The other day, I had a fright when my Blogger blog was not able to load. Single posts were fine but the homepage couldn’t load except for the header and sidebar. All my posts (content) were missing from the homepage. I thought that it was because of a widget or some script that I have placed on the sidebar was not loading so I accessed another Blogger blog of mine that uses the same widgets, scripts and set up the same way as this blog. it worked fine.

When I have given it enough time and tried using different browsers, including from my smart phone, and it still wouldn’t load, I was desperate and decided to check Google discussion board to see if anyone else is facing the same problem.

Reading about other people’s problems with their Blogger blogs gave me a chill. Many say that their blogs have been marked as spam. That could be a false alert and the blogger has to submit an appeal. However, there are some who says that their entire blog is missing from their Blogger dashboard and they are not able to access the blog at all. It is so strange. And as a Blogger.com user, it is certainly very scary! Even if a blog is deleted by Blogger because of violation of terms of use or something, I believe the owner will be informed. But to have the entire blog missing…

YouTube was unblocked by authorities in Turkey over the weekend, after two long years that it has been blocked in the country. It should be good news to the youth of the country, who I am sure love the stuff that youth in other countries love as well, including YouTube.

But even as the 2009 court order to block it has been put aside, authorities once again blocked it without any reason. Funnily, the block was removed ONCE more, though authorities are still demanding that videos considered insulting to the Republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk be removed. I wonder if they know that these videos are no longer live.

YouTube, on the other hand, is trying to restore those videos, as they would like other governments to see that this is not a company to be bullied and they cannot go around removing content from their website just because a government says so. However, they are willing to block access to certain videos from certain ranges of IPs.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this will all end up. I don’t know how those videos are but it’s not good to publish anything that offends others, right?

Google has sent out email announcement to Gmail users regarding the settlement of its recent Google Buzz lawsuit that was brought on by a group of Google Buzz users. they claimed that their privacy has been violated.

Apart from making changes to Google Buzz, as part of the settlement, Google will also create a US$8.5 million fund, where the majority of the money will go towards organisations focused on internet privacy education and policies. Google has also pledged to work harder towards educating users about the privacy aspects of Google Buzz.

I find it weird that although Google has sent out a mass email to Gmail users, I still haven’t receive the email yet, though my family members, who also use Gmail, already received it and have forwarded to me to read.