A lot of people are reporting on the Chinese censorship of Blogspot. The Chinese bloggers can post to their blogs, but can’t read them, or any others for the matter. Ben Hammersley and Shelley Powers have commented on the issue and indicated a few workarounds like proxy networks and mirroring; this last, using either already existing services or the blog network we have to provide temporary hosting to blocked sites.
I’m all for mirroring, but I worry about how far the Chinese government would go to block content. Shelley pointed to another article about the Chinese censorship in which we can see that the Chinese government wants to control every single byte that goes through the Chinese webspace. If more bloggers get blocked because they are hosting other blogs the damage could be bigger. On the other hand, the article also talks about how anonymous P2P networks can help to counter blocking. Maybe something similar could be done for RSS feeds.
Anyway, anything we can do to help in minimizing the effects of censorship in dictatorial countries is obviously good. It’s fortunate that the Internet has grown big enough so that individuals around the world can join to fight such attacks to freedom.