Anti-establishment? "It's one thing to pull a list of words out of blogs using an algorithm. It's another thing to become an agent of a government and censor an entire blogger's work. Yes, I know the consequences. Yes, there are thousands of jobs at stake. Billions of dollars. But, the behavior of my company in this instance is not right." So writes Robert Scoble, Microsoft's technical evangelist, of the shuttering of the MSN Spaces-hosted Web log of Michael Anti, a Beijing-based researcher for the New York Times.
In his own unaffiliated blog, Scoble is highly critical of his company's apparent decision to gag Anti, who has been promoting the freedom of speech in the Chinese cyberspace and real society for a number of years. His blog has been described as one of the communist country's rare sources of true information. Anti's site was closed down after he posted articles critical of a management purge at Beijing News, a purge that led to a walkout by journalists at the newspaper.
"I posted three posts about the Beijing news and all posts and articles were deleted inside China," Anti was quoted as saying by the AFX news service. "MSN Spaces (has) now deleted all of my articles and I have no backup and I'm very angry," he added.
Scoble's references to algorithms refer to
So are we really staring at the ugly--but necessary--face of