Reports from Asian technology blog, Penn Olson state that for the past 5 days, Gmail services are being affected on Android handsets. The Android Market has also been intermittently inaccessible during the same period.

While the Gmail website is working as normal in China, both the Gmail app for Android and the Android Market have completely stopped working in the country. The website Blocked In China confirms that the Android Market is inaccessible on both Android devices and via the wired Web.

Android Market shows as “Blocked” in China

Gmail was the battleground where Google’s exit from China was decided. It comes as no surprise, then, that the service should also be blocked on mobile phones. What is surprising is the fact that it took Chinese authorities so long to make this decision.

Google Plus, on the other hand, was blocked hardly a week after it was launched in China, and remains that way since.

If the sequence of events repeat themselves, Google might find itself exiting the Chinese Mobile market as well, which could be yet another major blow to the company’s East Asian operations.

Interestingly, only the accounts of foreign journalists and analysts based in China and Taiwan were affected.

The journalists whose accounts were blocked received messages saying “We’ve detected an issue with your account”. They were asked to contact Yahoo! While one such account has been restored by the technicians at Yahoo! details about the other accounts are not yet available.

Yahoo!, of course, has said that they condemn the attacks and will do whatever they can to protect user privacy.

However, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) is not quite satisfied with this statement alone. In fact, they have blamed Yahoo! for not informing all their users about the situation.

As if these allegations were not enough to add to the growing international contempt for the Chinese government, Google, who recently shifted bases to Hong Kong, has also blamed the Chinese government’s censorship tools, commonly known as “The Great Firewall of China”, for blocking Google’s search services earlier in the week.

The services were later restored, so Google has admitted that they do not really know whether the drop in services was due to a technical fault on their end or an intentional move on the part of the Chinese government.

Google’s mobile Web services were also partially blocked later, but no reason has been provided for that.

GoDaddy will stop registering .cn domain names. However, they will continue to manage existing registrations.

Speaking at a U.S. Congressional Executive Commission on China, Christine Jones, Executive V.P. of GoDaddy said that the decision was made following the new requirements that the Chinese Government has imposed on the registration of new websites.

The Chinese government has now made it mandatory for newly registered sites to provide a photo ID of the person registering the site along with other details of business registration in China.

Jones later admitted that GoDaddy had also been a target of the same spate of cyber attacks that sparked Google’s battle with China.

Ellen Nakashima and Cecilia Kang at The Washington Post write, “The rules, the company believes, are an effort by China to increase monitoring and surveillance of website content and could put individuals who register their sites with the firm at risk. The company also believes the rules will have a ‘chilling effect’ on new domain registrations.”

Google and GoDaddy might soon be joined by PC manufacturer Dell, who has also suggested that they may move their operations from China to India. Could this increased monetary pressure, arising from the loss of business from China might make the government rethink their stance?

In January this year, Google threatened to cease operations in China, if they were not allowed to provide uncensored search results.

Until yesterday, Google waited in the hope of being able to sort out the issue with the Chinese government, but early on Tuesday, they announced their decision to quit the country.

Google has not, however, completely walked out of the country. Instead, the company has moved search operations out of Beijing into Hong Kong, where they are currently not required to censor search results.

Chinese Reaction: “Are we bothered?”

While this solution allows Google to operate within the laws laid down by the Chinese government, the company seems to have ruffled a lot of feathers. The decision might be widely commended in the Western press, but in China the sentiment is largely negative. Google is not the market leader and their presence will not be missed by the masses.

“We still have Baidu.com. I don’t use much Google to start with. Just go. Who cares?”, says an article on Chinese site, Sohu.com, “We welcome the exit of Google from China. We allowed you to earn so much money, and you still caused all this fuss. If you don’t want to abide by Chinese laws, just go away! Hong Kong is also a part of China, so you shouldn’t stay in Hong Kong either. Google is just a global thug of the US imperialists.”

Future Of Google China

The nearly 600-strong staff of Google.cn is unsure of their future. So far, they have resisted any temptation to move to other companies. Similarly, advertisers on Google have also resisted moving to other sites. This will definitely change if the Chinese government blocks Google altogether.

At present Google has retained a research and sales division, a map service and a free music portal, which is ad supported.

The Chinese government has condemned Google’s move to shut operations in China and have said that Google has violated their earlier commitments to follow the rules of China, as they had promised in 2006 when they first entered the Chinese market.

The government may decide to completely block all Google-related matter from the Internet in order to retaliate against the search provider.

Update: TechCrunch reports that the Chinese government has reacted to Google’s cheeky exit strategy by blocking the search results pages for certain search terms that they normally would have censored.

The New York Times is also reporting that Google’s ties with other Chinese companies are now being strained as the Chinese government is pressuring China Mobile and China Unicom to cancel their ageeements and plans.

Search results that would have previously been censored now show on Google.cn

When Google was first launched in China, in January 2006, the company received a lot of flak for agreeing to censor some of their search results, in keeping with China’s political policies. However, they felt at that time, that it would be better to provide at least some services in China, rather than none at all. Google was also hopeful that the situation would improve gradually.

Following a series of hacker attacks last month, Google found that at least 20 other major corporations from diverse fields had been attacked. They was also found that apart from stealing corporate infrastructure, the hackers tried to illegally access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Google has taken a very serious view of these attacks and decided to stop playing ball with the Chinese government by refusing to censor search results in China. They will hold talks with the Chinese government regarding this and will shut down their Chinese operations if necessary.

China is currently the largest Internet market and although Baidu is the largest search engine there, Google has a 35% online advertising market share, worth about £620 million last year. However, according to Goldman Sachs, Google’s China earnings are only about 1% of its total revenue, and hence the decision to shut down is likely to be financially inconsequential in the short run.

It is possible, that these developments may affect Microsoft’s plans to operate in China.

While Google’s decision was appreciated by some, many criticised it as being opportunistic, empty posturing and just another blackmail tactic.

Captions will be automatically generated through the voice recognition algorithm that is used on Google Voice. The technology is known as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology and can be pretty accurate for some cases.

In many cases, though, the automatic captions result in some rather funny output, even for videos by Google’s own employees. This could lead to some very confused users if they relied solely on automated captions!

Funny Automated Captions On YouTube

In order to use automated captions, a user has must click on the upward arrow button on the bottom-right corner of the video control bar and click on ‘Transcribe Audio’ from the captions (CC) menu.

It is also be possible to translate the captions into several languages.

While this will greatly improve YouTube’s accessibility and benefit people who have difficulties hearing, the translation facility will also help people who do not understand the original language used in the video.

Another feature that is being simultaneously introduced is auto-timing for subtitles. If all the words used in the video are provided in a text file, Google will automatically associate the timing of each caption alongside the video timeline.

In other words, the text of the video will be transcribed. This transcript can obviously be indexed and crawled, thus helping users with search engine optimisation of video content.

The new captioning features will therefore eventually allow users to search for a video based on keywords used in the video script.

The automatic caption feature is already available on most educational and Google-owned channels. Automatic timing is now available on all newly uploaded videos on YouTube.

Data pulled from the 4 billion page views collected across more than 3 million websites that use the StatCounter analytics solution showed that Google monopolises the mobile search market. The search giant, whose brand is now a neologism for searching, delivered 96.23% of mobile searches worldwide in the first half of 2009.

Yahoo! follows second, worldwide, with 3.24% mobile search market share and Yandex.ru is third with 0.14%.  Ask Jeeves (0.11%) and AltaVista (0.07%) round off the top 5 mobile search providers. The rest, including Microsoft, account for no more than 0.21% of the worldwide mobile search volume.

In the UK, the situation is similar, with Google commanding 98.8%, followed by Yahoo! (0.86%) and, surprisingly, Ask Jeeves (0.14%).

Before screaming “anti-trust” or falling into depression caused by the world turning into a Googleopoly, let’s take a moment to examine the data…

While the size of StatCounter’s data set is nothing to laugh at, most of its volume comes from fixed internet websites rather than mobile sites. In fact, the page views and number of sites using StatCounter to track visitor data on the mobile Internet is bound to be much, much lower.

That’s not all. StatCounter data itself is not wholly credible due to the fact that they use cookies and JavaScript to track visitors, both of which often don’t work when websites are viewed 0n a mobile device. Therefore, any data delivered by StatCounter is only valid for a small subset of all the different mobile phones consumers use to search the Internet.

Last year, Nielsen reported that Google’s mobile search market share in the USA was an estimated 61%, while Yahoo! and Microsoft got 18% and 5% respectively. Not a lot has changed in the mobile search market since June 2008, which makes it safe to assume that Nielsen’s numbers would not be drastically different today.

This still leaves us back at square one, asking “has Google already won the race for mobile search supremacy before it even really began”?

The message prompts webmasters to give Google AdWords a try, as an alternative means for sending traffic to their website and even offers 100 € free AdWords credit to get them started.

Like all Google promotions, this one is cleverly interwoven into a helpful email. They start by pointing users to the Webmaster Support / Help page and their search engine optimisation starter guide. Only after that do they add that the AdWords programme is just another effective way to drive traffic to a site.

The message ends with a quick run-down of the advantages of advertising via AdWords.

Google has not remained unaffected by the economic downturn. This promotion is just one more example of the various new means they are trying to drive advertisers expenditure. The search giant is continuously testing ways to broaden its advertising platform’s reach, prompt more users to click on ads and convincing more advertisers to spend a greater portion of their media budget on AdWords.

Screenshot of message promoting AdWords to Webmaster Tools users

The popular social network was blocked for being ‘illegal’ back in 2006. This time, the reason for blocking it seems to be politically motivated, although no official reason has been provided for it yet.

In fact, when questioned about it, the President said he was unaware of it and would investigate the matter.

The country is facing its 10th Presidential elections, which are due to be held on the 12th of June.

The candidates set to run for office are the current President, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Mir-Hossein Mosavi the former speaker of the Majlis, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai, who is a conservative.

The powers that be have reason to believe that their main political opponent Mir-Hossein Mosavi has over 5,200 supporters on Facebook. It is obvious that they do not want him to make use of the network as a way to campaign and motivate his followers against the incumbent President.

In spite of being blocked time and again in Iran, Facebook remains the 10th most popular site in Iran as reported by Radio Free Europe.
A spokesperson of Facebook said, “We are disappointed to learn of reports, that users in Iran may not have access to Facebook, especially at a time when voters are turning to the internet as a source of information about election candidates and their positions. We are investigating these reports.”
“We believe that people around the world should be able to use Facebook to communicate and share information with their friends, family and coworkers. It is always a shame when a country’s cultural and political concerns lead to limits being placed on the opportunity for sharing and expression that the internet provides.”
This kind of restriction on access to information and networking is one of the hazards that the citizens of non-democratic countries have to face, and it only reminds the rest of us, about how lucky we are to be living in a democracy.
Several sources have criticized the blocking.

Yahoo! is the current search leader in Japan. Google Japan started featuring “Hot Keywords” on their homepage last month. This was done with the intention of guiding users to other related sites such as Google Maps, Google News, Gmail and YouTube, which they hoped would improve the user experience and get more users to access the site.

Akky Akimoto at the Asiajin blog reported last week that Google Japan hired Cyberbuzz, a company that specialises in online marketing to sponsor blog posts through a pay-per-post service to inform users about these new features and associated Google products.

Paying bloggers for links is against the policies of Google. Since Google Japan had to pay the online marketing company for the blog posts, they have broken one of their own company’s rules.

Google Japan has not only discontinued the services of Cyberbuzz, but has also issued an apology on the Google Japan blog, The translated post says:

“Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products. It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologise to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.”

The “Hot New Keywords” feature has also been removed since then and Matt Cutts confirmed that Google dropped the page rank of Google Japan from 9 to 5 and it will likely stay that way for a while!

Latitude works with Google Maps on mobile handsets as well as on a desktop. Users who add this service on iGoogle or download the latest version of Google Maps on their mobile phones can join Latitude and then invite their friends to join. If the friends accept and share their location, they can see where they are, in real time, on the map.

The system makes use of a digital map, where the coordinates of the handset being used are plotted by triangulating the location of the nearest mobile communications towers. This is merely an extension of their My Location service that was launched in December 2007.

The service has its benefits above and beyond the obvious social aspect of knowing where one’s friends are. For example, people can keep track of each other in a very large gathering, or parents can keep an eye on their childrens’ whereabouts.

There are concerns that using such a service would allow Google to invade an individual’s privacy. As David Perez of Arete Consulting put the point across succinctly, “I do not want my mother to know where I am!”.

Users have the choice to accept or refuse an invitation to join the service. A user’s location is revealed only to those members whose invitation has been accepted. Moreover, one can also choose to change the privacy settings for individual contacts in their friends list. Users can also manually input a fake location if they wish to hide their true location from a particular contact.

While Latitude is free to use, Google will most likely start serving location-based advertising to monetise the service.

At present, the service is available on Android phones like the T-Mobile G1, iPhone and iPod touch devices, most colour BlackBerries, Windows Mobile 5.0+, Nokia Smartphones and Java-enabled mobile phones in 27 countries including the USA, most of Europe and India.

Mozilla is expected to launch the latest version of their browser, Firefox 3.1, shortly. In Russia, however, the default page will now be Yandex, the leading Russian search engine, instead of Google.

According to Harvey Anderson, who is the General Counsel at Mozilla, they have conducted a very extensive and detailed study into the matter before arriving at this decision. He says, “Russian users really wanted direct access to Yandex search services in official Firefox RU builds. As a result we’re planning on setting Yandex as the default search provider for the Firefox 3.1 Russian locale builds.”

The change by Mozilla from Google to Yandex at this point of time is particularly interesting, given the fact that in August 2008, the Russian online ad market grew by 73% compared to what it was in the same month a year earlier. It has also been estimated that the Russian online ad market will grow from $400 million in 2007, to $4 billion by 2017, which is a 10-fold increase in a span of just 10 years.

This move will certainly boost the fortunes of Yandex at the expense of Google.

In the past, Google and Mozilla have shared a mutually beneficial or symbiotic relationship for quite a long time. Google received exposure by being the default home page and default search engine on Mozilla browsers, and in turn, Mozilla earned a major share of its revenue through Google.

This happy situation may now be on a slightly sticky wicket, given that Mozilla will replace Google with Yandex in Russia and Google is now promoting its own browser, Chrome.

The survey was conducted across 16 countries, with over 27,000 participants, ranging between 18 and 55 years of age.

Users from China were found to spend the highest amount of their leisure time online – approximately 44%, as compared to only about 16% of free time spent online by users in Denmark, which was ranked last among the 16 countries.

While youngsters below the age of 25 spent about 36% of their free time online, Chinese users in the same age group spent nearly 50% of their leisure time online.

Interestingly, while the average U.K. user spent about 28% of his / her spare time on the net, the average housewife from the UK spent 47% of her spare time on the net, which is even higher than the average time spent by the Chinese online.

Unemployed U.K. resident spent 32% of their free time online; students spent 39% of their free time online.

British residents also revealed that the majority of them do not trust the information provided through newspapers too much. Only 23% of them trusted newspapers, as compared to 69% of people from Finland. The British feel that online news is a trustworthy source of information, second only to that relayed by a good friend.

Where social networking is concerned, the BBC reports that the survey found the average number of online contacts each user had was 17.

When the respondents were asked if they had met any of their online contacts in person, the Germans topped the list, with 76% replying in the affirmative, while China was at the bottom of the list here with only 44% saying yes.

On an average 60% of users had managed to meet some of their online friends. Users from U.K. reported that 58% of them had met online friends, while 455 of them had spoken to them over the phone.

37% of users from U.K., however, reported that they could not be sure of the true identity of their online friends.

The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which deals with the protection of the privacy of citizens in the EU, is of the opinion that the search engines should delete all identifiable data of the user after 6 months, as the search engines keep tabs on what their users are searching for, or buying and from where etc.

Getting the search engines to accept this demand is not going to be easy, and it may take a long time to come to a mutually acceptable agreement.

It will not be possible for the EU to force their decision on the Search engines, as these companies run their operations worldwide, and it is not possible for them to use a different set of rules regarding privacy, for each country or region they operate in.

The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party does not have the power to enforce their decisions on the search engine providers, but they are currently discussing, the length of time after which user data should be deleted. They are also discussing how effective the measures taken by the search engine providers are, to protect the privacy of the user.

While the IP address is the most reliable and efficient clue to the users location even that is not 100% accurate.

The largest Search engine in Europe, Google, (which holds almost 80% of the market share) will obviously be in a position to call the shots here. They had agreed in September to cut down their data retaining time, from 18 months to 9 months.

Yahoo had offered to cut down to 13 months.

On the other hand Microsoft, which holds only about 2% of the market share, has agreed to accept the EU demands fully provided all others agree to do so.

The reason search engines wish to hold on to user data for a long time, is that they make use of it to find their target audience for the purpose of advertising which is their main source of revenue.

It looks as though the best way to get the search engines to agree to the EU demands would be to put pressure on them through the users while continuing negotiations across the table.

Citizen Lab has come across a database, which has thousands of words, that are considered to be politically sensitive. Whenever a Skype message contains any of these words, it gets automatically blocked. The database on which these words are stored also stores the personal information of the users, including their IP address, username and phone number. The database is insecure and hence is publicly available, which is a blatant breach of security for the users.

According to Citizen Lab, there is a surveillance system in place, which selects and stores messages transmitted through online telephones, and text messages. The messages that get deleted may contain some commonly used words such as democracy, Taiwan, Tibet, Voice of America, milk powder, Olympic games, earthquake, Tiananmen and SARS. The database reportedly contains over 1,50,000 messages, and it is possible to identify all the senders and recipients by entering just a username.

The internet service provider Skype, which runs its services in China in a joint venture with the Chinese company TOM online, under the name TOM-Skype, says that they are aware of the filtering of data by the Chinese authorities, but are concerned by reports about the resultant breach of security.

Citizen Lab has enquired whether or not Tom online and Skype are cooperating with the Chinese authorities and if so to what extent.

President of Skype, Josh Silverman has said that it is common knowledge that that Tom Online follows procedures to meet the local laws and regulations, such as monitoring and blocking messages containing certain words, which the Chinese government disapproves of. However according to policy these messages are to be deleted. They will have to investigate to know if the policy has been changed to allow storage of these messages and why.

O3b stands for the ‘Other 3 Billion’ who do not live in Western society and do not enjoy the wonders of mobile and Internet technology. The O3bnetwork will be able to provide Internet connectivity to developing nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East at high speed and low costs.

In its present form, the Internet is mainly accessible in developed nations thanks to an extensive network of submarine fiber optic cables, which work out to be very cost-effective once they are laid. In place where these fiber optic cables are unavailable, there are geo-synchronous satellites that can be used to connect to the Internet, but they provide very slow connectivity and are also very expensive, thus making Internet access unaffordable for most people in developing countries.

The new O3b system will provide fiber-like Internet services, by means of several medium-orbit satellites. In its initial phase, O3b will have a constellation of 16 satellites, providing low latency links ranging from 1Mbps to 10Gbps. These satellites will make it possible to access the Internet at high speeds with low latency, thus making it possible to quickly disseminate information even to the remotest of places such as the interiors of Africa, at reasonably low rates.

O3b satellites will be positioned around the earth, at almost one-third the distance of the geo-synchronous satellites, thus improving the connectivity and transmission times.

Backers Google, Liberty Global and HSBC have collectively contributed U.S. $60 million to O3b Networks. It is estimated that the O3b satellites will be functional by the end of 2010, making Internet access faster, cheaper and easier. This in turn will encourage upcoming market operators and internet service providers to improve the overall internet experience. For details please visit:

http://www.o3bnetworks.com/

Madhouse Inc. started a contextual ad service, towards the end of 2007. They have also started full screen interstitial mobile ad products and mobile video ad products this year, which are firsts for China, and have been very well received

Ad platforms in China allow mobile ads to be targeted to users depending on their location, mobile phone brand, model, and even retail price. The services can also optimise ad versions and frequency of ads shown, clicked or downloaded by each individual customer, similar to the way Google AdWords does.

China currently boasts over 500 million mobile phone subscribers, which represents a penetration rate of under 50 percent. Most Western European nations have penetration rates of over 100 percent.

If the Chinese population adopt mobile usage in a similar manner, the potential audience for mobile advertising in just that country will overshadow Europe or North America.

The service, which is only available to users in China, will directly challenge the illegal MP3 Search offered by Baidu. Of course, Google’s links will all be legal, and the results will be provided by ‘Top100.cn’.

Users from outside China cannot access the service, and instead see a blank page with one line of text in Chinese, that reads “Sorry, you are not in a region where Google provides this service.”

www.google.cn/music

Google will offer this new service for free, providing streaming music, downloads and lyrics. It will be funded by advertising revenues and paid caller ring back tones via China Mobile. They will provide mostly Chinese music, and most of the major domestic labels have already cleared rights for the service.

How much Google’s new service offering will affect Baidu, is to be seen. The service will definitely be better than other international ones such as We7 and Spiral Frog. Users will be able to keep the downloaded MP3 tracks indefinitely and the downloads will be DRM free, which means users will be allowed to freely transfer music onto their portable devices.

Baidu, which already has a head start on Google, accounts for about 30% of the traffic on these sites.

Google is expected to score over Baidu, as they will share revenue with all their content providers via Top100.cn. Baidu, on the other hand, has always kept all the profits for itself, except lately, when they started profit-sharing with a few of their top content providers.

It now makes good sense for all the music labels and independent artistes to join Google, as they will be assured of receiving their fair share of the revenue.

Top 100.cn, however, will have to work hard to convince all its remaining partners to start providing content to Google, failing which Google’s service will seem incomplete, and that may deter users from switching loyalties from Baidu.

Another problem that Google may have to contend with is apathy on the part of users who are already satisfied with the service provided by Baidu, even though it is illegal.

It must be remembered that other Mp3 service providers in China, have not made any difference to Baidu’s popularity. All these services are of course illegal. It also remains to be seen, if the URL, www.google.cn/music will work in Google’s favor, by creating its own brand identity, or against it as users in China are used to the term ‘MP3′ in the URL of music search engines.

Chinese authorities will now be in a better position to take some concrete steps against illegal service providers, like Baidu, as a legal alternative is now available to users. It also looks as though it will finally be possible for content providers to get even with Baidu for its misbehavior and high-handedness in the past.

In fact, according to a post on TechCrunch, a local social network, Mixi.jp, has beaten both of them, and is currently the 6th most popular site in Japan, while MySpace is way behind at number 95 and Facebook does not even figure in the top 100 list.

It is not as if the Japanese are not inclined towards social networks, but it is essential for these sites to adapt to the social and cultural customs of the region.

If these networks think that whatever is appreciated in Western society will be accepted all over the world they are wrong!

In Japan, for instance, far more importance is given to the community as a whole, than to an individual, and security concerns are very important. Facebook for instance, advocates the use of real names and photographs in their profile, which is not a very welcome idea in Japan.

Also Facebook’s translations leave a lot to be desired and most of the third-party apps on Facebook are useless to the Japanese who are not fluent in English. Another major issue could be the absence of blogs on Facebook, which are a big draw in Japan.

Mixi, on the other hand, has been able to meet the demands of the Japanese culture and hence it is doing very well.

MySpace and Facebook opened up to the Japanese market 3-4 years after their respective launches in the U.S. In the meanwhile, Mixi has had plenty of time to established itself and has now turned into a $1 billion company, unhindered by competition from these international giants.

The absence of mobile optimised versions of Facebook and MySpace on Japanese handsets could also have been yet  another cause for their failure, as Japanese consumers use the mobile Web far more than consumers in the US, UK or Europe.

It so happens that Japan has one of the largest online advertising markets in the world, which is incentive enough for these social networks to go out of their way to establish themselves there.

Specifically the parliament will be discussing a bill by which they can then enforce the death penalty for certain ‘crimes’ that up until now, have attracted a lesser sentence. Details on the bill can be found on a site promoting human rights for Iran:

http://www.iranhumanrights.org/main/library.html

Of particular interest to the Iranian law enforcers will be people who set up weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy. Apostasy – the abandonment or forsaking of religious faith, vows or principles – is considered a particularly intolerable crime in the extremely religious state.

Bloggers who commit these so-called crimes will be categorised as enemies of the state (Mohareb) or enemies of God on Earth (Mofsed fe-al-arz).

The official agency says that the bill is intended to “toughen punishment for harming mental security in society.” In other words, they will further reduce the levels of tolerance in the country.

At present they ‘only’ arrest bloggers who may dare to challenge the government in any manner.

According to Amnesty International, 317 executions were carried out in Iran for various crimes last year, which is close to double the number of executions in the previous year when they carried out 177 executions.

It so happens that blogging has become a very popular activity among youngsters in Iran, who often try to challenge the old school of thought, which is extremely conservative.

According to The Committee to Protect Bloggers, Iran is one of the worst places to live in for bloggers, as they are constantly harassed, even to the extent of imprisoning bloggers and students.

In a bid to retaliate, some Chinese citizens demonstrated against and decided to boycott the French hypermarket chain Carrefour in China from May 8 to 24, the time during which the Olympics will be held in Beijing. Soon after that, it was found that searches carried out on Google.cn for the word “Carrefour” did not show any results even though Google.com has over 6 million results on the subject and they are available in Hong Kong, which is outside China’s national network.

Searches for Carrefour on Google China bring up a message that informs us that ‘this information cannot be accessed and one should return to google.cn for other information’. News and video searches for Carrefour have also been blanked out.

Censorship of domains is quite a common practice in China, but censorship of keywords is something relatively new. It is believed, that if this censorship has been carried out by Google under instructions from the Chinese government, it is more likely to have been ordered with a view to appease the agitating public rather than to hurt Carrefour per se.

While the Chinese government encourages a show of patriotism, it is not in their best interests to encourage huge hordes of angry protesters, as this may eventually harm their own set up – they intend to use the Olympics to project an image of tolerance and non-dictatorialism to the world.

In the past Google has often cooperated with the Chinese government and agreed to impose a degree of self-censorship. For example, some satellite imagery is not available on Google Maps, and a number of domains relating to human rights organizations are missing from the search index. Anti-government sources have also been removed from Google News.

It is not absolutely certain, though, whether this ban is from Google or the Chinese government. It is quite possible that the Chinese have developed some system to block specific search queries, perhaps based on the specific URL returned for individual queries. At present, neither part has commented on the ban.

This feat was accomplished with the help of some 4,000 users of Facebook who gave various suggestions to translate the program into French. They eventually voted for the best translation. The same strategy was used to launch the German and Spanish versions of Facebook.

Facebook was launched in 2004, by a young entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg from Harvard as a social networking site for students of the college, from where it spread to other colleges and then into the workplace in general. Facebook claims to have accumulated 67 million users in this short span of time, of which about 1.4 million live in France.

Users can now choose any of the four languages in which the site is available, through a drop down menu to display their homepage. However it should be noted that as of now, the different applications, games, software nuggets etc. are available only in English.

Over 1,30,000 users greeted the launch of the French version with enthusiasm. Some users, however, are not satisfied with the program, as Facebook has only gone halfway with the translation.

The majority of Facebook users now live outside the U.S; with about a third based in Europe. According to Facebook, France is the 6th largest community on their website. Facebook has been steadily eating into the market share of the current social networking leader, MySpace, which was started in 2003 and then acquired by Rupert Murdoch. MySpace claims to have 110 million users.

According to Forbes magazine, Zuckerberg, who is only 23, is the youngest ever self-made billionaire. Last year Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, which means its net worth, is $15 billion. Last month Facebook hired Sheryl Sandberg of Google to boost their previous year’s turnover of $150 million in order to make the investment worth it for Microsoft. Zuckerberg says, “the foreign language sites are a part of a larger effort at Facebook to create web communication tools capable of spurring social change.”

Facebook (French)

28.3 million UK visitors used at least one Google property, making it the most popular site, beating Microsoft’s 26.7 million visitors. Each of these companies reached a phenomenal 80+ per cent of the country’s online population. Yahoo! did not beat eBay to the third position, in spite of a 2.4 per cent fall in eBay’s visitor numbers.

The top ten websites in the UK can be seen in the chart below:

Facebook was the fastest growing site in the United Kingdom, with total visitors to the site rising from 7.6 million to 8.9 million in just one month. The 18 per cent growth rate is not a one-off occurrence. The social networking site has continuously risen in popularity since February of this year, making it an attractive acquisition target for Microsoft and Google.

Other sectors that fared well in the UK included online TV and shopping comparison, with sites from both sectors demonstrating double-digit growth percentages. BSkyB and News International both grew over 10% in August, with total visitor numbers well beyond the 5 million mark. In France on the other hand, the greatest percentage growth in visitor numbers came predominantly from travel sites. The fastest growing site, though, was an automotive trading site, LaCentrale.fr.

The top ten websites in France can be seen in the chart below:

Interestingly, Google reached only 69.5% of the French Internet population, compared to its 89% reach in the UK. The total number of Internet users in France is also still less than that in the UK. Google, Microsoft and France Telecom are the most popular sites here, with Yahoo! trailing at a distant sixth position in overall popularity.

The detailed reports for France and the UK can be read on the comScore website.

Brazilian authorities requested Google Brazil to disclose information about Orkut users to aid an ongoing investigation against paedophiles in the country who have used the social networking site, which was the most visited site in Brazil. The site has allegedly become home to over 1,200 communities of and hosts more than 3,000 profiles of paedophiles.

Its tremendous popularity has attracted a lot of negativity towards Orkut. This year alone, human rights groups in Brazil claim to have received more than 100,000 complaints against the site, which range from human-rights crimes to sale of drugs and guns.

Google Brazil have handed over personal information in the past, as have Yahoo! and Microsoft. This time, however, the Brazilian office of the search giant contends that the information contained in Orkut is actually managed and owned by Google Inc. in the United States.

This issue is quite a double-edged sword for Google. If they hand over personal information, privacy advocates will have a field day criticising their breach of user confidentiality. On the other hand, if Google obstructs a government investigation aimed at halting paedophilia, it will create a storm of negative publicity.

Prosecutor Sergio Gardenghi Suiama said, “Google’s attitude is ensuring the impunity of pedophiles and perpetrators of hate crimes and shows they are only motivated by profits and are ignoring their social responsibility to Brazilian laws and society.”

Yahoo! trails far, far behind at a distant second place with 3.14% market share, followed by MSN at 2.48%, Orange at 1.89% and Free.fr at 0.72%. The remaining 1.99% is distributed among many smaller search engines as well as the likes of AOL, Ask, AltaVista and Lycos.

The research published by XitiMonitor, a French web survey Institute, was based on a study of 84,108 websites during the period July 1 to 31, 2007.

La Toile du Québec, a small and relatively unknown search engine saw the greatest gain, in terms of percentage change in number of visitors. MSN visitors grew 7.7% making it the second fastest growing search engine, followed by Orange with 4.3% growth and Ask with 2.5% growth. Google’s actual visitor numbers grew only 0.3%.

The full report with graphs showing French search engine market share and charting growth trends among search engines in France during 2006-2007 can be viewed on the XitiMonitor site:

XitiMonitor Search Engine Barometer

Last week the University of Lausanne’s library became the first French library to be added to Google’s database. The hundreds of thousands of Dutch and French books from the Belgian University will be next in line to be converted into digital fom for posterity.

While Google News has faced more than a few obstacles in its endeavours to index content from Belgian and French news sites, the Google Book Search initiative seems to be sailing unhindered.

The project has been made possible by the Flemish government, and it is a Godsend for the University who had planned to renovate its library in 2010. Digitising the books will help students and researchers access the precious collection online during their work.

Additionally, users can also cross-reference the electoral programs of the candidates, view relevant Google News publications, related images and even the videos distributed via Google Video.

In order to see whether all this information will have enabled French voters to make a good decision for the second round, the service will be up on May 7 in the same format and with the same functionality. As of June, a guide of the legislative elections will allow the users to view the results for the candidates in each district.

Last week, the two companies settled their dispute with an agreement that is supposed to be satisfactory for both companies.

One can’t help but think that the passage of time and settlement has worked more in the favour of Google, for whom €13.2 million is now a mere drop in the ocean, compared to two years ago, when they couldn’t afford to go about splashing out $3.1 billion on a whim.

Funded with approximately £1 Million of venture capital from a VC started by the founder of Infosys, Zook makes a pretty impressive first entry from India with some rather cool features such as answers facilities and user groups. However, a few features such as signup confirmation via SMS might raise barriers to adoption of the service.

The highest growth in number of unique Internet users was reported in India where 21.1 million users aged 15+ accessed the Internet, up 33% from January 2006. In spite of being the 2nd largest population in the world, India still ranks only 8th in terms of total online population.

China, the most populated country in the world, has the second largest Internet population in the world, with 86.8 million unique users, up 20% from last year.

21% growth in the Internet population in Russia, to 12.7 million, maked it the second fastest growing Internet population Worldwide.

Internet usage in the U.S. grew 2%, up to 153.4 million users aged 15 or over. Canada, Israel and South Korea led the list of countries in average number of hours users spend online.
The figures in comScore’s report exclude traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes and access from mobile phones and personal digital assistants, which could actually drive numbers in China and India up even higher, as a lot of users in those countries do not own Personal Computers but still use Internet cafes to browse and email.

The report details can be viewed on the ComScore site press release about Worldwide Internet audience growth.

Now Google China is facing issues as ISM Technologies who own Gmail.cn refuse to sell the domain to Google. Given that intellectual property issues in China can become complicated by politics, the battle for establishment of Gmail as a worldwide brand for Google seems to be far from over.

The rankings go as follows:

1. Time Warner ($29,834 Million)
2. News Corporation ($16,726 Million)
3. General Electric ($14,689 Million)
4. CBS ($13,389 Million)
5. Disney ($13,207 Million)

Following Google’s lead are Microsoft Sites and France Telecom, with 16.8, 15.7 and 13.6 million French visitors, respectively. The most popular gainers in December were shopping sites including card site Dromadaire.com with 1.7 million visitors, comparison shopping engine Shopzilla.com Sites with 1.9 million visitors and Karstadt-Quelle with 5.7 million visitors.

Other notable sites included Apple Computer (3.8 million visitors), Kingfisher, which includes Darty.com, Castorama.fr and But.fr (2.4 million visitors), Groupe PPR, which includes Fnac.com, Laredoute.fr and Conforama.fr and La Poste.

This is worrying news when one thinks about the likelihood that China could overtake the U.S. as the country with the most Internet users within two years, according to its government, which released figures showing that the nation’s online population had increased to 137 million people in the last 12 months.

This is definitely bad news for Yahoo! especially at a time when most analysts seem to think 2007 might be the year that makes or breaks Yahoo!