New U8UNTU Elixir Site

Our new address: http://u8untu.blogetery.com

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The Blogetery.Com Reboot

Good news is blogetery.com is back online. If you recall, this blog was  in the process of moving to blogetery when the site got taken down by an over-eager service provider who thought Open Source was the work of El Quaeda. It didn’t help matters that a magazine called Vision was publishing recipes about how to blow up the world with Ubuntu.

Check out our new site

http://u8untu.blogetery.com

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U8UNTU needs a new logo

Been thinking about a new logo. Something like the above, which is based on Ubuntu FM.

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U8UNTU is 1 in 2 million

Yes, that’s right, this blog is 1 in 2 million, 1,718,711 to be exact.

There are 1,718,710 sites with a better three-month global Alexa traffic rank than Indlovu.wordpress.com. Search engines refer about 42% of visits to it, and visitors to it spend approximately 78 seconds on each pageview and a total of two minutes on the site during each visit. We estimate that 68% of its visitors are in the US, where it has attained a traffic rank of 420,158. About 85% of visits to Indlovu.wordpress.com consist of only one pageview …

ALEXA

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Open Source Auto

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Yes Men sign P2P distribution deal

THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD is a screwball true story about two gonzo political activists who, posing as top executives of giant corporations, lie their way into big business conferences and pull off the world’s most outrageous pranks. This peer-to-peer special edition of the film is unique: it is preceded by an EXCLUSIVE VIDEO of the Yes Men impersonating the United States Chamber of Commerce. p2p  is the only way that this film is being distributed. Please spread the word!

http://vodo.net/yesmen

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FFUU theme

lassekongo83 has created a mod of my favourite theme — ffuu is based on Zuki

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Ubuntu 10.04 free cd arrives

Canonical is still shipping free CDs. If you haven’t got one yet, place an order via Shipit. An Ubuntu CD is also a great way of getting new users to switch. Now if we could just persuade the forces that be to send us hardware. Think about it, Ubuntu is a collective, a community which produces Free Software, but why not a community which produces open machines?

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Maths of the blogetery takedown

Seeing as how I am one of the people affected, I am republishing this interesting posting from fuseoptimisation, although in theory only those blogs at the site which had failed to change their default bylines would have been found, I like the can-do attitude.

“After searching around the internet for ways of finding all the 70,000 blogs which have gone missing I stumbled on the piece of text which is added to the page title of all Blogetery blogs (Just another Blogetery.com weblog)  Google is showing 2.8 Million results for this phrase.  So I started to break down the results by industry, here are some of the ones I found

Car Insurance – 218 results
Real Estate – 2,550 results
SEO – 8,360 results
Personal Injury – 7,580
Christian – 3,680
iPod – 1,860

With British phrases such as “personal injury” it is clear that many UK SEO companies have been using Blogetery as an easy way to gain links to their sites.

Using Google’s “inurl:” command…

inurl:Blogetery.com – 287,000 results (This includes some non Blogetery sites)

…we can see that if 73,000 blogs were taken down then on average only 4 pages were being indexed per blog.  Taking the top result for the inurl:blogetery.com command we can see that Smartech had 771 pages indexed.  This can only mean that thousands of the blogs were either not indexed by Google at all, or perhaps just had one page.

“The startling thing for me is that out of the 2.8 million pages that Google lists only a small percentage seem to be optimised for specific industries.  The SEO result above was the highest I could find, even gambling sites and adult sites don’t seem to feature.  I can only assume that the majority of the blogs were personal blogs by real every day people.

NOTE: When I moved content over to the site from this one about a month ago to check the interface, I did notice a slow uptake on google over the first month which might explain the fact individual blogs on the site were probably badly optimised, however the site as a whole, was a real winner when I made my initial search.

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Open Source linked to al-Qaeda plot?

THE unbelievable story about the termination of wordpress site blogetery.com right in the middle of the much vaunted U8UNTU eLXER migration has taken a bizarre new twist.

While this latest news story may squash any theory about the Feds impounding two years of U8UNTU material because of a GPL violation, or worse, a general crackdown on free software, it raises all sorts of questions regarding freedom of the press, in particular the law as it applies to online publishing and blogging.

One would have at least expected a court order before such a draconian move as the shutting down of 73 000 blogs, literally under martial law imposed by the USA Patriot Act, and which have now all apparently been deleted. Attempts to explain away the actions of Burst.Net, as a “voluntary” over-reaction fail to take into account the threat to impound servers and seize assets.

Neither burst.net nor blogetery.com are to blame in this affair. One must place the blame on the Federal Government which has acted in a threatening and undemocratic manner.

Even if the cause was an online publication called Inspire which apparently published a hit list and an article “How to make a bomb in your mother’s kitchen”, there are laws guaranteeing freedom of the press in the US constitution. Bring the alleged perpetrators of hate speech and incitement to war to book in a court of law. Get this out in the open, otherwise we all suffer from a culture of secrecy which is anathema in a democratic country.

Here is how the event unfolded, after TorrentFreak reported the U.S. government may be involved as part of stepped-up antipiracy operations and  conversation  between Blogetery management and the host provider via an online forum appeared to validate  speculation that it was all about copyright infringement, it turns out both copyright and free software have nothing to do with it. According to CNET, “the site was shut down after FBI agents informed executives of Burst.net, Blogetery’s Web host, late on July 9 that links to al-Qaeda materials were found on Blogetery’s servers, Joe Marr, chief technology officer for Burst.net, told CNET. Sources close to the investigation say that included in those materials were the names of American citizens targeted for assassination by al-Qaeda. Messages from Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the terrorist organization, as well as bomb-making tips, were also allegedly found on the server.”

Surely the culprit could have been dealt with in a sane way that avoided alienating so many people and causing loss of confidence in blogs such as this one? We all lose out when Federal agents can no longer distinguish between an al Qaeda recruitment journal and a Free and Open Source Linux blog!!!! I guess as servers become smaller and data gets compressed, we could all end up losing a lot more than the truth.

Al Quaeda Hit List and Bomb Tips Allegedly Linked to Shut Down of Blogetery

Blogetery closure a violation of our blogging rights

CNET:Bomb-making tips, hit list behind Blogetery closure

CNET: Why Web host shut down 73,000 blogs a mystery

SLASHDOT conversation

PCWORLD

BBC

DAVID ICKE

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