Microsoft on Tuesday called for internet companies to adopt a common approach to dealing with official publication restrictions in China and elsewhere, as it continued to struggle with the fall-out from a decision to block an internet blog by a well-known Chinese dissident.

The US software company also modified its policy for deciding when and how to accede to official requests from governments around the world to ban particular writers from its MSN Spaces blog service. It said that under its new approach, while it would still have blocked the blogger in China under the Chinese restrictions, it would not have done so in other countries. The Microsoft service claims 15m bloggers, more than 3m of them inside China.

Microsoft's discomfort over its decision to remove a blog by Zhao Jing last month was a forerunner of the greater public outcry that has followed Google's decision last week to launch a censored version of its search engine service in China.

The speed of the internet's advance and its mass-market adoption by amateur bloggers around the world had raised new issues for internet companies that were different from those traditionally faced by publishers that operate internationally, said Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel. "This is not a single-company issue, or a single-country issue - we need principles that will drive our industry as a whole," he said.

Under what Mr Smith called a "more robust" policy on responding to official requests to censor bloggers, Microsoft said it would only remove blogs when it receives an official legal order. However, it said it would continue to publish material that was blocked in this way outside the country concerned.