Blogging increases in China

While making the rounds through my RSS feeds I read at China Venture News how there are 5 million bloggers in China now but they expect 60 million by the end of 2006. This rapid growth is in spite of some governmental policies to restrict the freedom of information in China, particularly the Great Firewall of China.

You can add China Venture News to the list of websites outlasted by Muskblog.

I blogged while I was living in China and I was careful not to press the envelope. I had my own domain, however some of my classmates had to cease blogging as they were using blogspot.com and it frequently is blocked. However it doesn’t seem to matter if the government blocks access to one blogging service as there are so many now. MSN Spaces, which I believe made some concessions to the government, is very popular among Chinese bloggers. There are a number of made in China blogging services as well such as Bokee.com, even Baidu has a blogging service, which wasn’t the case when I asked them about it several months ago. Even one of my classmates at Tsinghua, Edwyn had a Chinese blogging entrepreneurial venture, which of course is no longer online in 2024 just like China Venture News.

While I was at Tsinghua I tried to find other students that were blogging, my own humble blog even inspired a few people to start blogging. As China becomes the country with the largest number of citizens online it will obviously become the country with the most bloggers. The rise of Chinese bloggers can already be seen in the changing face of the Technorati Top 100. I even bitched once how Chinese bloggers were being ignored by the New York Times.

I ended up living and blogging in China a lot, I’ve collected the best of them into one post. Now in 2024, I’m redoing my blog’s taxonomy. Not a lot of people maintain a blog for almost twenty years certainly not from behind the Great Firewall. I wonder how many uncensored blogs there are in China now? If you have thoughts on blogging or more specifically blogging in China you can leave a comment below.

This entry was originaly posted on August 7th, 2006, it was last edited on May 19th, 2024 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Blogging, Blogspot, China.