Rebecca McKinnion has sought some clarity on what the Chinese government’s registration drive means for bloggers. She has the details and an interview with Shanghai blogger Isaac Mao at Global Voices:

You can listen to the 32-minute (15MB) interview with Isaac Mao here.

The major takeaways:

• The regulation requiring websites (including blogs) to register
  does not seem to apply to sub-domains. Which means that people with
  blogs on Chinese blog-hosting services like Blogbus and Blogchina (which are the Chinese equivalents of Blogger & Typepad) , are completely fine as long as the hosting companies themselves have registered, which they all have done or are doing.
• So
  the only Chinese bloggers who are affected by this regulation are ones
  who have set up blogs independently on their own server space.
• What
  does this mean? It means that actually, blogging will be alowed to
  flourish and proliferate but in a more controlled way. Because the
  blog-hosting companies are required to police and filter the blogs they
  host for questionable content - including politically sensitive
  content. So if you really want to speak freely on your blog you need to
  have one on your own server not controlled by a centralized host. It is
  those harder-to-control blogs (which also require more technical
  know-how to set up and run.) that are now required to register.
• Isaac says some bloggers are trying to register or plan to do so
  - with varying degrees of success depending on how they approach the
  registration office, whether they call their blog a "blog" or a
  "website," etc.  Many others are doing nothing and waiting to see what
  will happen.