i really enjoy reading wang jian shuo’s blog because he’s a fellow shanghainese who is currently living in shanghai (me having hometown pride) or maybe because he provides valuable information about shanghai and various other things on his blog. I first stumpled to his site when I did a google search on how to install perl on windows. Today I found on his blog the link to Top 47 key tips from the world’s best bloggers which led me to NetGuide Magazine and cnblog.org. I find NetGuide’s feature articles extremely interesting. Unfortunately I don’t live in New Zealand otherwise I probably would subscribe. Do they have interesting magazines like that in the US? I guess I’m not a magazine digger so I might have missed a great deal. I’ve always believed you can find plenty of information about the web through the web itself. But to have them in an organized and renewable fashion would be a bonus which I am willing to pay cash for. The discovery of cnblog.org is a breath taking event to say the least. I have no idea blogs are becoming a new trend in China. That site discusses much of the international blogging trend online with interwined chinese and english. I just can not believe it. It discusses the possibility of blogs becoming China’s new media for freedom of speech. If that becomes true, it would be revolutionary. However I still believe much of the internet unlike in western countries are under governmental control in China. As the author said, there will be a long way to go.

here’s my humble english tranlation of the most recent entry on the cnblog.org.

Between Oct 30th and Nov. 2nd, in Xi’an, there had been anti-Japanese patriotic parades demonstration led mainly by university students. Message boards and online news sources had openly reported and discussed the incident (although many personal messages had been deleted later by message board owners). In contrast to the activeness on the message boards, Chinese bloggers community responded uneagarly. When I searched the most popular blogging service right now in China Blogcn.com on this topic, it had only returned 30-40 entries. And most of these only contain links of the incident to other sites and minor discussions. I thought originally I could find insightful personal experience from bloggers live in Xi’an. To my disappointment, I only found one or two.

Apparantly Chinese bloggers community is yet big enough to create great impact with powerful memoirs from the masses. From my observation, more Chinese bloggers write about personal topics such as sex than political or social topics. I believe this has something to do with the limited representation of the population of the Chinese bloggers community and the recently propagated Blog/Blogger demonstration. (I have no idea what he’s refering to in the second part of his sentence since I don’t know much about the Chinese bloggers.)

It seems in Mainland if Blog was to become the media for the masses and to be noticed by more people, there is still a long way to go.