The anonymouse that roared

All public blogs are by definition megalomaniacal*. So naturally many of us who have blogs wish to see how many people are viewing them, who they are, where they are, what they view, etc., using sitemeter.com (I've already talked about this here).

Among the various patterns that have popped up is one I find very encouraging: a number of people have been linking to this post satirizing the Beijing Olympics through anonymouse.com.

Blogspot.com, as has been discussed in the blogosphere, is one of several major blogging hosts blocked in its entirety by Beijing. Consequently, given the subject matter of that post, it is my belief that most or all of those "anonymoused" viewers are connecting from the People's Republic of China, by way of Germany.

And if I'm right about that, this just fills me with joy. There is no reason for Beijing to continue to with its oppressive censorship of thought, and frankly it's an embarrassment that so many countries—especially South Korea, Japan, and the United States, and perhaps the EU—turn a blind eye to the PRC's excesses in the name of economic opportunity. The fact that savvy Chinese netizens are using anonymouse.com to bypass Big Brother Beijing in order to view things that the Chinese authorities don't want them to know (plus, perhaps, some porn) makes me ecstatic.

Incidentally, there are a few times when someone uses anonymouse.com to view posts other than the Five Mascots of the Apocalypse: specifically, when they are looking for "nude Koreans."


*Except for those that aren't.