FREE SPEECH
support free speech | adopt a blog |
Living on the Planet, another blog community, focuses on blogwriters from parts of the globe beyond the scope of north america | They also encourage and support free speech for others who want to maintain blogs yet who get censored by their home country | Adopt-a-blog is the vehicle to acheive this | There's a particular focus on China and the community's developers are actively seeking folks with independent ISP storage space to provide censored bloggers with storage space for their blogs |
I have not yet committed to this, in large measure because I don't know enough about the specifics and due to the recent difficulties I'm still having with Cleartel | But I'm clear on the concept, and find it meritable | The Living on the Planet site says this about it's efforts:
The Adopt a Blog project is not a political agenda seeking to oppose the PRC or its policies. It is not confined to any particular country. It was founded strictly to uphold free speech, regardless of content. Its main idea is: we spread out our blogs, and when they block a blog, we move it elsewhere.
One of the reasons that blogs have been so easy to block is that their authors tend to use free services which keep many blogs together on one server. This works fine, until that server is blocked (as was the case with Blogspot and Typepad). If bloggers could all afford their own domain names hosted on different servers, blocking them all would become quite a headache for would-be blockers. Unfortunately, the expenses involved make that solution impractical.
Although the majority of bloggers use free hosting services, there are a large number of individuals that buy their own domains and pay for their own hosting. These individuals often use blogging clients such as Blogger or MovableType to maintain their websites. In many cases, these individuals are paying for way more space on the server than they actually use. Now consider that even a blog that has been going for 2 years, updated several times a week, containing some photos, in its entirety is not likely to take up as much as 10 MB of space online.