At a customer site today waiting for a database to update I decided to check up on my blog. Seems that SurfControl has flagged MT.Net in its “Blogs And Forums” list. Yay! I finally made someone’s list!
I’m in good company, as Jeff and Jamie made SurfControl’s list. The Hallie And Travis page, a blog running far longer than my own, didn’t make the cut. Well-known bloggers Chris O’Donnell and Doc Searls didn’t make the cut, either. With Doc’s hosted at a site named “weblogs.com,” one wonders what it takes to be flagged as a blog. Ironically, other websites I host on the very same machine as my blog are not blocked at all.
The process makes me think about those organizations who control the Internet floodgates, sometimes in secret. I had no idea I was on SurfControl’s radar until just now. What about Google filtering out search results at the whim of Chinese government bureaucrats? What if it happened here? If you get filtered by search engine (or a nanny proxy like Surfcontrol), you effectively disappear from the Internet, don’t you?
Is being on the list good or bad? It wasn’t clear from the site if the list is a blacklist or a whitelist.
That’s the thing… SurfControl just classifies websites – its up to the SurfControl customers to decide which classifications to allow and which to block.
I found it amusing that the SurfControl blog is in the “Business” category and not the “Blogs and Forums” category!