China has the highest number of Internet users in the world along with a booming economy and that explains why American web companies like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft co-operate wholeheartedly with the Chinese government in implementing internet censorship there.
For instance, Google shows a different set of search results in China to keep the communists happy, Microsoft is known to block blog entries that contain banned keywords while Yahoo has been accused of helping Beijing arrest an innocent journalist by providing details of his personal email account.
While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies – US Congress to Yahoo.
But there are exceptions.
Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress blogging software, faced a similar moral dilemma in 2006 when China suddenly blocked access to all WordPress.com blogs inside the mainland.
Matt told AFP that ban on WordPress in China could have been lifted had he agreed to block certain words or topics and give up information to the Chinese communist government about [WordPress] users.
I started thinking about the DNA of the company. That sort of company is not one I would wake up every day and feel passionate about working in.
Unlike other giants, WordPress took a more ethical stand refusing to comply with the Chinese diktats and WP blogs therefore still remain blocked in China. The situation is likely to stay the same forever unless China relaxes their censorship laws which again sounds like a remote possibility.
Also see: How is WordPress Making Money
Some workarounds
The advantage with blogs is that they all provide RSS feeds so you can easily read any blog using a web based feed readers even if the main WordPress site is blocked.
In case of WordPress blogs, you can append the string ".nyud.net" to the blog URL and it should open just fine. For instance, if the main blog is located at labnol.wordpress.com, you can access a mirror image of this site from labnol.wordpress.com.nyud.net. If that doesn’t solve the problem, here are some more ways to access blocked sites.
Wordpress.com blogs now support "post by email" so Chinese bloggers can publish new content on WordPress blogs using any of the email programs.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/ban-on-wordpress-blogs-in-china/8913/
Tags: Archives, blocked, censorship, china, wordpress, Internet
Reader Comments
The Chinese will be losing all the benefits of Wordpress then. That’s pathetic somehow as it in one way or another violates human rights to grow by blogging.
Written by Harris on 06.01.09
Twitter,bing,flickr,Blogger,Live and so on, all have been blocked. Ever so angry!
Written by daniel on 06.03.09
Hmm..
Compare to China, cell phone (handset) is really costly in India, but still because of the connection cost is really really low, hence I see India with 400 million users, is he second highest in cell phone compare to China, which is in 1st with 650 million.
Price of a mobile device is so low in china that any child can buy one, where as in India at-least USD 15 needs to spend for a device..
Same applies for Internet. If in India also, we can find really cheap devices (PC platform) to get online, along with cheap internet connection, I am sure the numbers will change..
One more thing, the CNN article points that they are counting mobile browsing as Internet usage, so I wonder, how many of 400 million mobile (only mobile by the way) subscribers of India are using EDGE or GPRS ?? Thing to note is, although mobile connections (only connection, no handset) are damn cheap in India (sim cards are almost free by the way), but using DATA services in Mobile platform is that much costly !!!
Written by Choto Cheeta on 06.03.09
apparently China wants to keep it old school, Web 1.0, until further notice
Written by Smokey on 06.03.09