Reviews – Page 67

When you get into web developing, or are just contemplating buying hosting for a blog, one question that many of you have is to know what hosting service your favorite blogs use. To do this, I generally used to run a whois search on the domain, and check their nameservers. That generally gives the answer. I use Network Solutions’ whois query service. Agreed that it isn’t the fastest-loading site, but it’s available all the time. Many smaller whois query service providers go down sooner or later because of automated systems which abuse their service.

The nameservers themselves might not give a direct answer always. GoDaddy for instance uses secureserver.net or domaincontrol.com as the nameservers for domains hosted / parked with it. There are a few others too who do this. For those, you’d then need to search it up online.

Which brings me to this new service I came across recently. Simple and no-nonsense Who Is Hosting This. Try it. Handy tool, and plain old fun to find out which hosting provider your favorite sites use.

PS – BTW, this is NOT a sponsored post. :p

I never thought a day would come when I would need to write a third part to this impromptu series, but arrive it did. I was reading Living Digital today (September 2008 issue), and came across this piece on things to do (read: waste time) online.

Again, it gave a link to wikipedia.com

My first reaction was “Ah, now I can do a follow-up saying that even guys can get it wrong”. Really. That WAS my first thought – to show that anyone can get things wrong. I flipped over to see who’d written the article and to my surprise (?)

…it was somebody called Richa Sharma

Obviously some chick. Now when topics like these come up, people always jump up and start preaching about political correctness. ‘Political correctness’, IMO, is pure bullcrap. It also brings up the question of stereotypes – and something I said about that earlier – stereotypes exist for a reason. Bongs have funny accents when speaking English. All Tamilians like Rajni. Girls don’t follow tech that much. Screw political correctness. This is real life. In real life, it just happens.

Coming back to this journo in Living Digital, it wasn’t a one-off error either. At another point in the article, she’s talking about online avatar sites. And she links to some sites specifically stating that you can create avatars at these places. And which is the first URL?

secondlife.reuters.com

That’s Reuters’ friggin news page on happenings in Second Life, not the link to original site which should’ve been given (see the context of the article). That simply shows shoddy research. I’m not a bigot, but incidents like these make subscribers feel chicks would be better of staying in Living Digital‘s review pages as eye-candy than writing stories.

Update: Check out this month’s PC Quest. It’s a publication from the same media house as Living Digital (Cybermedia). PC Quest conducts an annual survey of brand power of different IT brands / categories – something which is highly respected in the industry (apparently). They’ve a category for ‘Best Blogging Service’. The winner is Blogger.com, and the runner-up is Blogspot.com. Get a clue – they’re the same friggin’ service! Not a typo, because they’ve gone into a whole analysis of ‘brand persuasion’ and ‘brand pull’ between the two even when they’re the same bloody service. Makes you wonder about how much they even KNOW about what they’re writing. You could talk of TypePad.com (the second runner-up) and Vox.com (another service from TypePad’s parent company SixApart) as two different services and compare them; but not the above two. Which shows that PC Quest’s India’s Favourite IT Brands survey is TRASH.

Mentioning the fact that they always referred to brands as loosing their market share (instead of losing their market share) – and the fact that they called Wikipedia.com a search engine – are just extra nails in their coffin.