This had nothing to do with our network providers, or data centers…
Matt Mullenweg, “Downtime“, WordPress.com Blog, June 14th, 2010

Doesn’t mean that our Systems Lead Barry Abrahamson isn’t going to do everything he can to make sure a similar event never happens again.

Barry is solid, and makes every link around him stronger.

I love working with that guy!

One of those customers, Time.com, is looking for a “Senior Front End WordPress Developer“.

*4+ years of PHP + MySQL development experience
*Experience with WordPress development, themes, plugins and other customizations
*Front-end markup experience with HTML, CSS and JavaScript
*Strong core PHP development experience
*Ability to work with and modify existing code
*Ability to develop applications from scratch
*Ability to work successfully in a team environment
*Ability to understand and work with people in a creative environment
*Strong attention to detail
*Ability to read and integrate third party API’s

Bonus is you’ll get to regularly collaborate with my team.

The best of 252,029 bloggers, 223,676 new posts, 327,799 comments, & 54,240,782 words today on WordPress.com.

Those numbers get me far more excited than page views and other “monetization” stats, because these right now front page stats reminds me blogging works.

These stats are about people expressing themselves (writing words) and connecting with other people (commenting).

These are the numbers I look to when I need inspiration.

Mashable’s “China Blocks Twitter (And Almost Everything Else)” seems to suggest that the block relates to the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen massacre on June 4th. That may be the case for the other major web publishing and social networking sites, but WordPress.com has spent much of the time since the beginning of 2006 blocked by the Chinese government.

It’s an incredibly frustrating, sad situation.

In “Blogging guru chips away at Great Firewall of China” my boss Matt Mullenweg shares:

After some discussions, Mullenweg realised the site would be allowed back online if he agreed to block certain words or topics and give up information to the Chinese communist government about users.

“I started thinking about the DNA of the company,” he said. “That sort of company is not one I would wake up every day and feel passionate about working in.”

The site remains blocked, although Mullenweg, unable to suppress a giggle, points out that the official Chinese line insists it is freely available.

There was a break in the blocking around the time of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, but that ended with the games. That was the longest time I know of when people could consistently access WordPress.com from across China.

Part of the Chinese government’s approach seems to be to sometimes allow western hotels access and other specific points — likely to deceive Westerners and cause confusion.

There does not seem to be a reliable way to automate detection of WordPress.com being blocked, regardless of what tools might promise. I’m not surprised that http://greatfirewallofchina.org/ gave up. This is the message on the site’s homepage:

“Because of the ever stricter measures of censorship China imposes on the Internet, the team of www.greatfirewallofchina.org at present can no longer vouch for the reliability of its test tool. We have therefore decided to take the test tool offline.”

Herdict <http://www.herdict.org/>, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, seems to be a novel, survey based approach to find out which locations are blocking or censoring web sites.

The tool of choice to let people dodge surveillance is Tor <http://www.torproject.org/>. Please consider your own safety and technology expertise before using any such tools. Reporters without borders <http://www.rsf.org/-Anglais-.html> seems like an excellent resource if you are considering reporting from a dangerous place.

Monday, June 8th Update

A reliable source in China shares that Twitter is back. The same source also shares:

Specific blockages do appear to coincide with major events, like those in Tibet last year and the recent anniversary, but are also part of general and ever-changing blanket censorship.

The Twitter blockage is really the only new story of the last week (apart from 5 second delay foreign television news blackouts) but the news media wanted to turn it into a larger story, including the WordPress angle.

WordPress has been blocked for years now. Youtube has been blocked for the last 3 months. Twitter went done last week.

While the dates for the last two occurred at the same time as sensitive periods or events, I think both are more about controlling new forms of communication and networking than the particular events. Censorship in China is generally a one-way street with periods of activity ramping up around specific times. I think of it in the same way tax auditors get busy around tax season and government ministries around budget time. The difference being once a site is blocked by thePublic Security Bureau (PSB) here in China, it is very difficult to get it unblocked; given the public security connection in an already opaque closed-door administrative system. A good analogy is trying to get someone off a no-fly list in a bureaucratic security system that lacks transparency.

Domestic blogging sites are heavily controlled and censored (though in an ad hoc way). Chinese video sharing sites are coming under increasing regulation and many believe it was only a matter of time before Twitter, as the newest uncontrolled networking site, was shut down.

Victoria is one of the stops on the book tour. Get your copy of the fresh minted book signed by Christian Lander at Chapters on August 10th, 2:00 p.m. He’ll be in Vancouver a couple of days later.

I was a little surprised that Christian was coming to Victoria until I thought about it. Victoria is the most homogeneous city of it’s size I’ve ever been to, so I’m sure it is a great stop to visit with fans and to do research. Whenever I travel and return to Victoria I think, “Dang Victoria is white!”

I’m really looking forward to meeting Christian. SWPL started as a blog on WordPress.com at the beginning of this year and over night became an internet phenomenon. We got in touch and he joined our WordPress.com VIP program. I’ve enjoyed helping host his blog.

I’ll be there getting my copy signed.

Along with CNN’s The Political Ticker, this is one of CNN’s most popularly blogs, so it is great that we know host them both.

I’m also excited Anderson Cooper 360° Blog is joining us, because of Anderson Cooper.

Although, I don’t reguarly watch CNN or follow closely many of the issues that Anderson Cooper reports on, I’ve long appreciated his journalistic style and integrity. His presence both stands out from the dispassionate old school anchors and the news as entertainment or tragedy tourism reporters.

Describing his philosophy as an anchor, Cooper has said:

I think the notion of traditional anchor is fading away, the all-knowing, all-seeing person who speaks from on high. I don’t think the audiences really buy that anymore. As a viewer, I know I don’t buy it. I think you have to be yourself, and you have to be real and you have to admit what you don’t know, and talk about what you do know, and talk about what you don’t know as long as you say you don’t know it. I tend to relate more to people on television who are just themselves, for good or for bad, than I do to someone who I believe is putting on some sort of persona. The anchorman on The Simpsons is a reasonable facsimile of some anchors who have that problem.

Back to the blog. In the announcement yesterday, “The ‘new blog’ blog” David Reisner, 360° Digital Producer wrote “the 360Blog promises to be more interactive and more custom fitted to your daily blog needs. More pictures, more video”. He goes on to describe how “mouse over a link and you get a preview”, Snap Shots, contributes to this experience, and how categories can give you “a customized blog”.

Categories (and now tags too) being so easily their own view and having their own feed is one of the 1st WordPress experiences I was wowed by.

The comments so far on the new Anderson Cooper 360° Blog experience have been every positive, though people are disappointed it can’t make them coffee.

The previous version of this blog was on Google Blogger, and what I’m most interested in seeing is how participation improves. Though I wasn’t involved in “selling” WordPress for this migration away from Blogger, I regularly beg people that have blogs that I participate on to move off of Blogger because of how awkward it is to comment in that system. It is not a nice experience. It will be interesting to watch more people commenting more regularly on the new Anderson Cooper 360° Blog.