Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

Nicholas Laughlin's blog banned by the Chinese government? So it seems, according to a real-time testing system devised by Jonathan Zittrain & Benjamin Edelman of the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. The system was set up as part of a project studying Internet filtering in China; it's been made accessible to the public as an experiment in what the authors call "open research". When you test a URL you help broaden Zittrain & Edelman's research base. (I discovered all this via OxBlog.)

Of course it's highly improbable that I've been singled out for censorship — as OxBlog's Josh Chafetz points out, a blanket filter's probably been set up for everything & everyone on the blogspot server. And it's hard to tell how reliable Zittrain & Edelman's system actually is — their explanation of how it works is pretty vague. (For what it's worth, the Trinidad Express & the Trinidad Guardian are both reported as blocked also!)