I run a real-time analytics service and we have roughly 700,000 Blogspot customers. At 1AM on January 30th (UTC time) we saw a huge number of new domains appearing on our radar. Most of these were new blogspot domains ending in the .in top level country domain and we saw several others.

The way this new configuration works is as follows. If you have example.blogspot.com as your blog:

• If visitors arrive from a country in which this is not enabled by Blogger, they will see example.blogspot.com as per usual.
• If visitors arrive from a country that has requested, or may request in future, that Google censor content, the visitor is redirected to example.blogspot.ccTLD, where ccTLD is replaced with a country top level domain. This is example.blogspot.in in India or example.blogspot.com.au in Australia, for example.

The effect of this is:

1. Blog owners are likely to be looking at their blog on a different domain to their visitors. E.g. you will see your blog on example.blogspot.co.nz if you are in New Zealand and your visitors will be visiting your blog using domains like example.blogspot.co.za, example.blogspot.in, example.blogspot.com.au, etc.
2. Because your blog now lives on multiple domains, your content is duplicated on the Web. Google claim they deal with this by setting a canonical tag in your HTML content that points to the .com domain so crawlers will not be confused.
3. Your visitors are now spread across as many websites as Google has top level country domains for Blogger. Rather than having a single page about bordeaux wines, you instantly have 10 or 20 pages about bordeaux wines, they’re all identical in every way except the URL and your visits are spread evenly across them.

A URL or Uniform Resource Locator has always been a canonical string that represents the location of a page on the Web. Modifying the worlds largest blog hosting service to break this convention in order to enable Web censorship, by Google no less, leaves me deeply concerned. I can only speculate that either Google is throwing Blogspot under the bus, or Google’s view of their company and its role on the Web has become deeply flawed.

Shouldn’t they all be growing virally? Google claims they’re in limited field trials, it’s invite only, etc, but I can get in and so can you I’m sure.

What worries me is that a social app that is truly engaging and social should have a very strong viral loop. New users invite new users.

If you’re Google, you’re starting with an audience of over a billion people. That’s a pretty good seed for your viral loop. They should be having to fight the traffic off with a sharp stick.

I think their strategy of softly-softly when launching new products hurts them in the long run. They’re so worried about down-time they’re sacrificing valuable PR buzz and new product momentum to avoid it. Twitter still goes down regularly and that hasn’t hurt them yet.

But the real problem I have with Google Plus is it’s fugly.

I don’t mean purely on design. The language they use to describe each product feature is like something out of The Boo Hoo Bird: ”Circles”, “Hangouts”, “Sparks”.

I also think the designers are still suffering from PTSD from the Google Buzz debacle:

[box]Circles let you share with just the right audience.[/box]

i.e. We didn’t screw up this time. Pinkie promise!

I’m ready to spend more money. Yup, I’m going to take my hard earned dollars and hand it over for more of that great hardware they have. Unfortunately Mick got laid off. So now I’m dealing with a team of 5 people.

I get almost daily emails from someone called Loree Brown reminding me of how much Dell rocks and telling me about the great deals they have. I even have this cute guy with his cute chin fluff, silk tie and his cutsie pie little smile appearing in my emails. He’s really been a huge influence on my buying decision. He looks like he just got laid and I’d like to look like that right after I buy my servers.

But I’ve been emailing “Loree Brown” @ Dell with requests for quotes and I get nada response. Nothing. Hell I even put the $4000 server that I want to buy in my shopping cart ready for him or her or it to turn into a quote.

I’ve sent reminder emails. Follow up emails. To multiple addresses. Nothing.

So really what’s happened is that they fired Mick and “streamlined” operations and I’m going to end up buying my machines somewhere else. Which means getting rid of Mick cost them probably several 0000′s (four zero’s again) over the next 2 years from me alone.

Get your shit together guys, I want my quote!!

Update: Got a call from Loree’s manager Reed West apologizing profusely for the confusion. Apparently the problem is that Dell’s marketing emails come from username@midmarket.dell.com and the reps don’t actually receive emails at those addresses. I had sent several emails to Lori at the ‘midmarket’ address instead of her real address. Their real email addresses are username@dell.com. So Reed has undertaken to fix that issue – their marketing emails will now come from real email addresses.  Nice to know Dell reads the blogosphere and twittersphere and responds – they got back to me less than 3 hours after I posted this. As I mentioned in the original post, their servers are unbeatable – looking forward to a better relationship with the new sales team.

I won’t bore you with tales of my screaming match at a manager there at 2am when a simple A record IP address change caused my image server’s address to drop in and out of their DNS at random. Or how the crankier I got the more he called me sir. Or how his colleague explained that if I choose to use their DNS service I need to know intuitively that I can’t make more than one change a day or their zone file gets corrupt – and how it’s standard procedure that you call them to do a “zone file refresh”. Or how he explained that a record I hadn’t changed at all dropped off their servers and the reason was because it’s an “Internet Thing”.

I moved over to dnsmadeeasy.com today and so far they rock. They’re the lowest cost host that offers Anycast on their servers which gives pretty good protection against DDoS attacks – something that took out dnspark a while back when I used to use them.

Nissan.com is a descriptive name in the case of Uzi Nissan, which means that it’s not a strong trademark (he can’t sue anyone else who is using it descriptively) but he also can’t be sued for using his own name – especially with a history of 20 years of use. Any junior TM attorney will tell you that. And yet Nissan went after him with a vengance, all the way to the supreme court – Nissan Motor Corp’s petition was rejected.

Uzi finally won and kept the name and it must have cost him a small fortune to do so.

Nissan’s behavior makes me ashamed to own a Nissan XTerra and I’ll be considering this when I make my next purchase decision.

With surprisingly similar space-time coordinates.

Our love of Facebook is duly recanted.

We’re no longer Zuckerberg’s subordinates.

Add a couple of sentences of your own and you can call it a mashup or use two sources and you can call it research.

Om Malik also had a run-in with content thieves a while ago.

UPDATE: Seems there was no bad intent on Brad’s part and he sounds like a pretty cool guy actually. Check out this awesome ad video he posted recently titled ‘the wind’.