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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 as with Blogspot, such pseudonymous user-generated content which is only unpublished by Google after complaint is a frequent target.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 05:04 PM
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rexduffdixon.com is inaccessible for me now, but I haven't tried his site before in Beijing.
The Techmeme algorithm is highlighting echoes, but is not highlighting source info. I'm not sure how to solve that problem; perhaps we need human editors (with all their foibles) rather than just automatic and gameable systems.
Posted by: John Dowdell at October 18, 2007 05:48 PM
I'm still reading through the articles. The "cyberwar" headline is offensive to me too, because it trivializes the real threat of hacking into other people's systems. Computer espionage is a real issue, but we become more vulnerable when we degrade the label "cyberwar" inappropriately like this.
Here's what I currently see as worst-case situations in this case:
(a) there may have been a temporary problem resolving DNS to some sites through servers in China, causing the DNS server's default page (Baidu) to display;
(b) tech-savvy westerners showed temporary insanity, and influential sites like TechCrunch republished anonymous and derogatory comments.
The real story here doesn't seem to have much to do with China, but instead with techcrowd groupthink. This problem needs to be fixed.
Posted by: John Dowdell at October 18, 2007 06:23 PM
Update: A few hours later, on another connection, rexduffdixon.com is available.
A far more accurate title for this incident may be "Blogmob declares cyberwar on China". I find the whole thing quite disturbing. We who have ready access to tech tools have a responsibility to use them with conscientousness.
Posted by: John Dowdell at October 18, 2007 10:25 PM
We certainly weren't trying to be alarmist with our post, and we noted that not everyone was having this problem -- but plenty of people do indeed seem to be having something weird going on and resembling what hit Google when it was shut down in 2002. And we also included confirmation that Google is hearing this from plenty of people.
[jd sez: Hi Danny, thanks for dropping by. Someone may indeed have had an outage, but that should not prompt the blogstorm of scurrilous headlines we've seen today. As I noted, if there was a germ of truth in this story, it was buried beneath mounds of screaming outrage. The blogosphere added noise which obscured any possible (and likely trivial) signal. A worse side-effect: many time-pressed readers take their understandings merely from headlines, and even subsequent retractions of prominent stories do not undo their damage. The Silicon Valley blogosphere failed us today.]
Posted by: Danny Sullivan at October 18, 2007 11:04 PM
It's not all, China also blocking Yandex.ru, LiveJournal.com, Flickr and Blogger.com
Posted by: Fanat at October 19, 2007 01:21 PM
I'm leaving the above "fanal" comment in, even though it's pseudonymous and its claims are not backed up by evidence, because it exquisitely illustrates the problems of giving yahoos an equal voice.
I am able to access Flickr. I am able to access Blogger (although, as noted above, not Blogspot). I've been aware for some time that LiveJournal has a history of redirection in China, because of some of the political speech it contains. The San Francisco Public Library does the same, only with sites it deems politically incorrect. And I'm not going to go to an unknown Russian site just because someone I don't know says something to me that they won't prove.
"Only speak if it improves the silence"... live it.
Posted by: John Dowdell at October 19, 2007 06:01 PM
"...it ... illustrates the problems of giving yahoos an equal voice."
I find this statement disturbing. I was with you for a while on your feelings of frustration about self referencing media storms. But you seem to be going somewhere else with this statement. Who is to determine who is a ‘yahoo’ and who should have an ‘equal voice’?
Perhaps that’s all you were saying is: It is obnoxious when people use their freedom irresponsibly.
[jd sez: I agree with you; judgmental statements like that are better when phrased carefully, and in that case my frontpage paragraph was already overlong. The emphasis here was intended on "equal" rather than "voice"... I firmly believe that even dumb speech should be permitted, but my issue was with the Techmeme listing of different voices as having equivalent weight. Two opinions are not equal to each other just because they're spoken by two different people; at some point you've got to compare the internal merits of the two arguments themselves. In this case the "Chinese Cyberwar!" meme was a loser, noise burying signal.]
Posted by: WChadwick at October 25, 2007 10:21 AM