The population of Chinese weblog users has reached 20.8 million, the Internet Society of China said in a report released on January 10, 2007.

Statistics displayed on the weblog pages show actress-director Xu Jinglei's blog, the most popular in the world according to blog search engine Technorati, has been visited 71 million times, followed by writer Han Han and real estate magnate Pan Shiyi in China. The large number of bloggers and hits demonstrate that netizens in China are stepping into a weblog era.

Undated file photo of Chinese actress-director Xu Jinglei. Her blog has the most hits of all the blogs in the world.

As one of the products of the Web 2.0 concept, the blog has been advocated in the western cyber-world by Google, Myspace, Youtube and other information technology leaders. With its lively inter-communication characteristics based on every web-user being a sender of messages and other forms of information, the new online lifestyle has been practiced by numerous people and is developing into a full-blown industry.

The situation is the same in China, which has similar techniques to western countries in this domain. In 2006 Chinese blog service providers saw a rapid increase in blog businesses. Douban, Qihu, Mop and a large number of such websites became famous and made huge profits. The portal website sina.com.cn (NASDAQ: SINA) opened weblog service at the end of 2005, and gained enormous success in this field with its incomparable number of web-users.

In the eyes of sociologists, the popularity of weblogs is proof that the grassroots society is waking up, as every ordinary web user is authorized and given the chance to publish his or her opinions.

In fact, traditional media like television are thinking more of bloggers' activities. Bloggers are quoted more and are viewed as public consensus. Some of them have also acted as news broadcasters, because nearly no other media can deliver information to the masses so quickly.

The development of celebrity blogs was impressive in the past year. Xu Jinglei's journals have been viewed tens of millions of times, and every single article she writes is followed by thousands of comments, which add to her popularity.

"In the past public figures held news conference to brief people, now they just need to post an announcement on a blog," Chen Tong, Sina's editor-in-chief told Xinhua. According to Chen, a popular TV hostess wrote about her divorce on her blog, a move that entertainment journalists did not anticipate.

However along with unprecedented freedom comes disorder in the cyber world. False and junk information floods commercial websites, and many write false opinions out of business interest. One of the reasons for this, according to government officials, could be the anonymity of weblogs.

The prevalence of blogs also helped with the popularization of online spoofs and so-called web-stars who have made names for themselves through bizarre behavior.

Like other Web 2.0 services, the blog is seen as a promising industry in China and the world, and many IT elites are ready to enter this field. Thus governmental authorities are expected to impose more effective regulations for its healthier growth.