A great summary from John at Global Voices of the bullshit rumor of a total RSS block in China, which some of the world's websites - BoingBoing, Techcrunch, Arstechnica, Mashable, to name a few - all bought into.
Suckers...
Do yo' damn homework.
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I almost regret the post now because the only response I've seen from 'the other side' has been anger and ridicule, and that's really disappointing. So off my high-horse, I think this is a great opportunity for it to be said it's precisely because of things like this that people here in China have grounds to accuse 'the west' of spreading unfair lies about the country. And don't call me an apologist, because this argument is of course complete bullshit; it's just that those who expressed anger at what happened have every right to, being stuck waist-deep or higher in the quicksand here and left struggling to get out.
So I haven't heard seen any productive reflection come out of this on the faulty end, but I have hope (slipping back up on my horse now) that the point's been made. We are all on the same side, after all, so one would hope that some are not getting screwed over due to the carelessness and excited-ness of others. Seeing one of the bloggers who spread the story refuse responsibility to fact-check, yeah, that made my head do a full 360.
Bloggers don't fact check - it's against our code! ;-)