China Blocking RSS Feeds

The Chinese Government has added a blanket ban on all RSS feeds, according to a report at Ars Technica.

There has been reports previously that Feedburner feeds have been blocked, but to-date information delivered by RSS feeds has generally gone uncensored, providing Chinese viewers information that would otherwise be blocked if attempting to visit a regular webpage or blog.

A quick test of WebSitePulse’s Great Firewall testing tool indicates that no one in China will be reading this post via feed, although whether the main page of TechCrunch is blocked in open to question, WebSitePulse suggests that it’s ok, however the Great Firewall of China site says that it’s blocked.

The number of broadband internet users in China will surpass the United States within the next 12-18 months; China is fast becoming one of the most important online marketplaces in the world. Whilst some could well argue about the rights of a sovereign nation to censor content within its own borders, the more pressing issue from a Web 2.0 development and industry perspective is the use of the Firewall by the Chinese Government to unfairly block foreign competition, particularly at a time where the Chinese Government is trying to start, or is already in Free Trade Agreement negotiations with a number of countries, including Australia.

There is also some suggestion that China will enter an APEC FTA in the future: would it then be fair that online industries are either excluded from the FTA or that access rights are ignored by China under those agreements? Western Governments are still generally not focused enough on the benefits of online business in a broader economic sense, so unless there is some serious lobbying, or more understanding leadership, our industry will likely be forgotten in the clamor for mineral, industrial and agricultural trade.

MyProgress Lets You Track Your Progress

Vancouver based MyProgress offers a service that provides progress monitoring features (generally used in computer role playing games) for life tracking.

MyProgress allows users to track their personal finances, skills, “knowledges”, wealth and health dynamics.

The site tracks every piece of information users enter, from a new purchase, capital gains, an hour of photographic or driving experience, or a rental price change, and provides a detailed overview on how fast they are progressing in comparison with the others across multiple categories, such as age, occupation, and location. The service provides analytics about user’s life and build forecasts based on past data.

MyProgress is billed as the world’s first online application “designed to helping an individual [not a corporate] manage their progress and read their life log as an RSS feed.”