Censorship. If you've ever had the experience of trying to access the Internet from within the Great Firewall of China, you'll know all about it. You may have also heard about the new censorship policy at Twitter where shortened URLs can be blocked on a country-to-country basis. Well, it looks like Google is following suit. with its Blogger platform.

Despite the rise of alternatives like WordPress, Blogger remains one of the most popular blogging platforms out there. It can be great for Internet marketers, for instance, who want to set up multiple "mini" blogs that approach different niches.

The trouble now is that Google will redirect visitors based on their IP address to a country-specific version of Blogger for each blog. If you happen to be in India and try to access http://username.blogger.com, for example, you'll automatically get redirected to http://username.blogger.in. If that blog happens to be censored in India, you'll hit a roadblock.

That's the bad news. The good news is, unlike Twitter's censorship, Blogger is giving you a way to get around those redirect. All you have to do is append the URL with /ncr/ at the end. So, you would visit http://username.blogger.com/ncr/ if you wanted "No Country Redirect." This won't affect bloggers in the United States all that much, but it could mean that you may end up limiting your audience if you get censored for whatever reason somewhere else in the world.

Twitter now has followers as well as lists. We might have came across profiles having many followers and few lists. I would measure a twitter user strength based on the list. Many lists someone is on will prove that much more useful the person's tweets are rather than looking into the follower count. The twitter lists are more influencial because the lists are places where there is active participations. A list with people would probably get more listeners than the usual followers. The follower count can be increased while the list count comes when someone adds us to his/her list of a selected list of followers.I have recently came across a structure on how twitter will weight the list.

The above structure shows that list can be as effective just like sitelinks of a website which is an authority measure of that particular website in search engine. What are you thoughts about Twitter lits ? Please share you thoughts as comments or get in touch with me through my twitter.

There had been lot of buzz in the internet world as Google started their new Google Buzz service. There was lot of negativity spread regarding the new Google service. Gmail Buzz privacy was one among then. The latest news is that Google started to index real time updates from myspace as well as Google Buzz.

Twitter has recently started to use no follow attribute to links that are being tweeted. Many famous twitter users including Andy Beard has joined Google Buzz. This is a quick change fromTwitter and it seems to be a bad decision as well. The no follow will make the tweets hard to get indexed and the tweets which get indexed will be lost very soon.Andy Beard has written a post on Twitter Alzheimers.I have also started my own Google Buzz as I feel that this is the right time to join Google Buzz.You can now follow me on my Google Buzz account along with my twitter account. Hope this will help my real time updates get saved in such a way that I can refer them back whenever I need them.

A lot of rumours are being displayed in real time search results due to the real time search integration to search engine results. The false information are being promoted virally through twitter and other real time social media. How search engines would prevent this type of false information being displayed on their real time search results is not yet clear.

Search Engine's should come up with a new technology like Page Rank which I do like to call as Social Rank. The tweets that come online at real time in search engines should be based on the Social Rank. The social rank of each profile must be based on the credibility of the users social presence and interaction.

I hope that this way we can really get the correct news at the right time. Real time search should provide the correct news not just the real time data which might be false information.

In the morning on feburary 3rd, 2010 TV channels created a flutter airing incorrect information about the death of popular movie star in malaylam and it was tweeted virally. The real time search started showing the false information. At 1pm the channels said they regretted airing the false news but within this time the news had virally reached to thousands of people around the world.

The TCS hack was in the real time search results today. The website was hacked by a french hacker according to relevant sources and the domain was put to sale.

Real time search have its own merits as well as demerits like any other technology. Search Engines needs to ensure that they start measuring the Social Rank of each profile rather than the Page Rank which seems to be an irrelevant source to measure credibility.

Do you think Search Engines should measure Social Rank? Tell us what you think

Matt Cutts have given the answer on how Google will rate the links from Facebook and Twitter. Here is the question that was asked to Matt Cutts "Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?". Matt says that Google will treat the links in the same manner whether it is from Facebook or Twitter, as if they were from any other site. The PageRank formula applies to all. The most important factor that is taken into PageRank is the reputation of the backlinks rather than the number of backlinks. Yes, quality really matters not the quantity. You must get your backlinks from relavant resources which have high reputation. Google will use a similar method to rank the tweets.

The links might still take time to pass PageRank as facebook has lot of private profile and links from this profiles will not get crawled by the search engines. The links from twitter are nofollow as of now. This doesn't mean that search engines will not consider the links at all. All the tweets are getting crawled and some tweets are even getting ranked. There are chances that the microlinks will pass relavant information to the search engines. The response of Matt Cutts is what most of the SEO's and Webmasters were expecting but now it is straight from the expert's mouth and we do have to take it into our strategy. We need to think whether to use a uncrawled platform or a nofollow platform.

Facebook has now come up with a feature similar to retweet. The feature is called "share". This seems to be Facebook's answer to Twitter's "retweet". This will help facebook to emerge as a platform where content can be shared and viral marketing can be made use of just like Twitter. Twitter feature of lists as well as upcoming feature of Contributors will make twitter a strong platform to market content on the web through social media. Google have already started ranking twitter lists just like tweets.There will be more improved features coming in the social media as the competition between Facebook and Twitter grows.