Forecast: 60 Million Bloggers on China's Censoredsphere by Year's End
A Reuters article (on News.com) says China will have over 60 million bloggers by the end of 2006 and 100 million in 2007. China has 110 million web users so over half of them will have blogs.
China is the world's second-largest Internet market after the United States with more than 110 million users. A survey by Chinese search engine Baidu.com put the current number of blog, or Web log, sites at 36.82 million which are kept by 16 million people, the official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday.
The number of Chinese bloggers is expected to hit 60 million by the end of this year, Xinhua said, quoting a report on China's media industry by the prestigious Tsinghua University.
Zhang Xiaorong, strategy development director of "Bokee", which was set up in 2002 and claims the biggest share of China's blogging market, said his company adds about 100,000 blogs a day.
"The expected 60 million bloggers would account for more than half of China's 110 million netizens," Xinhua quoted Zhang as saying.
The article says Bokee, a blog service provider in China, is adding about 100,000 blogs daily. That's terrific that they have so many bloggers in China but it is awful that they censor the blogosphere and ban Technorati. It is also a shame when big U.S. companies like Microsoft help them censor bloggers.
