Google began to redirect the blogspot.com traffic to specific national locations. So far, dozens of nations are affected, aside from the original three, especially:
Australia: motls.blogspot.com.auSee the diverse URLs in the last 100 TRF visits. The United States will keep their "global" dotcom suffix in order to appreciate that Al Gore, a child of America, has invented the Internet.
New Zealand: motls.blogspot.co.nz
India: motls.blogspot.in
Canada: motls.blogspot.ca
United Kingdom: motls.blogspot.co.uk
Germany: motls.blogspot.de
France: motls.blogspot.fr
Spain: motls.blogspot.com.es
Japan: motls.blogspot.jp
Brazil: motls.blogspot.com.br
Mexico: motls.blogspot.mx
Argentina: motls.blogspot.com.ar
Italy: motls.blogspot.it
Portugal: motls.blogspot.pt
Sweden: motls.blogspot.se
Additions from early May 2012: redirected since June 1st
Czechia: motls.blogspot.cz
Slovakia: motls.blogspot.sk
Austria: motls.blogspot.co.at
Hungary: motls.blogspot.hu
Switzerland: motls.blogspot.ch
Denmark: motls.blogspot.dk
Netherlands: motls.blogspot.nl
Belgium: motls.blogspot.be
Romania: motls.blogspot.ro
Ireland: motls.blogspot.ie
Norway: motls.blogspot.no
Finland: motls.blogspot.fi
Greece: motls.blogspot.gr
Israel: motls.blogspot.co.il
Hong Kong: motls.blogspot.hk
Singapore: motls.blogspot.sg
Taiwan: motls.blogspot.tw
Korea: motls.blogspot.kr
New countries are likely to be added into this list in the future. I hope that some readers who are keen tourists have already visited the branches of TRF in the whole world! My work shouldn't change; the only difference is that I will have to write every blog entry 193 times (assuming that countries outside the United Nations will have no TRF). Exactly one-half of the (7.2 million) TRF visitors came from the U.S.; TRF has been visited by people in 231 countries (see the last animated counter in the right sidebar of the TRF main page, play with it).
The purpose of these new domains is for Google to be able to impose legal restrictions of the content on a country-specific basis.
For example, if it were hypothetically illegal in the country of freedom called Iran to post blog entries informing the population that Allah is a silly superstition and the country's political and religious leaders are medieval bigots and jerks who should be shot, Iran may request Google to block a particular blog entry and only allow the rest of this blog which is totally kosher, even for hardcore Muslim bigots who really need everything to be kosher. ;-)
(I know it's "halal" in the truly kosher ternminology, it was supposed to be a joke.)
There's almost no problem with the new domains except for one thing: the Echo/JS-Kit "fast" commenting system (previously Haloscan) divides the commenting into different national groups, too. I will try to convince them to translate the URLs to "dotcom" but there's a fix now:
The only known fix for Australians and others who want to see the "global" discussion at motls.blogspot.com is to open the following URL:
motls.blogspot.com/ncrwhere "ncr" stands for "no country redirect". You may also get to this URL by clicking at the big title "the reference frame" at the top of this blog at any moment. You may also prevent redirect for individual pages; "ncr" always comes right after ".com", e.g.
motls.blogspot.com/ncr/2012/03/what-skeptics-of-climate-catastrophe.htmlBy using this URL, you should be able to view the old-fashioned global The Reference Frame instead of The Australian Reference Frame or the Deutsch Bezugsssystem, and participate in the global discussions. I hope that the *.com address remains in place even if you click at something in the archive. Incidentally, the ncr trick also works for google.com itself. There are many more countries in which the Google traffic (the search engine) is redirected. If you don't want the google.cz where you're redirected from google.com in Czechia, open
google.com/ncrThanks to Tom of Perth
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