Jeremey Goldkorn at Guardian confirms many of my suspicions about the internet blocking:
I do not even know if the block was a decision made by a person, or the effects of a filtering software that decided we had too many “sensitive” keywords. There is no hotline you can call and say: “Comrade, why did you censor my website?”Danwei.org is in good company: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of other foreign sites are inaccessible in China at the moment. But the difference between those sites and mine is that I live in China, and the website is part of a company that operates in China and pays my bills. We’re also small: we are not a platform for citizens broadcasting their opinions like Twitter. It was something specific that we published that got us blocked, and it feels personal.
Wonderful to get this information, this experience, out there into the public domain.
I believe I can provide another data point on this round of blocking, which of course took most of us by surprise. Later on, I happened to go to a site known as Fool’s Mountain, which is generally a pro-China English language site. I have never been a regular reader, but in any case I stopped by one day, (this is after the crackdown had already gotten pretty severe), and the site was still up.
One ‘mini-post’ on the front page did have the dreaded ‘D’ word, I noticed, and although I didn’t care about that particular author’s opinion, I did find that the post itself was blocked, but the rest of the site was still up…for another few hours. And then, it was gone.