The killing of a Chinese blogger has sparked outrage in China, with thousands expressing outrage in Chinese Internet chat rooms, often the only outlet for public criticism of the government.

The incident has also alarmed advocates of press freedom, who say municipal authorities had no right to attack a man for simply filming them.

Police have detained 24 municipal inspectors and are investigating more than 100 in the death of Wei Wenhua, a 41-year-old construction company executive, Xinhua reported on Friday.

The swift action by officials reflects concerns that the incident could spark larger protests against authorities, whose heavy-handed approach often arouses resentment.

This is the type of disgraceful behaviour should encourage Google to do what’s right. That is, stop supporting the Chinese Government by filtering search results based on what it deems appropriate for its people. So, Google is in no way ‘evil’?

Source CNN via TechCrunch, thanks to Jeremiah Owyang via Twitter.

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According to Technorati

Over the holiday break we found and fixed a bug that inflated authority counts for certain blogs. The blogs affected were those on domains that also have linked-to sub-domains. The links to the sub-domains were erroneously counting toward the blog authority of the blog on the parent domain. Since Technorati Authority is a calculation of how much attention is being paid to a blog and the posts beneath it, we do not include sub-domains. Sub-domains are treated as separate entitities and often are references to tools, utilities, features, and other non-blog resources.

Examples:

http://chinese.engadget.com

http://desktops.engadget.com

http://hdtv.engadget.com

http://storage.engadget.com

Well, we fixed the bug yesterday. The impact of this change is mostly limited to the Top 100 and the overwhelming majority of the blogosphere is unaffected. Thanks for bearing with us while the Top 100 experiences some turbulence.

We’re always thinking about how to improve and develop new meaningful metrics for the blogosphere and we welcome your feedback on these issues.

I’ve never had faith in Technorati. I’ve certainly never paid any attention to its ranking. That’s not to say that the top 100 don’t deserve to be there. They probably do.

Take Segala’s blog for example (trust me, I don’t keep an eye on figures, I don’t even know how many RSS subscribers we have). Our entire Web site, including this blog, is based on WordPress. When a blogger references me, or a post that I’ve managed to slapped together, they tend to link to Segala.com, my profile page, or this blog. Technorati sees these as three separate ‘blogs’ and as such, doesn’t rank ‘the blog’ properly.

I don’t really care much for rating a blog based on inbound links alone anyway. Different types of blogs attract different types of people. For example, a blog which attracts a large non-blogging audience, will not rank as highly as a blog which attracts an early adopter type audience, of which many blog and link back.

Shouldn’t Technorati be intelligent enough to recognise everything after segala.com/ as one blog? I’m not entirely sure they’ve fixed a bug as many blog networks will have entirely different blogs on subdomains. One of the main benefits of a subdomain is to create separate sites.

Read what TechCrunch has to say.

Technorati blog.

Thanks to Chris Brogan for the link via Twitter.

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I’m heading to Le Web 3 in Paris in the morning so I’ll try to catch up on some blog posts during my relaxing time on the train. Let me know if you’re going and would like to hook up.

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Some of the changes include

• Removal of recent posts from the right side bar. We now display links to posts published in the last 3 months at the bottom of this page
• We’ve moved the Segala logo to the left and moved the search box to a more appealing position. Search is the most underused feature on this blog and it’s the easiest way to find content quickly
• We’ve added an option to change the colour contrast. This is useful for people with poor vision. Did you know that 1 in every 7 males are colour blind?
• We need to update to the latest version of WordPress so we can implement a tag cloud. This will enable you to see what the most talked about topics are very easily. It will also enable you to click through to all the posts written on those topics
• We intend to redesign the social bookmarks again as it’s a bit busy looking.
• More stuff but I won’t bore you with the detail

Please let us know if there are other changes you think should be made. Is there anything that you like or dislike (apart from me) about this blog?

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If you’re a brand guardian, have you ever wondered how to respond to bloggers who make negative comments about your products or services? Have you wondered whether to react at all? If you’re an agency, have you thought about how to answer this question when your clients start to ask?

Well, one thing is for sure, you should never tell bloggers that they should remove comments about your brand or you’ll take them to court. This will only encourage them and other bloggers to highlight your silliness on their blogs. This results in a pyramid marketing campaign of bad publicity which can easily spiral out of (your) control.
The only way to influence a conversation about your brand is to get involved in that conversation. You do this by listening to what others have to say and then do one of three things. Let’s call it AED for short.

1. Apologise and explain how you will make change
2. Explain your position and solicit their feedback on your explanation
3. Defend yourself, providing constructive feedback

Damien Mulley, who’s flying in from Ireland to speak at our next Breakfast Bite and who I’ve invited to be a guest writer on this blog, was on one end of this conversation today. Take a look at Damien’s natural reaction to a marketing agency ripping off his content and their reaction to his blog post.

You don’t learn when talking, you only learn when listening.

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John Burns’ response to a disgruntled recipient should have been an apology. Instead, he stupidly wrote

These email addresses are part of a networking list from www.itcork.ie and are all available for everyone to see.

I do appreciate your concern chris, (i will keep my eye out for the bloggers!!!)

This is a guy who clearly doesn’t understand the data protection act. He also doesn’t understand that what he did was simply bad practice and dumb.

I regularly get spam from recruitment agencies. It doesn’t actually bother me but it does add weight to my argument for not using them. I’ve got vast experience on both sides of the fence in terms of being a client and candidate. Generally speaking (in my experience) they’re unprofessional and back stabbing at best. On the rare occasion, I ran into a great bunch of people such as those at PriceJamieson, but this doesn’t happen often.

Disclaimer Ann Jamieson is the founder of PriceJamieson and is a member BIMA’s Advisory Committee, which I Chair. This in no way had any influence on my tone used throughout this blog post.

So, if you work for a recruitment agency and come by this site to harvest contact details, don’t bother because you’ll only end up in the bin where you belong.

Origin Tom Raftery’s blog.

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