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New Media News Every Morning

American companies selling racist magazines in Japan

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japanracistJapanese companies owned by American firms, including Seven-Eleven, Yahoo! and Amazon are selling racist magazines in Japan.

According to a Bloomberg Report, a magazine titled “Gaihin Hanzai Ura Fairu” or “Secret Foreigner Crimes”, includes a cover in red and black with caricatured images of foreigners grinning manically with glowing red eyes, and includes articles such as “Chase the Iranian!” and as Joi Ito recently noted on his blog, a photo (above right) with the caption “”Oi Nigger! Don’t be touching a Japanese girl’s ass!”.

Japanese firm FamilyMart has stopped selling the magazine following customer complaints, however it is still available for purchase from Amazon.co.jp and Seven and Y Corp, an online bookshop 50.8% owned by Seven-Eleven and 31.3% by Yahoo!.

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Originally posted on February 7, 2007 @ 12:48 am

Blogger Users unhappy

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bloggerBlogger users unhappy in 2004 2005 20062007

In another case of all that is old is new again, users of Google’s Blogger service are unhappy (again), complaining that the service has suffered from repeated outages, feature malfunctions and data loss.

Computerworld reports that the problems are “particularly frustrating” to bloggers who recently migrated to the latest version of blogging on the expectation that the new platform would be more reliable than the old platform, which had a history of…. repeated outages, feature malfunctions and data loss.

Blogger users reported problems including*

  • Mysterious gremlins with faces like Marissa Myer and Matt Cutts eating blog entries,
  • Being bared from posting comments because unlike most other users of the service, they didn’t have 100 spam blogs hosted there
  • wonky RSS because all of a sudden 5000 other Blogger users stopped reposting their content
  • Little or no response from Google to support requests, with some users still waiting for responses dating back to 2004

Are you a non spam blogging Blogger user suffering problems with the service, let us know, I’m sure we can find someone to fix the problem for you…with WordPress :-)

*Yes, I’ve taken the liberty of juicing the story up a little bit, after all, who wants to read the exact same story that has been covered extensively every year, and just about every single month since Google bought Blogger. Nothing changes, but I would like to see a Matt Cutts gremlin :-)

 

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Originally posted on February 6, 2007 @ 6:35 pm

Warner Music announces Last.fm deal

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lastfmWarner Music Group and Last.fm, one of the leading Web 2.0 social music sites, have signed a deal to allow Warner’s entire music catalogue to be played legally on the Last.fm streaming service.

Last.fm is similar to Pandora (my personal favorite in this space) in that it recommends songs by tracking your music-playing habits and suggests and plays new music based on other users with similar tastes.

According to Reuters, Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel said the site was in were in talks with the other three major labels and content holders.

 

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Originally posted on February 6, 2007 @ 4:59 pm

“Lustful gentleman” and friends result in Vietnamese blog investigation

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vietnam“Black Blogs”, blogs that partake in “questionable materials” such as “sexual images and language” have resulted in a new investigation into this perverted form of internet abuse by the Investigation Agency of the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture.

According to Vietnam Net Bridge, Mr. Vu Xuan Thanh, Chief Investigator for the Ministry, said that blogs in Vietnam are growing too fast for the Ministry of Culture and Information to manage and that consequently, the agency has recently dispatched a team to research blogs in order to find out ways for the Government to manage them.

He noted that although blogs are not illegal in Vietnam, that Regulation 55 and Circular 02 issued by the Ministry of Culture and Information prohibits Internet content that are the opposite to social and Communist Party values.

Blogs noted as containing “questionable material” include a blog by “Lustful Gentleman”, who is rather impartial to sex, and another blog by the name of “conxion’s world” who has “sexual pictures” some of which “are too much for words”.

 

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Originally posted on February 6, 2007 @ 2:41 am

Hands up if you’ve heard of Wretch?

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Anyone heard of Wretch? I hadn’t until today either, check the bottom right hand corner of this chart from the ebuiquty report on spam blogs:

chart2

Wretch.cc. Some sort of social networking/ blogging outfit that is registered in Taiwan and seems popular in the Chinese community, although their main page is in English. An Alexa ranking of 30! 15-20% of all legit blogging content being created according to the chart above is coming from Wretch.cc! If anyone knows anything more about this site, share in the comments…I just hate it when something gets this big and I’ve never heard of it before :-)

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Originally posted on February 4, 2007 @ 8:59 pm