consider a trend I have noticed.

About a year ago, I recall discussions over on Little Green Footballs on Google not accepting the ads a conservative organization wanted to place. Other comments around that time mentioned some conservative ads not being accepted, either. The people who had tried to advertise there did not ads for gay and lesbian and leftist groups showing up.

Later, it seemed some people noticed the results of searches left out topics specifically discussed or posted on some of the larger conservative blogs. Interesting…

Then, Google responded to the Chinese Government’s request to block content headed for China by doing what China wanted: Censoring.

Michele Malkin, most noticably, recently noted some of her YouTube postings, all very right wing in nature, were dropped from that site. Other video clips, such as the recent lampooning of the Clinton Administration’s policy carried out with North Korea over the development of nuclear weapons, has been blocked as “offensive.”
Update: A rather embarassing YouTube post of Harry Reid hanging up in an investigative reporter has been pulled. “Copyright infringement.” Yeah, right. Take a look around YouTube and thousands of clips from movies or TV are there.
This “educational video” regarding the aftermath of the physics of missile attacks on Red Cross Ambulances in Lebanon has also been removed, and the poster threatened with having his account shutdown on YouTube.

Why does this matter?

Google owns Blooger Some of you may have heard of this site, and a few of you may even use it…:)

What if one morning, you get settled with your cup of coffee, and click on the link to your blog’s control panel and get a message like: “404 Site Not Found?” Then when you check email, you find out your entire blog has been deemed offensive and therefore deleted….

I hope I’m wrong, but, for those using a free service, with a demonstrated propensity of denying access to conservative content, you have been warned….

I don’t really have any objection to a business setting standards, after all, they aren’t the US Government, obligated to let you have your free speech. I just am not sure the path they seem to be headed down is one I think will tolerate conservative and Christian content much longer.

(Hint: if you’re serious, get your own domain and hosting…it’s not that much)

Valour-IT isn’t just for Memorial and Veteran’s Day. Our young (and some not so young) citizens, who stepped up to the plate and have been injured can use a little help.

Matt of Black Five reminds us to not forget those who have given so much. There’s the Valour-IT logo on my sidebar, there’s one on my Charities page, or you can click HERE on the Soldier’s Angels site if you feel you haven’t found a link to get to the place to donate a few bucks (or many).

This program, I’m convinced, will not only be a great morale booster to our injured troops, but will pave a road for many disabled, be it in the military or at their job on a construction site somewhere, in and out of the United States, setting a process to model for a long time to come. Join in a be a part of something bigger than you can imagine by helping soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines communicate with their families, their “shipmates” and others in their lives.

Also: Fellow Bloggers, military related or not, please consider passing this info along via your readership. Link here, link to Black Five, link to Soldier’s Angels, but….please just link it!

Thank you for your consideration.

Trackbacked/Crossposted to:
Diane’s Stuff

From Despair.Com, a DIY demotivator poster generator.

Example of demonstrated creativity:

Thank you, Dave in Texas, for encapsulating our collective endeavours!

Click here and have fun!

I’m looking forward to the cynicism that will be produced!

Trackbacked to:

Dragon Lady’s World

Simon of Blogasm did a little unscientific survey, but it yielded some data worth scanning:

Premise: After reading a Newsweek article that discussed the lack of diversity in the blogosphere, I instantly became fascinated with the discussion of how the semi-anonymous blogosphere’s diversity compares to the diversity of traditional media. When talking about this Newsweek article, several bloggers pointed out that in many cases, you don’t know the race or gender of a blogger, which theoretically means that there is a somewhat-even playing field based on quality of content alone. But I was surprised that not much was done to actually chart the diversity of the blogosphere to create a frame of reference for these diversity dicussions to take place. So I set out to not only map the diversity of the blogosphere as a whole, but to also map diversity within individual niches.

Methods of experimentation: I emailed 1,000 different bloggers with a 4-question survey that enabled me to statistically chart the diversity of both gender and race within each niche. The 4 questions were:

1. What niche does your blog fall into (Examples: Political, gadget, movie, etc…If more than one, please list)?

2. What are the genders of all the bloggers who write for your site?

3. What are the races for all the bloggers who write for your site (if there are any that you’re not sure about, just indicate that you don’t know)?

4. What do you think of the diversity of the blogosphere, both in your niche and as a whole?

There’s more to read, but here’s where us MilBloggers fell out:

Military Blogs:

Male: 76%
Female: 24%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 100%

More grist for the mill….

Gee…it’s a good thing I scan other blogs sometimes….(Note to tasking agency: Captain Steeljaw: Send tasking directly next time – it reduces the response cycle considerably!) Anyhow, Skippy-san of Far East Cynic nailed Steeljaw Scribe, and he informed me (via a note at the end of his answers). Here are the details:

Seven Songs

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your LiveJournal/blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

1) 5 Candles – Jars of Clay

2) I Can Only Imagine – Mercy Me

3) Summer Song – Joe Satriani

4) Soundtrack from Crimson Tide

5) Tub Thumping – Chumbawamba

6) Pictures of a Matchstick Man – Status Quo

7) 3AM – Matchbox 20

Seven other victims? Who to bother…decisions, decisions:

I’m thinking Station Commando of Recruiting Tirade, Jack Army, Eagle1, Holly of Politics of a Patriot, Jason of Navy Says Hoorah1, Dadmanly, and (finally!) Andi of Andi’s World!

(Emails to follow later)

Disclaimer: While I have publically stated (about a year ago in the junior blog), I will never generate a meme, I have not said I would not pass them along!

Station Commando pointed out that my comments section didn’t work. They had on the 9th, but as I dig about, I found that its not just comments. IT also has renedered the permalinks ineffective, dumping you to the top post.

I did chnage the format of the link titles to the “short form” and then things were working…problem: It negates all the track flaoting about the net….

Anyhow…if anyone has any fixes, I’d appreciate them. After 6 hours of the WordPress forum and different search engines, it’s pointing at the FrontPage extensions, but none of the proposed fixes, that others say worked for them worked for me….

I did, however, in my clicking about, completely disconnect the blog datatabse from the “world,” resulting in my getting a “It looks like you haven’t installed WordPress yet….” error…scary, but, I got in and dug about raw data files until I figured out where ti manually edit the database records, and it all came back, complete with the error of the permalinks not working.

My head hurts, but I’ll go at it more later…

Update: (I was gonna go and take and asprin, but I checked the net one more time…..) The problem is fixed. I found a post where a blogger said he had upgraded to PHP5 and his permalinks died. I then remembered that last weekend, while doing lots of reformatting for the 2996 Tribute Project post, I also changed over to PHP5 from PHP4 at my web host. I just changed it back and permalinks are now functional!

After about 10-12 hours the last three days looking at changes in style sheets, index formats, sidebars, the database and finally chasing my tail off to the MS FrontPage extensions, it was my using the newest version of the scrrpiting language that had caused the problem….go figure.

I hope this helps someone somewhere…

“Something in the air” is a recent post at Neptunus Lex.

Subject matter: As the political debate in the execution of the GWoT continues, how is this affecting those who serve?

The main post is a well thought out, well stated point of view of a prefessional warrior, an aviator, and a man who has held command in a combat role. He is no stranger to the intricacies of conflict, and a well studied man, or men and events, as well.

The discussion is a sane, polite discourse, wtih those on both sides of the issue, complete with some links to supportive information for consideration.

If you need to see such temperate, yet controversial, discussions can still be held, it’s up to you to click and go read…and join if you will, in the sharing of ideas.

I think it’s time to share my meager readership with others. Lord knows I’ve filched enough for my sitemeter through the graciousness of others in the blogosphere, most notably GreyHawk at Mudville Gazette. I still can’t get a ping thru to his blog with WordPress, even with standalone pingers….:(

The “event” will be weekly and appear Wednesday afternoons (when the sun is over the yardarm). I’ll make an attempt to post a short “sea story” and you will post links to your postings to that post!

This is in the vein of “Full Bore Friday” from CDR Salmander, “Flight Deck Friday” by SteelJaw Scribe, and others who have a special category of writings weekly (Hey, guys….what’s with the friday thing? Run out of work to do?)

Check back after noon local (EDT) this Wednesday for the first one…..

Oh…to place a trackback, copy the link to the post, then append “/trackback” to the link in your trackback pinging tool of choice. They then show up as comments. I’ll dig about to see if there is a way to pull them up into the main post automagically via some WordPress plugin (and if you know how…please share the secret!).

Over the weekend, I got a little busy in pulling over posts from the “Junior” blog and then updated links. It’s a long and tedious process, but when you have to a scan through a number of posts you did a year to almost two years ago, you see some interesting things. Well, I did any way….

I’m trying to get some of the more notable posts over, and not pursuing the project in any particular sequence, as some posts spanned several writings, and crossed boundries of months.

I mentioned some of the earlier issues of moving from Blogger to my own domain and switching to WordPress as my blogging software in this post.

One of the pitfalls is Blogger only lets you work with up to 300 posts. Those you can pull up and edit. After that, the best bet to get to older posts is to go to the blog, select the month, then right click and “View Source”. You can’t edit that page that comes up, but you can copy and paste the contents into NotePad. From there, I cut and paste the specific posts into WordPress, just like I was wrtinig it new…

I have been trying to faithfully retain the time the original article is posted, which can be done by putting the original data into the “Time Poststamp” on the entry in WordPress, and making sure the “Edit TimeStamp” box is checked when you publish. That way, the post moves to the right place in the blog time continum for historical purposes.

Anyhow…as I have seen Capt Lex doing lately (and who would not want to emulate a fine idea?), he has posted links to some older posts of his own. Here are a few of my personal favorites:

• The Battle Off Samar – 60th Anniversary
• What is Happening in Iraq Because of the Vietnam Experience – Part I
• “Sir, would you like to conn the ship?”

Enjoy!