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October 18, 2007
Techmeme's China problem
Techmeme's China problem: I'm browsing the news, and see that Techmeme is all up-in-arms about China blocking Google, Yahoo, MS Live, redirecting them to Chinese search engine Baidu. Speculation is that it's in revenge for western recognizing the Dalai Lama. I scanned some of the ad-laden articles, looking for a steps-to-repro on the failure, but they talk too dang much, saying too dang little. I'm in Beijing right now and have been accessing these services just fine. Maybe they spoke with someone who had a local redirect, at the local ISP. Hard to tell. But here's the important part: The incestuous nature of their ad-driven rumor-mongering means the Techmeme culture is introducing more noise than signal. The iPhone love/hate/love story cycles are a good example of their groupthink and shouting-down of more valid info. A useful motto: "Only speak if it improves the silence."
For the record, I've had difficulties in Beijing accessing Blogspot, ZDNet blogs, Robert Scoble (probably because of his unconsidered repetition of Rebecca McKinnon's alarmist stories), maybe one or two others.
I just checked YouTube and that's inaccessible to me right now (note the experiential qualifiers), but I recall this being true in the past... as with Blogspot, such pseudonymous user-generated content which is only unpublished by Google after complaint is a frequent target.
If there are any new restrictions within The Great Firewall right now, then this week is a logical time: it's the 17th Communist Party Congress in Beijing this week. Police presence on the street is quite high. The local television is carefully scripted. This week would be a reasonable time to expect new restrictions... except I haven't found any yet.
Most of the loading problems I've had here have been from Web20 blogs with too many HTTP requests on their pages and fancy CSS which doesn't display in my Opera mini-browser, but these are design problems, not regional problems.
Perhaps there is a germ of truth somewhere in this whole story. But if I couldn't find that germ of truth through five fifteen twenty-plus minutes of scanning through tons of umbrage, then these tech writers have communicational dysfunctions which go far beyond what a clumsy government could redirect.
Social media needs antibodies. When these ad sites go wholehog on groupthink like this, we've got a real problem.
Posted by JohnDowdell at October 18, 2007 5:04 PM