Having trouble accessing a website? Suspect it might be more than just a faulty connection or technical malfunction?
Visit Herdict.org, a website designed to track reports of censored web sites around the world. There, you can report anonymously that a site is inaccessible and see if other people are having the same problem. There is no way to determine whether or not the inaccessibility of a site is the result of a technical glitch, hackers (see Twitter.com trouble today) or the government stepping in, but it can be a warning that something’s up even before the media catches wind of it, as it was when China censored YouTube and Google.
All in all, it’s a pretty fascinating way to keep watch of potential censorship problems reported directly from the source – and to track the “verdict of the herd”, the idea from which the site takes its name.