China blocked my Blog

Unfortunately my small Blog that was attracting only 2 to 3000 Visitors a day has been blocked by the Great Firewall.

I'm very sad about this developement and had actually hoped for the so called "Great Firewall" to sort of loosen it's strings by the action of setting free Wikipedia.com which of course also has been blocked again.

A little proud I am also of this "achievement" from Owen, James and I to be counted important enough to be blocked by the government.

Like Technorati, Blogspot, Anonymouse or Wikipedia.

I'm not necessarely against it, each government puts some restrictions on it's people.

I understand that many people in China could misuse the information on the web as so many individuals in foreign countries do.

But a blog about China's web 2.0 scene?

I thought I was providing a service to the country and the website, many webmasters of the early web 2.0 Companies here came to us to be introduced, get a first flow of traffic.

Of course it's also partially my fault of not registering the blog as required by miibeian.gov.cn,

I have thought it not to be important enough for me to do.

The Chinese government made it clear that it reserves the right to "close" any site not registered at miibeian.gov.cn.

I also thought I could circummaneuver the law by having it hosted on a foreign server.

I have been proved wrong and will now do my all to get it back up and to the standards of Miibeian.

For those of you that need to know how to register a chinese website with the Government I'll briefly explain:

"First you'll have to go to the website of http://miibeian.gov.cn

You'll sign up and make a username for yourself,

you need a valid passport or ID verification No.

It has to be a chinese one.

Then you fill in the blanks of your name, adress, education, workplace etc.

After that you can log in and apply for certificates of "legal website"

This includes your personal information and Server Ip, domains, sub

domains, website name and server address.

Then a little more small things,

at last you'll have a few checkboxes in which you can chose the purpose of your site.

This one is a little tricky since you have several options like business,

education, news etc.

None of them will work because you'll need an educational licence to apply for education, need an ecommerce licence for business and of course the impossible

a news agency licence for news.

Just check Qita 其他 for other and you'll get your licence within days as long as it's not like porn, or other offensive content.

Now wait for 2 weeks and you'll get your licence."

Now you'll also have some plus points of this registration,

No 1, first page rank is ensured since you'll be featured on the related government page that has 8-3 pagerank.

Depending on where they feature you.

You'll also be picked up by the other spiders early.

No 2, You're officially a webmaster aknowledged by the law of the country.

No 3, You're finished with the hassle, nobody will bother you again, except of course you start selling porn and people on your site or the like.

Hope you can still enjoy some of our archives until I worked this out......

Hope also that you'll learn from me and register your site with miibeian before getting a lot of traffic for it, since that is a major emotional bumper for a blogger as you can imagine......

Featured on digg, blocked by china.