Last night before I went to bed I had done a GeoURL neighbors search to see what was registered around Tokyo. This morning I reloaded that search to see what had been added, to my surprise a lot had been taken away. Here's the cache html from last night: last night, and here's the html that just loaded: this morning.
I had noticed last night that some enterprising hotel marketer had plastered GeoURL with links to their hotel web sites (and hundreds of these, all over the world, not just Japan) and thought that while this probably exposed an oversight in the GeoURL design it was certainly a legitimate use of the system. The oversight being that they should have added categories to separate business from personal, etc, so that if you were looking for blogs in a certain area you wouldn't have to wade through links for hotels, coffeeshops and thrift stores.
But now they're all gone. If they were taken away by the original link poster, well OK, but I find it more likely that someone at GeoURL got rid of them. I find this disturbing; It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
It would be easy to add another META tag that Geo-URL could use to do this categorization. That's what they should do rather than start getting picky about who can use the system. Fuck censorship.
Update: I just checked the source for one of the de-listed hootle.com pages and it does indeed still contain the geo.position data that is accepted by GeoURL. I say again: fuck censorship.
Update 2: I emailed Joshua @ GeoURL about this. He says he deleted the hottle.com links because they sent him a file to do a bulk load, and he's going to reload them sometime in the next day or so. Actually the site is going to be down for about 12 hours while he's reworking some stuff. So I guess this isn't a huge consipracy after all :)
Comments