Since there has been some recent uproar around foreign blogging in China, I thought I would provide a list of blog services for the rest of us.

• Blog Sina - Blogger of China, this is perhaps the most common way Chinese people blog today
• Blog.China - as DigitalWall describes it:

attracts a group of IT elites, who regularly publish articles and criticizing current issues on it

• CnBlogs - an extremely popular place for technology oriented blogs, with subjects ranging from Linux to .Net, the site is devided into themes based on the programming language/technology, and attracts a fair share of recruiters - so much in fact, that there is a special job posting section sponsored by zhaopin
• Bokee - a less famous platform, but an increasing popular among foreign/english speaking audience due its recent partnership with Six Apart (with its typepad inavalability, a long overdue if you ask me)
• MSN Spaces - huge with anyone who ever used msn messenger–which is almost the whole of Internet China (even QQ users) since it is the very first tool all new Chinese Internet users learn to use (sina, sohu, baidu and QQ come later)

Note: I will add some more here later, but these are the leading ones…

Filed under: China Market | 12 Comments »

This is just bizarre:

The Chinese authorities have turned to Yandex having finished with Google, LiveJournal, and Wikipedia. So, finally, according to some sources, Chinese internet-users were denied the access to www.yandex.ru. However, Yandex accounts its site faulty operations not for any governmental political decision, but for difficulties experienced by a certain internet provider.

I can understand the news about Google, Yahoo, MSN, but Yandex? A Russian-language search engine that brings up results highly irrelevant to anyone living outside of Russia… There must be here something more than what’s on the cover.

So What is It? Here are my answers:

• Powerplay between Beijing and Moscow
• Punish increasing numbers of Russians in China (or an attempt to curb population growth of illegal Russians
• Preventing Chinese people from accessing vast amount of porn (quite common in Russian culture) on Yandex
• Finally, a simple mistake by an IT technician at one of the major ISPs…

Filed under: China Market | »