[photopress:blogger.jpg,full,alignright]The number of blogs in China has topped 34 million, more than 30 times as many as the country had four years ago. True. But if you work out the maths and allow every one of the regular readers to read two blogs that means each blog averages three readers.
The Xinhua News Agency said, citing a report by the government’s China Internet Network Information Centre, that 17.5 million people in China consider themselves Web log writers, while 55 million regularly read them. Which sort of confirms that average number of readers for each blog is in single figures.
Most blogs deal with pop culture, travel, family matters and other nonpolitical subjects. And China has the world’s second-largest population of Internet users after the United States, with 123 million people online.
Which brings us to a philosphical point: the virtue of blogs is not in the reading, it is in the writing. Just writing a blog says, ‘I blog, therefore I exist.’ And I can write. Sort of.