I received an email this morning from Ken Carroll of ChinesePod telling me that China has blocked Technorati at the great firewall – it would appear that Technorati will no longer be available to anyone to use in China.
Co-incidentally, when I interviewed Technorati’s CEO David Sifry on the PodLeaders show a couple of weeks back, Ken submitted the following question for David –
Do you have a China strategy? What do you foresee there in terms of blogging and blog search?
Does this mean Technorati isn’t censoring search results into China like Google, MSN, Yahoo are? And if this is the case, will Technorati now have to start doing the Chinese government’s censorship job for them if they wish to be seen in China once more?
I have posted about this topic in the past and, in my naive opinion, unless all the search engines come together to formulate a common China strategy, China will continue to pick them off one by one.
UPDATE:
I see the Mad About Shanghai blog is also reporting that Technorati is being blocked in China.
FURTHER UPDATE – it looks like a couple of sites are now reporting that Technorati is available once more in China – can anyone else confirm that?
Comments
63 responses to “China blocks Technorati”
I live on Technorati. I’m an addict who visits it 20 times a day! I can access it via a proxy, but that’s a pain. I guess I’ll be using Feedster or Icerocket now. It’s just that Technorati just has that brand – somehow more attractive than the others!
Who knos what will happen? In China anything could change tomorrow. I wouldn’t be surprised if Technorai was back in a day or two. On the other hand, it could be permanent.
Ironically, this is a bit like being banned by Google – happned to me last year on another site. Nothing you can do or say, just wait and see.Nor do the people who ban you give you the vaguest hope of an explanation.
It’s hard to imagine what Technorati were nailed for. I’ll get someone to comb the Chinese blogosphere to see why they were banned.
[…] Según comenta Loic en su blog, China ha bloqueado el acceso a Technorati pasando a formar parte del Gran Firewall de la censura. […]
first it was google…
… now it seems China is blocking Technorati. Anybody?…
Report: China net authorities blocking Technorati
On his blog today, Tom Raftery reports that net-censor authorities in China have blocked access to Technorati. Link (thanks, Damien)…
[…] Tom’s post on China blocking Technorati just got BoingBoing‘d. Hopefully it won’t be the last time for a post by Tom. Tom’s out back now having a post-boingboing’d smoke. As you do in those instances I’m told. Technorati Tags: blogs boingboing censor china ireland irish irishblogs technorati […]
[…] More here and also on here […]
Yep, same thing happened to WordPress.com a few months ago. We even came back for a few days, then were banned again. It’s pretty hard to figure out who to contact about it.
What I did notice though was while our traffic disappeared from China, we started seeing huge bursts from other Asian countries like Singapore which I suspect is people coming to us through proxies.
[…] Tom Raftery reports that China is blocking Technorati. I agree with Tom, the search engines need to group together to figure out a “China strategy”, and take into account China’s human rights violations in their quest for profits. […]
As for WordPress.com, same thing happened to Typepad once or twice…
http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/news/2005/06/typepad_in_chin.html
[…] China has banned Technorati via their Great Firewall. Permanent Link […]
The block probably follows the same logic that the recent NYT article on Google discussed, specifically:
Technorati is not particularily popular in China so it will be interesting to see how they react.
[…] 作为在Bloglines里订阅我的Blog的读者，女儿å?¯èƒ½æ³¨æ„?到了，我曾ç»?åœ¨å‡ ç¯‡æ–‡ç« é‡ŒåŠ äº†ä¸€äº›Technoratiçš„Tag（比如这篇），å?¯æ˜¯æ²¡å¤šä¹…之å?Žæˆ‘就没有å†?åŠ äº†ï¼Œå› ä¸ºæ²³åŒ—ç½‘é€šå·²ç»?ä¸?能æ£å¸¸è¿žæŽ¥Technorati了，而å?ªèƒ½é€šè¿‡åŒ¿å??代ç?†æ‰?能以缓慢的速度æµ?览。å‰?å‡ å¤©æˆ‘ä¸€ç›´ä»¥ä¸ºæ˜¯æˆ‘è‡ªå·±çš„é—®é¢˜ï¼Œä½†çŽ°åœ¨å¥½åƒ?全国的Technorati都是被å°?æ?€çš„状æ€?，ç»?大部分ä¸å›½çš„Blogger都ä¸?能使用Technoratiçš„æœ?务了。 […]
[…] Apparently China has blocked all access to Technorati at the Great Firewall. Does anyone else think that China is getting out of hand? What really ticked me off was Yahoo! Mail cooperating with them.read more | digg story Bookmark this postThese icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
It shows up in search results from google.cn – for whatever that’s worth.
Repost of a comment that may or may not show up on GapingVoid, whence I linked in here:
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
China blocks Technorati
With another step towards internet-censorship, China has blocked Technorati.
Tom Raftery repor…
…
Bizarrely, the itunes uk music store has been offline for about a week now (or at least it can’t be accessed from Beijing).
[…] China Blocks Technorati – News from Tom Rafferty (via TechCrunch) […]
“Great Firewall” blockt Technorati in China
Während sich Google und Yahoo auf einen Deal mit den chinesischen Zensurbehörden eingelassen haben, um im Land der Mitte präsent sein zu können, ist von der Weblog-Suchmaschine Technorati nichts dergleichen bekannt geworden. Offensichtlich folgt nu…
Technorati access has been slow and patchy in China for quite a while. Over past few months, sometimes I can access it, sometimes I can’t. Depends on what mood the Chinese Government Net Nannies are in. Given that we have just gone through a “sensitive time” politically (Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to the U.S.), no big surprise that they would shut off the taps for a while.
P.S. Incidentally, if we managed to attract enough attention that the Chinese government saw fit to block us, we would wear it as a badge of honour! But then that’s just us…
An update from Rick Segal, via gapingvoid:
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002793.html
Our site, Blogsome had a couple of thousand bloggers from China until it was blocked last summer. In an upgrade we changed IP address – it took them about 2 weeks to block it again.
[…] La notizia è lanciata da Tom Raftery che spiega anche il perchè di questa scelta da parte del governo cinese: Technorati infatti non ha apportato censure sui propri risultati delle ricerche come hanno fatto Google, MSN e Yahoo! in base alle richieste cinesi. […]
Japanese Technorati has not banned yet, you may use it instead of original Technorati.(but JP ver. doesn’t have enough function like original one..)
Switching to Firefox, switching to Schwartz and falling pieces
In today’s IT Blogwatch, we look at being paid to swap browsers and the new Sun CEO. Not to mention time flies, tetrus style …
[…] Technorati has been reported to be blocked by the Great Firewall fo China. Other Chinese bloggers made the same observations but it’s not fully confirmed yet. […]
[…] Technorati and China is the hot words today, just several days after the New York Time’s article about Google’s China problem, we just have another case for the censorship in China, and I also got emails to ask me to confirm the rumor. […]
Technorati is back in China today.
[…] Most recently technorati has been blocked, and I even though Bloglines was blocked. Instead Bloglines is working at home, but not at work. I am not sure it is blocked by my company, it could be the ISP that’s blocking it. So I might have to switch to another online rss reader. […]
[…] Enquanto aqui estão todos os blogueiros reunidos, tentando fazer da blogosfera brasileira um lugar melhor para viver, tentando colocar o brasil nos top 100 do technorati. Lá o bixo está pegando. Que ridículo! Explore posts in the same categories: Tecnologia […]
works very well for me today!!!
[…] China’s great firewall has apparently blocked Technorati blog search according to sources such as IT Views and Chinese Pod. […]
[…] TomRaftery在IT Views 写到 : […]
[…] You can also see more on this topic over at I.T Views […]
I can access to it now.I’m in china
I can confirm it can be accessed from China
Technorati终于被��
　　Technorati是一个著å??çš„å?šå®¢æ?œç´¢å¼•æ“Žï¼Œæˆªæ¢2006å¹´4月，Technoratiå·²ç»?索引了超过3å?ƒ4百万个å?šå®¢ç«™ç‚¹ã€‚å?¯ä»¥è¯´ï¼ŒTechnoratiå·²ç»?æˆ?为世界上最é‡?è¦?的一个Blogæ?œç´¢å¼•æ“Žã€‚　　Technorati在2006年西å?—西韅
Technorati GFWed
两天å‰?vAnsæ??到的Technorati抽风事件æŒ?ç»è‡³ä»Šã€‚其实…虽然并ä¸?希望看到事情的å?‘生，然而从目å‰?的情况以å?Šå??æ˜ æ?¥çœ‹ï¼ŒTechnorati最终还是被GFW了。
�就��，�是MS这次�得还真彻底。在月充
Just to keep you informed, Technorati is down again in China. It was restored for a few days last week, but it disappeared again. This is just just conjecture, but it could be soemthing to do with lead up to the Tiananmen anniversary on June 4th. Hopefully after that things will return to normal.
I really miss my Technorati.
Btw, have you seen http://www.sphere.com/? It’s so so right now, but it looks promising.
[…] Technorati non si cala le braghe! Technorati è oscurato in Cina perchè non ha censurato i suoi contenuti come hanno fatto gli altri cala-braghe Google, Yahoo e Msn. Non avevo mai sentito parlare prima del “GreatFirewall”..:-) Sti cinesi hanno la mania delle grandi muraglie.. http://www.tomrafteryit.net/china-blocks-technorati/ […]
It useless to say anything,what you can do is only wait……
Do not wish real freedom in china.
[…] Sphere is the newest player on the blog search engine block, only coming out of beta last weekend. The search is adequate – I searched for “technorati blocked by China“, a story I broke here and was heavily linked to and quoted as a result, but my post on this is not found by Sphere. The searches I subscribed to using Sphere again didn’t return as many results as the other search engines and did contain some spam! […]
Everything were controlled,even people’s breathe.
it works well early time,but today, I cant access technorati.com !
The right to Technorati in China…service improves…
To commemorate China’s winning a seat on the new UN Human Rights Council, the government has now banned Technorati as an example of good practice of that well-known ‘right to be kept in the dark’. It is noticeable in the…
很�错哦,,支�呀,,,
…and here in Beijing google.com and google.co.uk no longer work. Even the english language option on google.cn fails
[…] Technorati, il principale motore di ricerca per i blog, a differenza di Yahoo, MSM e Google non ha accetatto di filtrare le ricerche degli utenti in Cina e sottoporle a censura. Per questa ragione è stato bloccato dal governo cinese. Download Blog segnala l’articolo di Tom Raftery, “China blocks Technorati“ […]
Check out http://www.proxydom.com to access blocked sites.
[…] 原本是ä¸?想blog的，ä¸?æ˜¯å› ä¸ºä¸?懂è¦?写什么，而是太多东西è¦?写，而且å?ˆæ¯”较忙一下所以ä¸?è¦?blog一阵å?。 ä¸?过æ‰?ä¸?想blog一两天，在网络界å?ˆæœ‰é‡?大消æ?¯å‡ºæ?¥äº†ï¼ˆçœŸçš„å?˜åŒ–莫测）。 å?¬è¯´ä¸å›½çš„网络长城è¦?block technorati。 I received an email this morning from Ken Carroll of ChinesePod telling me that China has blocked Technorati at the great firewall – it would appear that Technorati will no longer be available to anyone to use in China. —— Tom Raftery’s I.T. views: China block Technorati […]
A chink in the wall:
From ZDNet Academics Break the Great Firewall of China.
Might take a little bit of time for them to fix it.
[…] Das Verbot ist weiterer Schritt zur “Erhaltung der kulturellen Volksgesundheit” genannten Zensur in China, wo inzwischen auch Satellitenschüsseln verboten und Technoratis Blog-Suche unterdrückt wird. UPDATE: boingboing.net berichtet, auch die BBC und Yahoo News. von Carsten ‘cra’ Raddatz um 12:29 | abgelegt in General, Digitalkultur, Informationstechnologie, Zensur, China Trackback URL | Comment RSS Feed Tag at del.icio.us | Incoming links […]
[…] Uno no es nunca del todo grande hasta que su empresa sufre algún tipo de conflicto internacional. Esta afirmación, que ya valió en su momento para Google o Yahoo se hace ahora perfectamente cierta para Technorati. El principal buscador de ‘blogs’ de la Red ha sido censurado en China y permanece inaccesible desde aquel paÃs desde hace horas. Parece que una vez más el ‘Great Firewall’ ha impuesto su ley. Todos los que chocaron con anterioridad con las autoridades de PekÃn prefirieron ceder antes que perder el mercado. ¿Qué hará Technorati? vÃa> Loïc Le Meur […]
[…] Uno no es nunca del todo grande hasta que su empresa sufre algún tipo de conflicto internacional. Esta afirmación, que ya valió en su momento para Google o Yahoo se hace ahora perfectamente cierta para Technorati. El principal buscador de “˜blogs”™ de la Red ha sido censurado en China y permanece inaccesible desde aquel país desde hace horas. Parece que una vez más el “˜Great Firewall“™ ha impuesto su ley. Todos los que chocaron con anterioridad con las autoridades de Pekín prefirieron ceder antes que perder el mercado. ¿Qué hará Technorati? vía> Loïc Le Meur […]
What about now? Because I thin everything is again unbloked.
Was trying to use google.cn from chinese proxy and all seems again like one year ago.
Any News?
I was also wondering the current situation. Tried to google but only found this page.
Technorati is blocked. I googled and found this post.
http://proxyguy.com/ seems to work for Technorati… up to a point and then all’s you get are error messages.
Dang frusrating, for sure.
I’ve had trouble getting wikipedia ever since I’ve been in China (three years). I have had others tell me they can get it, however. Is this selective censoring? How would I be a threat if that’s so? I understand that such an open knowledge base could be threatening, depending on the content of articles on topics such as Tiananmen Square, Tibet, etc.. But to rob the Chinese people of such a valuable resource seems counter-productive. Selective blocking would serve the purpose of those who believe they need to control their people’s minds without robbing them of knowledge which could help this country develop. I usually just want to get good information for travel articles.
Great Fire Wall from Ideas…
I can never understand why China chooses to censure web sites or why they try to order the organic process to join the world economy.
It almost seems to be an attempt deliberated to order expression, and by the expression, learning. Most of study is qu…
Wikipedia no longer censored in China?…
Some good news for Wikipedia Fans in China. The popular online encyclopaedia seems to be available at least in Beijing, I don’t know about other parts in China.
Wikipedia has been censored in China since October 2005 (with a short interruption in…
does anyone know a proxy which is unpopular but still works???
many thanks