Several blogs and websites are reporting that Indian government has issued instructions to ISP’s to block Blogspot hosted free Blogger blogs, Yahoo’s free Geocities web hosting and many other sites. Both these popular sites have thousands of users contributing a lot of great content. However, these free hosted sites are often prone to publish spam and non family friendly content.
Why this sudden internet censorship in India?
Popular Indian newspaper site like Hindustan Times and Indian Express are reporting that the government has instructed Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block some websites in response to the recent Mumbai blas.ts and these websites are perceived to be ‘anti-India’.
Continue to Manage your site / blog
The good news is that access to Blogger is not blocked. So you can keep blogging and your posts are appearing for the rest of the world. Even your feed is freely accessed by your readers. Also you can login to geocities.yahoo.com and manage your Geocities account. But your website will not be seen by those in India. if you dont have a predominant India visitor base, the entire world is still visiting you.
Legal ways to continue reading a Blogspot blog
1. Subscribe to feed – you can continue reading your favourite blog and get updates via any newsreader like Bloglines, newsgator etc.
2. Subscribe via email. Many rss to email services let you track your favourite blog through updated new posts via email. Try Feedblitz for a daily email digest, or RSSfwd for a single email per post. Just enter the feed url / blog url and you are done.
What is the blog feed url?
All blogspot blogs have a default feed url like this
http://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml
(Replace blogname by the blog name you want)
Encourage Full Text Feeds
It is really useful if your favourite blogspot blog is publishing full text feeds. Those blogs with a predominantly Indian readership can enable full text feeds for the time being.
Will the Blogspot and Geocities ban continue?
This ban seems to be an error in communication between the government and the ISP’s as it is not possible to continue blocking millions of useful sites hosted on blogspot and geocities. I think they will sort out and block the actual spam blogs soon.
Of course there are other ways to bypass the ban. Learn how to Complain and Report Spam Blogger Blogs