Blogging in China
Rebecca McKinnon interviews Isaac Mao about blogging in China. Here are some excerpts:
Up until now bulletin boards have remained the number-one way that Chinese communicate on the internet. Will people now switch to blogs? Or to something else?
Isaac: Not only BBS, but all internet sites are tightened by government in these days. Even personal website with independant domain name should be declared before June (see Zheng’s post)
Whether it’s easy to execute and maintain, the action will affect many of internet sites hosted in China. Although some guys like Maomy are seeking alternative solution, such as blog, [switching] from BBS. They don’t know how long they can live in this form. Zheng even predicts that there will be a new round of “Silence” in China cyberspace.
Rebecca: You mentioned in your latest post that “centralized blog hosting services” can’t work in China either, and that people are “moving to more distributed blogging solutions.” Can you explain what you mean by that and give some examples of how centralized blog hosting services aren’t working, and what the distributed blogging solutions are, and how they work?
Isaac: [Chinese blog hosting services like] Blogbus.com/blogcn.com/blogchina.com are a centralized hosting service, but student bloggers have to move to these sites with the first reaction when their campus blog community blocked with BBS.
The first reaction of student bloggers in Tsing Hua once their blog community was blocked along with BSS is to move to other blog hosting service providers. The user, Maomy, moved from TsingHua University blog community to blogbus days ago. Just commented on my post at CNBlog, “Seems I should find a safer solution building my own blog site….”. It shows their concerns on centralized blog hosting service too. …It’s still not the ultimate safe solution I want to tell people, neither Maomy and other guys want. Just a temp solution.
The safer and distributed solution means an independent space with an independent domain name. (e.g., rconversation.com, isaacmao.com, etc.), and better they are not attached to one service provider.
As I know, the centralized bloghosting sites will soon add “Shui Mu Qinghua” [The name of the Tsinghua University BBS] as a blocked keyword in their self-policed system. By searching Grassland(an RSS search engine developed by cnblog.org team), some centralized blog sites has removed their user’s posts manually in last days, some links broken already.
Rebecca: So isn’t Blogbus [Isaac’s blog hosting service] also subject to government requirements that it must block keywords and filter content?
Isaac: In China, there are already serveral thousands of independant blogs linked with independant domain name the blogger like. However, it is only about 1-2% of the total blogosphere size. Most of the blogs still hosted in centralized blog service providers. That’s why some said there are only serval ‘blogs’ in China. What we are trying to do is to help people set up their own blog site with an affordable price. Actually, many bloggers wants to have such site if he/she blogs over one year. To those centralized blog hosting services, they have to choose “self-policing” between “free speech” and “self-policing”, no exception. But in some ways, they are also good to help people to learn what’s blog initially.
Although setting up an independant blog site is not easy to common users, I found more and more users seek helps from peers to build their own blog site now, either hosted in China or overseas. I’m talking with some local entrepreneurs here on how to help those bloggers to set up independant blog site without pain. Although ISPs are also controlled by government for sure, the mass distributed content is more difficult to be blocked once a time like SMTH BBS.
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