Chinese Internet company Baidu launched its blog search service on Thursday to help Internet users navigate their way through the 20 million Chinese bloggers.

It is the first Chinese search service specifically for blogs.

Yu Jun, a senior executive with Baidu, said the service was based on a database of billions of websites, including all the blogs supported by Chinese blog service providers and individual blog websites.

The new service is expected to boost Baidu's users. Baidu started its space channel last July to provide blog services.

Many people have asked about the meaning of our name. "Baidu" was inspired by a poem written more than 800 years ago during the Song Dynasty. The poem compares the search for a retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour with the search for one's dream while confronted by life's many obstacles. ".hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood." Baidu, whose literal meaning is hundreds of times, represents persistent search for the ideal.

The number of blog sites in China reached 34 million in August, a 30-fold increase from four years ago, state media said on Tuesday, despite a series of curbs on media and dissent.

China has more than 17 million people writing blogs (short for Web logs) and more than 75 million people reading them, Xinhua news agency said.

Authors of personal blogs choose their own subject and can instantly forward their writings to friends anywhere in China or the world.

"The rapid growth of blog sites in China also brought potential business opportunities to the advertising industry," Xinhua said. "Some blogs written by famous people attract millions of daily readers." The report said that out of the 34 million blog sites, 70 percent were "dormant," having remained unchanged for more than a month.

FeedBurner, which powers hundreds of thousands of blog, podcast and mainstream news feeds (including this one), is apparently being blocked by Chinese authorities. Here is a Yoda-esque loose English language translation of William Long's original post. William even used a proxy server to verify that the issue is with the Chinese, not FeedBurner. His subscriber count dropped from over a thousand readers to zero overnight.

Though there is not yet a fixed way for creating revenue from blog services in China, search engines and Internet portals have in succession launched their own blog services. Sina, Sohu, BlogCN, Bokee.com, ChinaBlog.net and others are already crowding the market.

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.

Milk Pig, another blog reported to have been disappereared, is also back in action. Both Massage Milk and Milk Pig are hosted on Yculblog.com. However the third blog mentioned in yesterday's Danwei report, Pro State in Flames is still not functioning.

Hmm.

Unlike western bloggers who often focus on news and politics, the Chinese white collar bloggers see complaining alongside office and personal gossip as their priorities, according to the survey.

According to the findings of a blogging survey conducted by CBP among white-collar workers in China's four largest cities - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen - 52% responded they already had a blog, while another 28% said they plan to begin a blog in the near future.

"Weblogs have become the fourth online channel for Chinese people to communicate with each other, following email, bulletin board systems (BBS) and instant messaging tools such as QQ and MSN Messenger," Bian Bingbin, President and Chief Career Consultant with CBP Career Consultants, told Interfax Monday. "Blogging is now a lifestyle habit for more and more Chinese white-collar workers, with a majority updating their blogs once every three days on average," he said.

The Redmond software company, which operates a popular blogging technology called MSN Spaces, said Tuesday that the changes will include efforts to make the banned content available to users elsewhere in the world even if Microsoft decides it has a legal duty to block it in a particular country.

The company also pledged to provide users with a clear notice that it has shut down a Web site because it received a legally binding notice that the material violates local laws. Previously, it has simply said the content was unavailable.

Microsoft has said that it 'will remove access to blog content only when it receives a legally binding notice from the government indicating that the material violates local laws, or if the content violates MSN's terms of use'.

The Chinese agencies will have to first find offending content, and then send Microsoft a separate letter for each instance it finds, putting the onus, and the overhead for content blocking, on Chinese officials.

If the Chinese agencies decide that, in doing this, Microsoft is failing to adequately block the content it doesn't want available it could shut Microsoft's MSN Spaces blog service down.

Reflecting its uneasy alliance with the Chinese government, Google isn't releasing all its services.

Neither Google's e-mail nor blogging services will be offered in China because the company doesn't want to risk being ordered by the government to turn over anyone's personal information. The e-mail service, called Gmail, creates a huge database of users' messages and makes them instantly searchable. The blogging services contain a wide range of personal background.

This is very, very beta, but it could be big... I think: http://chinese.engadget.com

Late last year I spend some time in China and had a major Starbucks moment. People were lining up to pay US$4 for a cup of coffee even though a lot of white collar folks in China make $500-$1,000 a month. There is an appetite for US products in China, it's a huge market, but there are ton of issues.