Skypecast: Isaac Mao on China’s crackdown · Global Voices
Rebecca MacKinnon

I spoke to Isaac Mao in Shanghai via Skype to get some clarification and detail about how the latest regulations requiring bloggers to register in China are actually being implemented – and interpreted.
The conversation was exremely interesting. As usual, the situation on the ground is complicated and full of ambiguity.
You can listen to the 32-minute (15MB) interview with Isaac Mao here.
The major takeaways:
How can people outside of China help Chinese bloggers who want to retain their ability to speak more freely? Adopt a Chinese blog on your server. In order to do this, you need to have a blog on your own server space, not one hosted on Typepad, Blogger, or similar. Interestingly, rather than having a centralized website that will broker and match up interested volunteers with Chinese bloggers in need of help, they're doing the matching through Technorati tagging. So Isaac says:  if you're interested in helping Chinese bloggers, write a post on your blog expressing your willingness to help and tag it as “adoptablog” with this code:
That will automatically enable Chinese bloggers to find you through this page.
Technical note: I called Isaac using Skypeout, which enables me to call a regular phone number via Skype. (We tried doing it Skype-to-skype but there was serious breakup and delay, probably due to a busy network at mid-day in China.) The whole half-hour conversation set me back about one whopping Euro in my Skypeout account.
The conversation was recorded directly onto the hard drive of my IBM Thinkpad using Hotrecorder. A $15 premium version enabled me to convert the audio file to “.wav” format. Did little trimming and normalizing in the free program, Audacity, then exported it to MP3, then uploaded it onto the blog.
The quality was not perfect – Skype emits a high-pitched buzz that I couldn't eliminate and Isaac's voice on the phone had a bit of an echo, but it's perfectly audible, especially if you listen through headphones.
TECHNICAL APOLOGIES: Sorry to those of you who had to click over from the original link. We're still sorting things out technically. I failed to format the enclosures properly in my original post, then the software wouldn't let me fix the situation once the post was published.
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