The great thing about leaving China for two weeks is that you are virtually guaranteed to come back to some kind of scandalous dustup. In this case it is the hysteria that accompanies the most recent blocking of Feedburner by the Net Nanny (among others). It was amusing to gauge the different reactions from inside and outside of China. Roughly:

Reaction from inside China: Swell. Another hoop to jump through and time to tweak my newsreader, update my proxies, etc. (Weary sigh.)

Reaction from outside China: Oh my GAWD! The sky is falling! They're blowing up kittens! The bastards! RSS is a HUMAN RIGHT! AAAaaaarghhhh!

And so on. 

Imagethief learned long ago that there is particular risk in blogging or syndicating through large services as they are all prone to what appear to be completely arbitrary blockings and unblockings. I swear it's like they have a large "wheel of fortune" on the wall at the ministry, and every two or three months they give it a spin.

Ziiiinnnng! Step right up and place your bets. Who's plug gets pulled this autumn? Livejournal? No one will notice. Bonus repeat spin! Ziiiinnngggggggg....

Hence the various Blogspot/Typepad/Blog City/Feedburner episodes over the past three years. Imagethief and its syndication engine are hosted by my friend in Ohio. This doesn't by any stretch make me censorship proof (and it does create some other problems). It will, however, give me the satisfaction of knowing, when Imagethief finally does go dark in China, that I was singled out personally and not caught up in some vast censorship drift net. Of course, deportation would accomplish the same thing, I suppose.

At any rate, John Kennedy, of Global Voices, has published a post that recaps the actual state of affairs and links out to some of the more productive and less hysterical postings on this situation from other bloggers. And, in the interest of scholarly completeness, he links to some of the worst offenders as well. It's worth a look.