Adopt a Blog: Support Free Speech

Adopt a Blog: Support Free Speech

Introduction

The Adopt a Blog project began in response to the second major blocking measure taken by the government of the People's Republic of China against blogging services. The first such measure was taken against Blogger's free Blogspot hosting service on January 8, 2003. That block is still in place today. The more recent block of Typepad blogs began on March 25, 2004, and is also still in effect.

The Adopt a Blog project is not a political agenda seeking to oppose the PRC or its policies. It is not confined to any particular country. It was founded strictly to uphold free speech, regardless of content. Its main idea is: we spread out our blogs, and when they block a blog, we move it elsewhere.

One of the reasons that blogs have been so easy to block is that their authors tend to use free services which keep many blogs together on one server. This works fine, until that server is blocked (as was the case with Blogspot and Typepad). If bloggers could all afford their own domain names hosted on different servers, blocking them all would become quite a headache for would-be blockers. Unfortunately, the expenses involved make that solution impractical.

Although the majority of bloggers use free hosting services, there are a large number of individuals that buy their own domains and pay for their own hosting. These individuals often use blogging clients such as Blogger or MovableType to maintain their websites. In many cases, these individuals are paying for way more space on the server than they actually use. Now consider that even a blog that has been going for 2 years, updated several times a week, containing some photos, in its entirety is not likely to take up as much as 10 MB of space online.