The Herdict Reporter :: The Future of the Internet

The Herdict Reporter

March 24th, 2009 | by elisabeth | Published in Future of the Internet | 1 Comment

As you all know, one of Prof. Z’s projects is Herdict, which monitors blocked web sites around the world. One of the ways you can help out the project is to jump over to the Reporter, a.k.a. amiblockedornot, which lets you test the accessibility of websites where problems have been reported. The Reporter will suggest the sites (generally drawn from others’ reports — more on that below), and you say whether you can the see the site. It’s a nice way to get in your good-netizen points for a day — and if enough people do it, we can track Web filtering as and where it happens.

The Herdict team is still working on tweaking the algorithm that decides what sites will come up when you go to the Reporter page. The goal is to gather the most interesting data about blockages. First, we want to make sure we’re gathering the right amount of data—enough to be sure we’re seeing a pattern, but not so much that people are spending time testing a site we’re already sure is down. We also want to be able to track the behavior of these sites over time, so the team is working to figure out how often to sprinkle sites back into the testing queue.

The bigger question is: what makes it interesting or uninteresting that a site is down? It’s probably most interesting to know if a site is blocked for a particular country or a particular ISP. If YouTube is down in China, as just happened yesterday, that’s worth knowing. But if the accessibility pattern isn’t correlated with a country or an ISP, that tends to indicate sites that are down for some easily explainable technical reason.

To take another example, Herdict testers in the US are probably most interested in testing sites blocked overseas. Sites blocked in the US (for the moment) are usually related to school or workplace firewalls. But even within the US, ISP-level data could be interesting (are you using Comcast, and having trouble accessing BitTorrent?). If you have any suggestions about what accessibility problems you find interesting, and what kind of data you’d like to see from all this testing, leave suggestions here or talk to the Herdict team here.

—Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Responses

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minhaaj ur rehman says:

March 24th, 2009 at 7:12 pm (#)

I am a great fan of Zittrain but i’ll probably never understand why on earth websites shouldn’t be blocked according to cultural norms and believes in different countries. Why everything has to be Americanized else where :)

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