Blog down!

Last Friday JamBayan became suddenly and inexplicably inaccessible. When I logged on to it I found this message staring at me: 403 Forbidden: You have no permission to access this site on this server. I rebooted my computer to make sure it wasn’t just a glitch, but the error persisted. I began to panic when even the other computers in the Mirror office couldn’t access my blog, and so I texted my wife to check if she could log on using our home computer. After an agonizing few minutes she confirmed the worst: JamBayan was down.

I was concerned because other blogs on Blogger were up, and I began to be really worried when I read on the Inquirer website that the blog of the anti-Arroyo group Black and White Movement was also down – with the same error message appearing when one tries to access it. This was in the aftermath of the arrest of former Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman as she and some colleagues went “strolling” down the baywalk area in Manila wearing anti-GMA black shirts.

Understandably, the inq7.net report implied that the blog’s inaccessibility was linked to Soliman’s arrest, and for a while I began to think that perhaps JamBayan had been brought down for similar reasons. Now as you know, JamBayan is as non-political as it gets: it focuses on guitars and music, and while I may rant and rave every once in a while (especially at how expensive music gear are), the heart of the blog remains the same. With the B&W’s blog down, however, I suspected that perhaps some government agent decided to bring down blogs written by journalists as well – just to make sure.

But just as I was beginning to feel self-important (well, important enough to merit some censorship), JamBayan decided to show up. And about the same time, the B&W blog also became accessible. Now I don’t know if the blogs were indeed pulled out and if government relented when it was reported that some anti-government blogs (and mine, which is not anti-GMA even if its writer is) became inaccessible, but in cases like this I find that it’s prudent to use the simplest explanation: Blogspot (which is owed by Google) suffered a glitch. Which may explain why the inq7.net report on the B&W blog has itself been inexplicably missing from the inq7.net archives.