China restricts BBS's

China has restricted access to popular university BBS systems to students only. Rebecca MacKinnon recently interviewed Chinese blogger Isaac Mao about the situation and asked whether blogging could fill the vaccum created by the loss of the BBS's:

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.

Domestic blog hosting providers already filter blog posts, and according to Isaac it may be getting worse:

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.

Head over to Civiblog and get yourself a blog!