I like Eamonn Fitzgerald’s Rainy Day blog. Today – fatefully, perhaps, the day Daithí is blogging live from the OpenNet Initiative‘s Oxford conference on The Future of Free Expression on the Internet – Eamonn writes:

Banned in Beijing

Was it something we said? According to the Great Firewall of China, Rainy Day is being blocked by the regime in Beijing. read more

Always curious about these things, I immediately clicked on the link to find out if Cearta is being blocked too. It is! The text in the middle of the screen-grab thumbnail on the right (click on it – or here – for full size image) says: “Your URL is Blocked!”.

Eamonn and I must be doing something right …


Update (19 May 2007): More on ONI from the BBC and MediaPal@LSE; and another live blog from the day from Tobias Escher at the OII. The ONI website also has a system for checking whether a site is blocked, and according to that, neither Rainy Day nor Cearta is blocked by anyone, not even by China. What a pity. Of course, this raises the age old question of trust, especially online. What was it about Great Wall that led both Eamonn and me to trust its assessment that our sites were blocked, or at least to trust it sufficiently to blog about it – perhaps it was because it told us what we wanted to hear? And what is it about the ONI that leads me to trust its assessment over Great Wall’s – perhaps it is because I am already familiar with, and already respect, the work of many of the people involved? Deep philosophical questions about the nature of trust here, then. All the same, I still think it’s a pity that the ONI check didn’t come up with the same result as the Great Wall check. To reflect the difference, I’ve added the question mark to the title.