Nerve Endings Firing Away

The Indian blogosphere is abuzz again with purported news that several ISPs in India may have blocked the Blogspot domain. But since, the primary government ISPs such as BSNL and VSNL doesn’t seem to have blocked the domain, it doesn’t seem to be an order from the top. However, when the Bangalore ISP Spectranet at Delhi admits to have received a letter from the Ministry of Communications to block the domain, things seem a bit fishy. I am not sure that is the case however because in case of a government directive VSNL and BSNL would be first to fall in line. Others have indicated that it may simply be a bureaucratic messup as someone inadvertently blocked the entire domain when they effectively wanted to block a certain blog on Blogger.

However, if you aren’t getting your blog fix and happen to subscribe to those ISPs in question, then you will benefit greatly from Amit’s suggested solutions (access through PKblogs). Let us hope the government didn’t get too paranoid after the Bombay blasts and decided to crack down on blogs for alleged rumor mongering. Trust me, if the blogs had that wide an audience to make any rumor worthwhile then we surely would know about it. I also suppose this ties in with the phone networks being brought down during a calamity (technical overload included) to avoid widespread panic. But at the same time, information dissemination via blogs especially through sites like Mumbai Help proved invaluable when phone lines were down.

Let us hope that this is merely a technical glitch rather than a government directive. If it is the latter, then it might be time for another blog campaign.