Last week, (July 18th) for some mysterious reason, personal Blogs were being blocked from anyone with an internet connection in India. This is a rather strange occurrence, especially considering much of the world’s outsourcing of web site development ends up in the hands of Indian developers. It can only be presumed that some percentage of the work these Indian development firms are hired to do deal with Blogs and other web-based communication forums.

The Indian government took steps last Thursday, July 20th, to rectify the situation, but as of this writing, Monday July 24, 2006, what many have called government censorship, or a blog blockade, is still in effect. The Indian Government as claimed the blocking of personal Blogs is a 'technological error'. It would seem though, as if the Indian government has shot their own economy in the foot with this technical error. This blocking of Blogs, can only slow if not completely stop production of millions of dollars in web site development, without the web developers having the resources of accessing Blogs, or being able to test any blog they are developing on a live internet connection.

The inability for the developers in India to access or post to Blogs has a direct impact on search engine ranking as well. One of, if not the biggest source for creation of inbound links and refreshed content on web pages, which is one of the key elements search engines look for, is RSS feeds. One of the primary sources of RSS feeds on the planet is personal Blogs.

What was the official government reason for all of this? The New York Times reported today: In an e-mail message sent early on Thursday, an official at the office of the Consulate General of India in New York said the order to block a handful of Web sites, including the popular blogspot.com, which plays host to thousands of personal Blogs, had been prompted by the discovery of a site that contained what the official called “two impertinent pages” rife with material considered to be ‘extremely derogatory references to Islam.”

In an effort to prevent possible violence from those sites, the government’s Department of Telecommunications instructed Internet service providers to block access to the two pages. “Because of a technological error, the Internet providers went beyond what was expected of them, which in turn resulted in the unfortunate blocking of all Blogs,” the official explained.
Hopefully, this technological error, will be remedied soon, and the people of India can once again join the world wide community of bloggers, adding to the rich RSS feeds which populate so many of our web sites.