What exactly is news group?

What is the story behind the shutdown of the Chinese group news blog china / divide?

• The rooster states "china / divide was a group blog launched March 1, 2010 by three China bloggers: Stan Abrams, Charles Custer and Kai Pan. Less than three months alter, on May 21st, china / divide was blocked by China's "Great Firewall," becoming inaccessible to readers in China without proxies or VPNs. Nearly five months later and after a total of 132 published posts, china / divide stopped publishing new posts and quietly retired." Source: http://chinadivide.com/ So, what's the real story?

• Answer:

  That is the real story. Stan, Charlie, and I were regular "China bloggers" at the time. The idea of joining forces blogging on a single site was for economies of scale, so there would be one site with more regular updates and content, pooling together our shared blogging interest and efforts as well as readership. We also weren't so much a "news blog" as we were just a commentary blog. None of us were journalists or reporters; we just had thoughts we wanted to share and discussions to participate in. We strongly suspect the reason we were blocked because of some articles by Charlie that included sensitive keywords about the Falun Gong. Initially, I had limited success in getting us unblocked by changing our hosting server's IP address and also editing what we could only guess as the sensitive keywords tripping the GFW's crawlers. For example, we edited Falung Gong into masked versions like F@lun G0ng. The limited success with changing the IP address of our server suggested we were initially blocked by IP, but then later it became clear that this was elevated to a domain level block. Given that the bulk of our regular readers were accessing the site from within China, we decided to call it quits rather than hoping people would all get VPNs to continue reading our musings.