Rebecca MacKinnon's interesting analysis of China's blog censorship

If you're interested in the specifics of how online censorship works --and doesn't work-- in China, especially with regard to blogging, check out Rebecca MacKinnon's post and presentation on her recent research into the topic. She and her students posted a range of potentially sensitive content onto a number of Chinese blog service providers and tracked what got censored where. Here is the presentation (best viewed in full screen mode), but if you're interested it's worth reading her post as well:

MacKinnon graphically illustrates the wide variation in censorship across different providers in China, although she doesn't map the results to specific providers to avoid getting the more permissive ones into trouble. (She explains why this variation exists, thus neatly overturning once of the most common misperceptions of the Net Nanny: That she's monolithic.) I don't know about you, but I'm dying to know who's loose and who's tight, among other things because I'm curious if there are consistent differences between local and foreign brands. (Wouldn't it be more interesting to discover that foreign-linked operators censor more rigorously because they're worried about their status? But that's just a bit of conspiracy-theory hallucination on my part.)