Can someone tell me why FireFox is displaying scripting.com in Chinese characters?

I downloaded Mozilla FireFox on the first day version 1.0 was released. I was impressed and glad. I could finally switch from Internet Explorer to another browser.



However, two days ago things started going wrong. First FireFox started showing little black diamonds on this site.

Yesterday I was reading Dave Winer's daily newsletter in Outlook and clicked on a link to his site. I got the above result - all Chinese characters. It also doesn't matter how I open the site either. Rebooting doesn't help. I've tried changing fonts and default character encoding but that doesn't seem to make any difference.

I've changed back and have made IE my default browser again. It's a bummer...

At the Scripting News Dinner on Monday evening, Ed Alkema told a story about how his company invested in WAP only to find that it was not a viable proposition for a small enterprise to develop applications, because operators had developed their own browsers, and had different interpretations of what was supposed to be a standard.

Adam Curry has pointed out that there is a risk of the same thing happening to the RSS world. Dave Winer agrees.

I am not that technically literate on RSS and Atom, but I do have experience in software development. Looking at a comparison of RSS and Atom, it is probably true that it might be possible to support both RSS and Atom right now. The problem is that they will inevitably start to diverge. RSS is probably not perfect, but it is well-supported, and it works, which is the main thing.

The really bad thing is that Google (through their subsidiary blogger.com) is trying to force Atom on the blog community by not supporting RSS on the more than a million blogs they host.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with having rival technologies. In the end the marketplace and (sometimes) the better technology wins. Given the huge installed base and wide support for RSS, Atom probably wouldn't have much chance. I think that is possibly why Google is trying to force the issue.

Google might be a small company, but it has a huge influence on the Internet. Companies literally spend tens of thousands of dollars to improve their ranking on Google searches. That's how important Google is perceived as being. If your site does not get listed on Google because it supports RSS and Google wants Atom, you have a big problem.

I'm getting anxious that Google might be beginning to emulate Microsoft's methods. It's hard to have faith in the neutrality of a search engine company when it is obviously partisan. I think Adam's concerns are justified.

I think this is an interesting new concept: Until now the web may have been world-wide, but mainly in the virtual rather than the physical sense. There was no link from websites to their geographic locations. It doesn't always make sense to tie a website to a geographic location, of course. But even if it doesn't make sense, it can be fun anyway. And for many sites such as blogs, organizations and business it does make sense.

You might have noticed the small GeoURL button on this page. The button displays a list of websites that are geographically near to me.

The GeoURL database is simply a list of websites and their corresponding longitudes/latitudes. [Okay, so someone could use this to target an ICBM at you, but why would they?]

To add your site to their database you have to add a few meta tags to the header of your index page. You can find information about how to do that on the GeoURL main page.

I found it harder than I thought to find out my coordinates. There are a list of sites that can do this for you on GeoURL, but I found multimap.com to be the easiest to use.



Click to show the map in MultiMap.