Using an RSS newsreader has its advantages here in China. Where blogspot and typepad blogs are usually blocked in the Middle Kingdom, you can read them through a third-party RSS reader like bloglines or google reader.

The same can be said for reading Web sites that are blocked based on content. I subscribe to Angry Chinese Blogger, and I can read his angry rants with ease through an RSS reader.

With the advent of Web 2.0 and Web sites that aggregate content via an RSS feed, an interesting question has been raised. What happens if content from a Web site blocked in China is published via its RSS feed onto a non-blocked Web site?

This question was raised on one of my favorite blogs, Bingfeng Teahouse:

Tonight I find two posts about HK july 1 march pop up in the front page of Douban's blog aggregator, one of the blogs, hosted by Zola, was blocked here in China. So, what happens here? How could "politically inharmonious" photos appear on the front page of the most popular web 2.0 site in China?

While there are real people who police the Chinese Internet for such "inharmonious" issues, it seems that like everything else in the modern world, it is slowly being taken over by machines (China Herald has some interesting thoughts on this). The erratic decisions made by the Chinese Net Nanny of late, be she human or machine or some kind of Bionic Woman... Well, all signs point to the fact that she's certifiably insane. Or, at the very least, has a screw loose somewhere.

Internet content is being recycled, mashed, remolded and spit out in so many different ways these days that it's hard to imagine that any one entity could police it effectively. The Chinese Net Nanny would have to make some serious evolutionary steps in order to keep pace with the current revolution in user-generated/recommended content. Why, just today, I happened upon a Friends of Falun Gong group on Facebook. Normally all sites related to FLG are rubbed out with a vengeance in China.

Note: I'm curious as to whether or not simply mentioning FLG will cause this very post to be blocked. We'll see!

 

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