Blogs hosted by blogspot, typepad and some websites have been inaccessible in India for the past couple of days. We talk to Amit Agarwal, Neha Viswanathan, Jace and Suresh Ramasubramanian to find more about how and why this happened.

The first inkling that these sites were inaccessible came from Dina Mehta and Mridula Dwivedi, and over the weekend many bloggers discovered that were not able to access some of their favorite blogs.

Amit, who has a blogspot account describes workarounds to access and read blogs hosted by blogspot and typepad.

Neha outlines and describes the issue...how did it all start? Is it censorship?

Jace and Suresh describe what happens in the back-end when you need to block selective urls. Jace has an article in Times of India (july 19th, 2006) on this issue. Suresh describes the back-end complexity and highlights the fact that lack of technical people combined with old software might have further complicated the situation.

Angelo Embuldeniya via email says: "The blogspot blogs have been blocked at the IP level in the nodal points. They (ISPs) should have used a filtering method instead of ignorantly blocking off an entire domain."

Desi Pundit has an extensive sticky post on the ongoing deb tate on this issue. Neha's sticky post describes how it all started.

The story is now being widely reported in many prominent blogs and MSM.

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