A perplexed blogger

Philippe Rieffel of the Geospatial Learning @ Primary School project shows a XO-1_Monty laptop.

I took the picture at the State Of The Map conference in Girona, in Spain in July.

The project Geospatial Learning @ Primary School provides a few children with laptop to learn geographical skills, and to contribute to the project Open Street Map in the process.

The OPLC (A XO laptop for every child) project is alive and well. For instance Rwanda will deploy further 100,000 XO laptops until December 2010.

You don’t need to enter the extension of a popular domain on the URL bar on Firefox, just the domain name.

That is, if your broadband provider is not Virgin Media. If it is, then your browser will redirect to a URL like http://advancedsearch.virginmedia.com/assist.php?url=yourdomainname

I seems to be powered by Yahoo. It’s just a search results page. I think they called it advanced error. Well, an error it is, but quite a dumb one. If you enter ‘virginmedia’, the engine does not find… its own customer, Virgin Media.

You may spare yourself all that adverstising by disabling the feature at https://my.virginmedia.com/advancederrorsearch/settings

Quora do not want search engines to publish their content: its robots.txt blocks all indexable URLs, for instance http://www.quora.com/SEO.

User-agent: *
Allow: /$
Allow: /about/
Allow: /jobs
Allow: /challenges
Allow: /press
Allow: /login/
Disallow: /
Disallow: /log
Disallow: /*/log
Disallow: /home/global_feed

It is not a surprise that a growing upstart tries to stand alone without the tail wind that Google provides. Its very selling point to investors is the fact that its uptake of adoption by users is by the social media experience itself.

An interesting paradox of Quora is that it is a social media site posing as a search engine. Its founder believes that “more than 90% of the information people want to know is still not available on the web in a format that’s easy for them to quickly understand”.

Also common to search engines is the focus on dealing with the challenge of duplicated content. Central to Quora is its ability to merge questions to keep uniqueness of the content over time and across topics.

Since SEO is really about efficiently rotate the inventory of content in any database, a fascinating challenge for Quora itself would be to optimize content with the active contribution of its users.