China is no stranger to Internet censorship. The country’s Great Firewall includes many well known sites, but up until now BitTorrent sites have never been blocked.
There was a short blocking incident two years ago when Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay were hijacked and redirected to the leading Chinese search engine, Baidu. However, this issue was solved in a matter of days without an official explanation.
In the years that followed the Chinese government mainly targeted local BitTorrent sites, leaving the previously mentioned sites unharmed. According to reports from isoHunt’s owner Gary Fung, this tolerant stance might have changed as visits from China to isoHunt have plunged dramatically.
The drop in traffic is so significant that any technical difficulties have to be ruled out. Last Saturday, isoHunt had only 1,349 visitors from China compared to 131,362 the week before, a massive 99% decrease.
Despite the signs that this ban of isoHunt is intentional, there hasn’t been any official word from the Chinese authorities on the situation. Whether it has anything to do with the recent P2P site crackdown in China, where the authorities shut down hundreds of local sites including some of the biggest BitTorrent trackers, is unknown.
IsoHunt owner Gary Fung told TorrentFreak that he recommends that Chinese users who want to continue using the site should access it through a foreign proxy. Gary said that China was never a huge source of traffic for his site, but sees the ban as a “big deal” for the ongoing net censorship debate.
Although China’s authorities are not known for their democratic principles, speaking out against the ban might help. “China has flipflopped between site bans, so putting on pressure and people voicing opinions do matter,” Gary added, referring to China’s previous banning and unbanning of websites such as Wikipedia.
In early February reviews of hot new streaming TV site TVGorge.com started appearing.
“If you’re outside of the US and sick of not being able to see good TV online or just tired of waiting for Hulu to get your favorite shows, you’ll want to check out TVGorge and its huge archive of shows,” wrote Lifehacker.
“The amount – and quality – of the content on TVGorge is nothing short of impressive,” wrote TechCrunch. “All episodes from all eight seasons of 24 are on there, for instance, in addition to dozens of episodes of shows like Californication, 30 Rock, Heroes, Lost, CSI, Mad Men, Grey’s Anatomy, The Simpsons, and so on. I counted 128 TV shows on the site.”
TVGorge was an indexing service and didn’t carry any material on its own servers. The site’s engine found sources for new TV episodes stored on other sites and either embedded or linked to the videos found. Users flagged broken links and also added their own links to TV shows.
The videos available via TVGorge came with no geo-lockouts, meaning that anyone worldwide could enjoy them without being bugged by “this show is not available in your area” type messages.
In total TVGorge linked to approximately 5500 episodes, 10,000 embedded videos, offered 60,000 external links, and reached 3 million people a month.
While nearly every review of the site was positive, most contained an element of doubt. Is TVGorge actually legal? Could it survive longer term? The general consensus was ‘no’ and ‘no’. Although it could be argued that the answer to the first question is still possibly up for debate, the latter proved fairly accurate.
Around a week ago, TorrentFreak received information that TVGorge was being threatened with legal action. At that stage the site was still fully operational, but very quickly the situation changed. We are now able to confirm that TVGorge was ordered to cease and desist by the MPAA on behalf of the companies they represent.
“TVGorge has recently been advised to remove all of our indexed content,” said the site’s operators in a statement.
“We understand content owners have a need to protect their content and we can only hope they take the initiative to provide easy access to all of their great TV shows at an international level. If anything, hopefully we have shown them that people are desperately looking for a place to watch their favourite TV shows.”
The site’s operators are remaining upbeat and say they will continue to index streaming sources for the TV shows they list, but of course, these will now link to authorized sources instead with the same restrictions that drove people to sites like TVGorge in the first place.
The new sources for TV shows are slightly less exciting…
Nevertheless, TVGorge won’t stagnate. The site will take on a new shape by becoming a TV guide featuring breaking news, forums, episode guides, TV schedules, show and episode reviews and linking to or embedding authorized sources from around the world.
Although TVGorge’s legal woes may be over, TorrentFreak has been informed that many other streaming sites are also currently the subject of legal threats and unwanted attention.
Considering the seriousness of the situation it would be irresponsible for us to publish the information we have been given without absolute confirmation, but we are told that in one particular case in a European country, a police investigation is underway against a major site. We asked the site and its host questions, particularly since the news we received corresponded directly with some site downtime, but the responses we received were generally pretty vague.
It may well be that their hands are tied. Time will tell.
There has been a lot of talk recently about the new Retweet site that has launched and it has the killer domain Retweet.com. Retweet is a direct competitor to the dominant Tweetmeme, which tracks what the most popular links are on Twitter.
Retweet went live last week and has received a lot of press but for the wrong reasons. Retweet seems to have just completely copied not just the basic site design from Tweetmeme, but also the code with relation to the Retweet buttons. Im a firm believer that innovation is key to a strong technology company, however im not too sure that Retweet has even thought about this.
With a domain name like Retweet. com I would have thought that the first idea would be to start a service similar to Tweetmeme, but to also add a killer domain shortening service to the site. Retweet is a great domain in which im sure Twitter would want to be associated with. Is this such a stupid idea?
There are so many Twitter sponsored tweets businesses popping up all over the net at the moment. The first players were Be-A-Magpie, but im still yet to see much of an adoption for this service. The newest player in the market is SponsoredTweets. SponsoredTweets is a service that does exactly what it says on the box and it is bough to you by the slight dodgy team over at Izea. Izea have launched many services that have caught the eye of the blogosphere and SponsoredTweets is no different.
SponsoredTweets allows early adopters to currently signup and via a special URL (click here for the URL), and then choose whether they want to get paid per tweet or per click. Currently the service is only picking up as many twitter users as possible and they will soon be launching the platform to advertisers.
Im really not too sure if sponsored tweets actually works, because most twitter users dont like sponsored tweets in general, but it is kind of appealing to advertisers. Only time will tell.
Some of you have already noticed that we have added a new advertising option into the sidebar. The services is provided by BuySellAds, and we are currently offering this direct advertising options (300 x 100px) for only $10 per month. There are currently 6 places on offer so be fast. We are hoping that this ad slot will allow startups get some extra promotion for a very cheap price. The stats for the site havent been updated yet, but as a startup you can expect a minimum of 40k ad impressions per month for only $10, bargain!
Back in early November of last year, I preempted the launch of Spottt. Spottt is a free link exchange between sites via a 125 x 125 widget. Spottt is developed by the guys over at Adbrite, so they have a product that needs to work and actually launch into something worthwhile. Since Adbrite has had a lot of VC Funding, they will be really expected to not just launch a product for the sake of it, and actually turn it into a commercial entity.
This brings me to the all important point, is Spottt actually going anywhere? Currently, the site is so simplistic and has a lot of competitors doing exactly the same thing. So where is it unique selling point? If I was the VC in Adbrite who put in a slice of the money, then I would expect an out strategy for Spottt and within a year or two at the most. Will this actually happen? and what features are really missing from Spottt or sites like Spottt?
It is huge news today around the blogosphere that Google PageRanks of large sites have been hurt. DailyBlogTips had some of the first info on the topic and most of the key information was from Andy Beard. Sites penalised are as follows:
Here is a list that I gathered with big blogs that supposedly lost PR on this issue:
Update: It looks like mainstream websites that were selling links were also penalized:
Andy Beard thought the drop was because of text selling which was reported about a week or so ago. This turns out not to be the case.
Duncan Riley over at Techcrunch has reported that Google didnt drop the page ranks because of the selling of text links, but because of link farms. Links farms are where each site in the network provides hundreds of outgoing links on each page of the blog to other blogs in the network, in some cases creating tens, even hundred of thousands of cross links.
This all comes a week after the linking characteristics of Techcrunch was analysed. Where it was reported that 1/3 of all Techcrunch outgoing links where to related Techcrunch sites. Hence, link farms do explain why the Techcrunch page rank hasnt changed, but the Crunchbase ranking is now at 0.
These changes will affect a lot of blog networks that survive on text link ads and related sales that depend on strong Google page ranks. A drop from a PR7 to PR4 should really affect traffic too heavily but it will make the tough job of selling ads much tougher. In the coming months and years I think we will see a lot of small blog networks starting to struggle and trying to find another way to survive.
About 4 months ago now I saw a decrease from a PR4 to a PR1 and I found it difficult to work out why, and about a month ago when Google announced that selling text link ads would bring in a punishment, I finally found out why.
I came across a very interesting site yesterday which is a twist between a link “million dollar homepage” and link group. It is the1000links.com. The site is very basic and quite a good idea. There are 1000 links slots on the page, obviously. The first like was sold for $1 and then the 2nd for $2 and so on. All new links are added at the top of the tree, so in the end if you purchase a link for cheap then it will end up at the bottom of the page. All links purchased will be displayed for 5 years and once the site has been indexed and received a Google Page Rank it will be a great deal more inviting.
Make sure you head over to The1000links and check out this unique spin on a very good idea.
