Blogging in Beijing

Now that I’ve settled in Beijing I’ve joined the small group of people who blog inside the People’s Republic of China, in English. Blogging in China can be difficult as the government monitors all incoming and outgoing packets to prevent subversive information from entering the country and to prevent the truth from exiting the country. Funny how so many people can’t handle the truth. It has become the story of my life of late, or at least a footnote in the story of my life.

One thing you quickly discover while blogging in Beijing is blogspot, the free hosting site for Blogger is completely unavailable. Other free services such as MSN’s Spaces and LiveJournal are viewable from inside the Great Firewall of China or were in 2005.

Another free quasi blogging service that is available is MySpace. I’m not a big fan of this service, it seems to try to be all things to all people. It wants to be Friendster, Yahoo Profiles, a Blog Service, and a photo sharing service all at once. It seems to encourage really ugly pages that load awkwardly with all sorts of extraneous gunk in them. One thing that annoys me about MySpace is that in order to try and view the other blog entries or look at pictures I had to join the service. One thing MySpace seems to be used for is to promote independent bands, the girlz of Kilbourne have a MySpace site.

Hopefully I can keep Muskblog from becoming banned in China so this will be one of my last posts where I discuss censorship or the government or the firewall. One of the advantages of your own domain and using a program like WordPress is control, several of my classmates lost the ability to blog when they moved to China but I did not.

Update: I’ve kept this blog online for over a decade recently upgrading it to WordPress 5. Almost half that time I’ve been behind the Great Firewall of China and still I have not managed to blog my way to a better career. I did manage to pass a lot of exams, I am overdue for the good life to say the least.

This entry was originaly posted on September 25th, 2005, it was last edited on May 5th, 2024 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Blogging, MySpace, WordPress.