The day the podcasts died
Richard noticed that Feedburner has been blocked in China. This is terrible news as a lot of blogs and podcasts are using feedburner! No wonder half my podcasts suddenly stopped working. Let me know if you find a work-around (besides using Tor for everything).
October 9th, 2007 at 10:47 am
I use Google Reader. Switched about one year ago and never looked back.
You’ll need quite some time to catch up since this is a pretty old issue!
October 9th, 2007 at 11:03 am
Not that I know of…. it really is a pain!
It is one thing to make a W3C compliant HTML page for all browsers to use. And one has been somewhat active to make sure their China WWW pages are “China Compliant” - you know, that is what extremely vague and wide reaching laws cause - they cause people to self censor.
In any case, putting things like Tiananmen or Tibet in your flters is one thing and a common sensical thing to do when your comments could be vandalized by a bunch of 1st world zealots who think that unless China does things =their= way, China can get stuffed and all the people can miss out on everything (ie: talking about google - or the Drupal people - I will blog about those wankers soon too). However it now seems that there is now one more issue to take into consideration when making your WWW site both HTML4 and China compliant :-s.
Blocking I don’t mind so much. It is their country, they can do what they want when they want and if you don’t like it, piss off back home. I just wish there could be a standardised and transparent notification of such changes so that we are not caught out and left swinging in the wind for 2-3 weeks.
Like here:
http://www.utilitycomputing.com.cn/?p=21
October 9th, 2007 at 11:35 am
Ionut: I do use Google Reader, but there aren’t any good web based podcast clients; iTunes will try to get all podcasts directly, thus be blocked.
Richard: The issue is the “mass blocking” that they do. Cutting off feedburner is like cutting off half of the podcast universe. Because they don’t have the technology they block entire media instead of going after the content items they don’t like. Even if you accept the fact that they can censor (which is a different discussion), you don’t have to accept the heavy-handed way they go about doing it. It’s ignorant and cuts off China from lots of innovation, the same way the “we only allow http” policy of some wifi providers does the same.
October 9th, 2007 at 11:59 am
Yes, taken. However, not that I will =settle= for “Notification” - but it is good to be told - hey as of 8:05 AM today, we also blocked =this=.
Granted this then will pique interest in the target and what caused it to be blocked and why……
I am just being selfish, I have monitoring systems for all client servers, but now I need one for my blog too - for widgets and “under the hood” components of it.
Not happy pappy….
October 19th, 2007 at 9:41 am
I have a solution: No one use a service like feedburner!
I am curious, why do people use it? What’s wrong with using your blog software’s built-in feed, such as www.blog.com/wp-rss.xml? I don’t get it…
THe big annoyance is many of the blogs in www.chinalyst.net are feedburner, so if you want to click on the link to go to the original post, then wha-la, you can’t. Annoying!
October 19th, 2007 at 10:28 am
[…] If people insist on using Feedburner, or similar, why can’t you also provide a link to your original feed URL as well. Richard wised up and did this! (Thank’s Richard!) Bjorn also wrote about this. […]