Karmona`s Pragmatic Blog

Due to the increasing demand (~300% in the last week) for I18N support in my blog, I decided to take action.

My pragmatic ROIDB (ROI Driven Blogging) approach brought the Google-Translate-Widget to the left pane of my blog with ~20 minute copy-paste work (this post included).

I almost tripled my blog exposure from 350 Million (English) Internet users to 1 Billion* internet users (85% of the world internet users) and I also hit the pareto princple (80/20) jackpot on the way :-)

But… I can’t really use the “I don’t have enough traffic due to I18N readiness” excuse anymore and the 3 people that allegedly asked for I18N support only wanted to “help” with my desist Nigerian cousin will arrangement so I am not so sure it was worth it after all…

Feel free to get a taste of this I18N perfection using my new left-pane state-of-the-art translator widget and with my personal favorite Spanish Blog Flavor

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* 365 English + 184 Chinese (!!!) + 101 Spanish + 86 Japanese + 59 French + 58 German + 47 Portuguese + 34 Korean + 31 Italian + 28 Arabic = ~1 Billion Internet users (Based on internetworldstats.com statistics)

Wikipedia is one of the best online tools (and my personal favorite) with over 1.8 million articles about everything you always wanted to know but was afraid to ask…

but Wikipedia is also the biggest online bureaucracy with very impressive set of regulations, policies and guidelines which will make Max Weber turn in his grave twice; This bureaucracy is governed by unfriendly-easy-trigger-not-too-smart-enforcement intendant bots and WikiLawyerians which make the average Pragmatic Wikipedia editor turn around and leave Wikipedia to the bots (dogs)

P.S. (I)

I think I am on to a new web conspiracy: “Google is a Wikipedia subsidiary” - You surely experience the trend yourself e.g.
* Try to Google: ‘World Wide Web‘, ‘England‘, ‘Mars‘ and even ‘God‘
* Wikipedia climbed to the 8th traffic rank (Based on Alexa lateset traffic details)

P.S. (II)

I really liked this Wikipedia rule since it reminded me of my early childhood ;-)

“The three-revert rule (often referred to as 3RR) is a policy that applies to all Wikipedians, and is intended to prevent edit warring - An editor must not perform more than three reverts, in whole or in part, on a single page within a 24-hour period. A revert means undoing the actions of another editor, whether involving the same or different material each time. Any editor who breaches the rule may be blocked from editing for up to 24 hours in the first instance, and longer for repeated or aggravated violations.”

P.S. (III) 

I am thinking (day dreaming) about writing my own little vicious Wikipedia bot someday - I shall call him… Mini-Me!

*** Experimental Post ***

Unique “foreign” languages support in Google:

Elmer Fudd, Hacker, Klingon!, Pig Latin and Swedish Chef…

Google Search Hacks

The most comprehensive Google Hacking Database I have stumble upon is located @ http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ghdb.php and my personal favorites are:

• password | passcode | “your password is” filetype:log
• “phpMyAdmin” “running on” inurl:”main.php”
• “login: *” “password: *” filetype:xls

Google “Internals”

• Google robots.txt (Checkout closely this huge list of disallows… ;-) and sitemap.xml
• A Tribute to google Moms @ http://www.google.com/moms/ (???)
• Misspellings statistics on Britney Spears @ http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html (a.k.a. did you look for “pritney spears” :-)
• “answer to life, the universe, and everything” answer from Google

Google Trends

I have decided to start a little experiment with Google Trends - I will state the 5 hottest google trends in my next posts to see if it gets the searching crowd into my blog… I promise to keep you updated with my findings.
Here it goes:

• Anna Nicole Smith’s “Death Photo” (did you see it?)
  
• LG Verizon Voyager (a.k.a. the iPhone killer)
  
• Sputnik Anniversary (50th anniversary!)
• Cabbit (WTF is Cabbit?)
• Borscht Belt (Ha?)
  

Good Luck!

“We are moving to a Google that knows more about you.”
Google CEO Eric Schmidt, February 9, 2005 (2.5 years ago…)

Did you know that Gmail have “No Deletion Policy” for your emails?

If not, you should read the GMail “privacy” notice
“… Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL)… Google may send you information related to your Gmail account or other Google services… Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems.”

–> Your private emails will be retained safely on Google’s backup system even after you close your account…

Google do records everything they can (and I mean everything) and retains all data indefinitely (and I mean indefinitely)

Google insists that it uses individual data and collects information about users’ activity to improve the quality of search results and not to create a profile for each user. But history shows that information seldom remains limited to the purpose for which it was collected.

Your Googeled data (private emails & documents, browsing preferences, search history etc.) has become the most wanted honey-pot in the internet– It attracts hackers, crackers, identity thieves, and perhaps most worrisome of all, a governmental big brother intents…

Personally, I like Google and I will keep using GMail since it is the best online email service available today and I don’t trust the other web-mails ;-)

Google recent outage brought me to this new karmona.com hosted home - powered by WordPress.

According to Alexa (which isn’t the most accurate thing in our planet :-), Orkut users are mainly Brazilian, leading with 71% share!!!, India with 13.2% in the honorable 2nd place, US goes 3rd with 3.3% and taking the 4th place is Pakistan (?) with only 2%…

I was really relieved to see that according to Google fight (which is the 2nd most accurate thing in our planet after alexa :-) Brazilian still like Football more than Orkut.

Loren Baker tried to explain the Orkut phenomena with: “Orkut sounds like Yakult or “iogurte” (yogurt)… Everyone drinks it in Brazil when they’re kids…” a.k.a. “Are you stupid?” - one of the amusing comments below his post…

Google’s “Black Sheep”:

• According to Kasie Hunt, USA TODAY: “Osama bin Laden fan clubs build online communities using Orkut” (!!!)
• Brazil Fed Up With Orkut (…)
• Police planning to ban Orkut in India (a.k.a. honorable 2nd place with 13.2%)
• Believe me there is more… (just google it and you will see :-)

So Google’s 3-year-old social network Orkut isn’t behaving according to the Google family expectation a.k.a. “why can’t you be more like your big sister Gmail?!”

Who knows… Maybe the new SocialStreem “treatment” (& Blogger integration) will help Orkut to grow-up and maybe it will only help it to grow-up in Brazil…