And now a blocked blog in Beijing

Following our announcement last week about Chinese censorship of our main website, it now appears that our new steel blog has been blocked by the authorities in Beijing. This has happened with the blog still in its infancy, prior to a roll-out planned for early July when announcements about the new weblog service were to be made to a larger international industry audience.

Anyone else out there with a similar web banning or blog blocking story? It would be good to hear from other SEOs, webmasters, and bloggers looking at their Chinese website or weblog visitor statistics ...

Steel goes 'off the net' in China

Our first piece of news, regretfully, is that access to www.steelonthenet.com appears to have been blocked in China. Repeated reports from visitors attempting to access the site from servers in Shanghai and Beijing in recent weeks indicate a persistent denial of access problem that is not evident elsewhere in the world. We think that these access restrictions commenced around April 2005.

Although control of the internet in China is a phenomenon that has been widely reported on in the last few years, most recent assessments have suggested a censorship trend towards more targeted internet filtering, focused in the main on Taiwanese independence movements, human rights activists and other political opponents.

But steelonthenet.com is a knowledge-sharing information portal that generates revenue from industry research and consultancy support. The business has no political agenda. Indeed, its success is predicated on its commercial focus and on the supply of timely and objective news reports from distinct and independent sources.

So we don't think that the current prohibition of www.steelonthenet.com that we're seeing is an early signal of some broader censorship by the Chinese authorities. Instead, we feel it's probably a temporary consequence of mistaken or perhaps just overzealous blocking...

Welcome to the Blog from Steelonthenet

Welcome to the blog ... from www.steelonthenet.com