Blogspot Shifts to .tw domain....

Great ride yesterday. Bagged century (100 miles) with my friend Charles Tsai. 164 kilometers along the coast from Taichung to Jhunan and back. Wind was brutal going north -- took us 5 hours to do 82 kms. On the way back, same distance took a little over 2.5.

Woke up this morning and found that my blogspot blog has been shifted to a .tw rather than the global .com address. Most of you are probably groggily finding out the same thing this morning.

I picked up a post several months ago on the shift in India which lead me to this Google support post. Google never said a word about this to us bloggers (UPDATE: Now I find out it was in the news two months ago). Note that they will now be removing content which they claim violates local law....

Q: Why is this happening?
A: We are doing this to provide more support for managing content locally. If we receive a removal request that violates local law, that content may no longer be available to readers on local domains where those laws apply. This update is in line with our approach to free expression and controversial content, which hasn’t changed.

The effects of this on free speech rights around the world should be obvious. No wonder Google has been really quiet about this.

UPDATE: A commenter below points out that Google has now effectively outed everyone who wanted to keep their country of residence private, but nope, they haven't. The domain name depends on where you are when you read the blog.... as below....

UPDATE 2: The way it works is that everyone in a region sees the website with the .jp or .us domain. Google says the idea is that if the government of, say, Japan, objects to some content, Google can remove it from everyone who sees it from the .jp domain, but people in Australia or Canada will still see it. Sitting in Taiwan, everyone sees .tw. In Australia, it's michaelturton.blogspot.au. Google says this will preserve content and protect speech, but I don't think they've thought it through.

Nevertheless, I've decided to keep the blog open on blogspot for now.
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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.

Landmark Free Speech Ruling

A court in -- where else? -- Taichung handed down a landmark ruling on free speech, sentencing a local blogger to 30 days and $7,000 US in compensation to the owner for giving a restaurant a negative review.....

After visiting a Taichung beef noodle restaurant in July 2008, where she had dried noodles and side dishes, Liu wrote that the restaurant served food that was too salty, the place was unsanitary because there were cockroaches and that the owner was a “bully” because he let customers park their cars haphazardly, leading to traffic jams.

The restaurant’s owner, surnamed Yang (楊), learned about Liu’s blog post from a regular customer, and filed charges against her, accusing her of defamation.

The Taichung District Court ruled that Liu’s criticism of the restaurant exceeded reasonable bounds and sentenced her to 30 days in detention, a ruling that Liu appealed.
The High Court found that Liu’s criticism about cockroaches in the restaurant to be a narration of facts, not intentional slander.

However, the judge also ruled that Liu should not have criticized all the restaurant’s food as too salty because she only had one dish on her single visit.

This brilliant ruling will surely be cited by free speech advocates everywhere as the judges have done a wonderful job protecting free speech. This is the kind of ruling that should be trumpeted around the world, so the greatness of the Taiwan Court system is manifest for all nations to see. Truly this is a wise and humane judgement. I bow to the superior wisdom of these black-robed gods. Now that this judgment has been made, I will never again feel a chill in the air of freedom in Taiwan!

Additional foreign blogger commentary from the Writing Baron, Lao Ren Cha, Echo, and OzSoapbox. These benighted souls clearly lack the acuity to see the unabashed greatness of this key ruling, to grasp its unalloyed goodness, how it has made their lives freer and safer in every way. Go back to your Cheeto-clogged, pajama-strewn basements!

UPDATED: Longtime commenter M says she got 30 days, suspended.
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Daily Links:

• Grass-Mud-Horse lexicon (thanks, Marc).
• The Bushman does a Neiwan grill party: looks like a blast.
• Don't sell betel nut to Chinese, says DOH.
• Taiwan's Museum of Alien Studies. Please tell me this is a joke.
• China warns US over South China Sea.
• China attempts to shore up Jason Hu of Taichung, lure Taiwanese SME's to special industrial zone just across the Strait.

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.

Ch-ch-ch-changes!

Big changes!

Things may be a little unsettled for the next few days as I work out the look and feel of the blog. I had to upgrade to Blogger's new Layouts or else it wouldn't let me import the posts to another system, so I figured I may as well go whole hog. Unfortunately Blogger's clunky format won't let me do what I want; I had more freedom under the old format even if the HTML was harder to monkey with. At some point I'm switching over to Wordpress.

To make this format, I downloaded a three-column format from here and then tinkered with the HTML. Lots and lots of tinkering.

Hope you like it! Comments are welcome...

[Taiwan]

Blogger Conference, Huashan Cultural Park

A policeman watches traffic in front of a metro station in Yungho.

Saturday began bright and early with a trip to Taipei where I was speaking at blogger conference at Huashan Culture Park. The park was a former winery from Japanese times, and is now a venue for performing arts and conferences. Ironically, the park was in the news that morning with accusations of bid-rigging.

It was a brilliant day in Taipei.

The Huashan Culture Center

Complete the sentence.

The beautiful grounds.

Creating posters.

The old buildings have been left standing, though converted to other uses.

A worker holds up a poster.

I walked over to the nearby Starbucks to grab breakfast. On the way I noticed some media trucks on Ba De Rd. I stopped to talk to one of the men standing around. "Oh, it's nothing," he assured me. "They have to have news, so they just make it up." The full irony of the comment hit me when I later realized he must have been a security guard for TVBS....

Another bright Taipei day.

The canonical city shot: a homeless man under a bridge.

Back in the park I took a moment to enjoy the information.

The room where I spoke. The venue left a lot to be desired, speakers in the other rooms being easily heard, and the funky angles in the walls and ceiling breaking up voices. In addition to the blogging speakers, the geeks from Mozilla were there to talk about Firefox 3, and there were several other technical speakers as well. It was a huge conference.


David Reid, who was there with Scott Sommers representing the Taiwan English blogosphere, snapped this photo of me speaking. I gave my talk in Chinese, the first time I've ever done that. I don't think I did a very good job, too nervous and aware that my audience wanted to go to lunch. Basically I just gave a short outline of how I saw the English blogworld, what my blog was about, and why me of all people was there. Still, they were a good audience, supportive, and willing to laugh at my jokes. Once in a while.

[Taiwan]