Mrs. Mecomber’s Scrapbook

I noticed that YouTube was not online Sunday. Anyone else notice? I, for one, was shocked. Since YouTube is so enormous and probably the most website on the Net, I thought it must have been something really big to disrupt service. I read this morning that it was caused by Pakistan’s attempt to censor YouTube.

Most of the world’s Internet users lost access to YouTube for several hours Sunday after an attempt by Pakistan’s government to block access domestically affected other countries.

The outage highlighted yet another of the Internet’s vulnerabilities, coming less than a month after broken fiber-optic cables in the Mediterranean took Egypt off line and caused communications problems from the Middle East to India.

… An Internet expert likened the cause of the outage to ‘identity theft’ by a Pakistani telecommunications company, which accidentally started advertising itself as the fastest route to YouTube. But instead of serving up videos of skateboarding dogs, it sent the traffic into oblivion.

On Friday, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered 70 Internet service providers to block access to YouTube.com, because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site, which is owned by Google Inc.

The authority did not specify what the offensive material was, but a PTA official said the ban concerned a trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, who has said he plans to release a movie portraying Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.

The block was intended to cover only Pakistan, but extended to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, starting at 1:47 p.m. EST Sunday, according to Renesys Corp., a Manchester, N.H., firm that keeps track of the pathways of the Internet for telecommunications companies and other clients.

… John Palfrey, executive director for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said that while all the facts in the case are not yet known, it appeared that the repercussions were due to Pakistan taking a relatively heavy-handed approach in trying to censor YouTube.

‘It points in many respects to the difficulty, if not the folly, in Internet filtering at the state level,’ he said.

Misrouting occurs every year or so among the world’s Internet carriers, usually as a result of typos or other errors, Underwood said. In a more severe example, a Turkish telecom provider in 2004 started advertising that it was the best route to all of the Internet, causing widespread outages for many Web sites over several hours.

‘Nobody ran any viruses or worms or malicious code. This is just the way the Internet works. And it’s not very secure or reliable,’ Underwood said, adding that there is no real solution to the problem on the table.

You can read more of the story here. This is a good example of how insecure the Internet really is.

The newest blog ranking system in the blogosphere is the illustrious IZEARanks, the brainchild of Ted Murphy (Murphy is a “serial entrepreneur” and CEO of PayPerPost, IZEA, MindComet, Social Spark, Rock Startup, and those really cool Blogger’s Choice Awards). IZEARanks has a system called “RealRank” that determines a blog’s value by its actual traffic and content. Gone are the days of arbitrary valuation (like Page Rank), the inaccurate stats of the toolbar (Alexa), and the begging for alms from other bloggers (Technorati’s “authority” numbers). RealRank is a formula that monitors your unique visitors, page views, and inbound links. The clincher is that the valuation determination is completely candid. This is from the IZEARanks FAQ page:

Unlike other ranking systems, the RealRank scoring algorithm is public. The system weights blogs 70% on daily unique visitors, 20% by daily active inbound links and 10% by daily page views as reported by ITK. Participants can choose to expose just their RealRank score or expand reporting to include other data such as pageviews and visits. This provides advertisers with the most comprehensive and relevant view of a blog’s ability to meet specific campaign goals. RealRank is the first site ranking service that focuses exclusively on measuring the traffic and influence of individual blogs throughout the blogosphere.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been jumping for joy ever since RealRank was debuted a few weeks ago. I use it for all my blogs. My travel blog is Number One in travel at IZEARanks.com!

There’s a lot you can do with your RealRank stats. You can check your own blogs stats, compare all your blogs’ stats with each other, compare your blog with other blogs, and more. Here’s how Mrs. Mecomber’s Scrapbook rates:

Hmmm…. looks like I could use some more visitors to boost my ranks, wouldn’t you say? With RealRank, the lower the number the better (as in a #1 RealRank means you are NUMBER ONE!) This blog has a way to go before reaching number one, but I can see where I need to improve, thanks to RealRank. The next photo shows a comparison of my three blogs:

The great thing with RealRank is: the more the merrier! The more blogs that join the IZEARanks community, the more it adds to the value of the entire blogosphere. RealRank is the free tool that measures your place in the community, and lets you (and others) see the value of your blog. It is far superior to any other blog ranking system, ever.

I highly recommend that if you have a blog, use RealRank. It’s very easy to use– it’s a piece of code that you insert in your html, just as you do with stat counters and such. Plus, IZEARanks.com offers a little badge that you can place in your sidebar, to display your RealRank status (you also have the option of keeping your stats private). The time has finally come for us bloggers to have a worthy, standardized blog ranking system. RealRank meets this need. The more bloggers who join, the better our blogs are valuated. Check out IZEARanks.com for more!

Forget all that “eye in the sky” stuff. The Big Brother and Inc. want to follow you everywhere, watching everything you watch! This is unbelievable.

What better way to track people’s video consumption than to have someone follow them around all day — literally from the time they wake up until they retire at night — making detailed notes about when and how they watch, listen, surf, read, play video games, download, text and talk on the phone?

That’s exactly how a new $3.5 million study–funded by the Nielsen Co.–will track the media usage habits of a panel of some 450 consumers in separate phases throughout this year beginning next month.

Some people will do anything for a buck. This is creepy. Do you think there’s anything wrong with being completely monitored for marketing purposes?