If you patrol the edits to our site though RecentChanges, you’ll quickly discover that AboutUs is an international and often multilingual site.
This isn’t exactly surprising, as many community-curated websites on the Web quickly develop an interest from non-English speakers. This seems to be doubly true for wikis; Wikipedia opened to the public in January of 2001, and by May had French, German, Catalan, and Swedish versions.
Now, the fact that AboutUs accepts non-English contributions isn’t something we discuss much, since a strong presence in the U.S. is something we want to focus on as a business. But there is one rather large international community that we’re unable to engage with at all, and that’s China.
Why the lack of communication? Well, it’s because we’re blocked.
Perhaps it’s strange thing to think of a young startup in Portland, Oregon being the target of The Great Firewall of China, but it’s true. We first heard about this around the 2008 Olympics, when author and new media researcher Andrew Lih (who’s based in Beijing) went on a hunt to find out which websites had been unblocked recently. We’re definitely indebted to Andrew — who’s known as an expert on the Chinese Internet, among other things — for making us aware of the issue.
It turns out that while sites such as the BBC and the Chinese Wikipedia were unblocked, AboutUs remained so, according to this post by Lih. Other Internet communities that remained blocked included Amnesty International, Wikia, The Pirate Bay, and LiveJournal.
But the question remains why we were among the ranks of those considered a threat to the People’s Republic. Our guess has always been twofold:
- We’re a website about websites. Among the millions of domains we cover include many of those blocked by the PRC. AboutUs could easily be used for viewing info about sites that violate Chinese strictures on speech.
- We’re not just free as in beer, we’re free as in freedom. The freedom for anyone who takes 5 minutes to sign up for an account to curate information and voice constructive opinions.
We’re not sure if we remain blocked in China, but we’ve heard no good news since August. While we’re committed to empowering people to contribute their knowledge about any website constructively, we hope to be able to serve China in the future.
{ 1 comment }
Strange but expected… China is very closed in. I read an article about how China blocks access to it’s own history. An example was, doing an image search of a type of chinese tank and the chinese google returned results that had nothing to do with it. But the same search using google.com returned many pictures of that tank.
Comments on this entry are closed.