April 26, 2006
first it was google…
Now it seems China is blocking Technorati.
Anybody?
[UPDATE:] Looks like it was only a rumor. Good news.
Hugh MacLeod
I'm a cartoonist.
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Until now it’s been Big Boys iwth Deep Wallets. Now they’re after the minnows. Not the point — that’s a financial measure. They’re going after the influencers. Radically different.
Hmm… this is interesting.
If you leave aside any freedom-of-speech angle for a second, you have to realize:
1. Technorati ceases to be useful *at all* if it censors things. A search engine with a gatekeeper can be better or worse for it, but a folksonomist with a gatekeeper is just plain broken.
2. The Chinese government, insofar as they want to block things that don’t self-censor, pretty well has to block it, since it’s *exactly* the kind of service that would call unwanted attention to undesirable reports on unhappy developments in China, in real time. If you don’t block the likes of Technorati, you might as well throw in the censorship towel.
If I were running the Great Firewall, I’d be smarter about this sort of thing. Instead of blocking something like Technorati, I’d selectively censor their content. Imagine a Great Greasemonkey User Script…
Anyway, getting around this kind of thing is easy on one level. It’s trivial to take, say, a Technorati RSS feed and put it on your blog without resorting to any client-side calls to their servers. That’s so, like, Perl4.
But that raises another, potentially scarier possibility:
What if your censoring body doesn’t just block Technorati, but rather uses it as an index of what else to block?
It’s important to remember that in the whole China-Internet debate, there are people on the Chinese Government side trying to be the Whac-a-Mole champions just like there are on the other side. And I’d be surprised if they were less convinced of the rightousness of their cause.
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whac-A-Mole
Funny: http://www.spymuseum.org/games/mole.html
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