GoDaddy Joins Google China Boycott : Stops Selling .CN Domains

Never one to back down from a chance to gain publicity, GoDaddy.com has announced that like Google, it too will be halting operations in China. I’m not sure how much of a percentage of the Chinese market uses GoDaddy, but this seems to be a serious announcement by the domain registration and hosting company.

If anything, the decision by GoDaddy will limit its reselling of .CN domain names more than anything. Less .CN’s on the market? This could be a good thing.

WashingtonPost.com reports

GoDaddy.com Inc., the world’s largest domain name registration company, told lawmakers Wednesday that it will cease registering Web sites in China in response to intrusive new government rules that require applicants to provide extensive personal data, including photographs of themselves.

The rules, the company believes, are an effort by China to increase monitoring and surveillance of Web site content and could put individuals who register their sites with the firm at risk. The company also believes the rules will have a “chilling effect” on new domain name registrations.

and from the Godaddy announcement :

“There appears to be a recent increase in China’s surveillance and monitoring of the Internet activities of its citizens,” said Christine Jones, general counsel for Go Daddy, at the Congressional- Executive Commission on China (CECC).

Jones said the new Chinese policies required every website owner to submit photographs, business information and individually signed forms, as well as their physical address, email address and telephone numbers.
“We didn’t want to act as an agent of the Chinese government,” Jones said. “We can’t let them be strong and us be weak all the time. We just have to stop it, and then we’ll start offering .CN domain names again.”

Source:- http://www.searchenginejournal.com/godaddy-china-google/19364/

Compare Google Caffeine

Search Google & their new sandbox version Google (Caffeine) at the same time and compare results on one single page. See what this new version of Google offers. Some noticeable points is you will see that the rendering speed is reduced. More about the changes can be read on the google webmaster blog post

http://www.comparecaffeine.com/

Browser Size: a tool to see how others view your website

In a newspaper, the most important story is featured on the front page. If it's a really important piece, then it's placed "above the fold," which means you can find it on the top half of the first page — the bottom half is folded behind and isn't readily seen when you first look at the newspaper.

The same concept applies to browsers as well. There's no clear line for "above the fold" on a browser — there are many different sizes of monitors, browsers are not always full screen and other things like toolbars can take up space. Consider a "Donate" button on a non-profit site. If it's far down the page, you may not see it when you first view the page. You can of course scroll downwards, but many people don't scroll and will miss it entirely. For example, on the download page for Google Earth, the install rate increased by 10% when we moved the "Download" button 100 pixels upward. We can attribute that increase to users who wanted to try out Google Earth, but didn't see the button before.

To help you understand how everyone sees your website, we created a tool called Browser Size in our 20% time. Browser Size is based on a sample of data from visitors to google.com. Special code collects data on the height and width of the browser for a sample of users. For a given point in the browser, the tool will tell you what percentage of users can see it. For example, if an important button is in the 80% region it means that 20% of users have to scroll in order to see it. If you're a web designer, you can use Browser Size to redesign your page to minimize scrolling and make sure that the important parts of the page are always prominent to your audience. We hope people will use this tool to make their websites better, in turn making the web better for everyone.



source:-http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/browser-size-tool-to-see-how-others.html