Like many others, I read this brief article on CNN.com entitled, "China bloggers surpass 30 million."  The articles says there's about 34 million blog sites, but the more important number is the number of actual bloggers — more than 17 million according to the article.  That's a few folks, but not all that many if you consider that more than 105 million persons in China have access to the web — but it's a lot of people for all those censors to worry about (and the number's expected to more than double by 2010).

In this morning's USAToday, there's a good article about the growth of libel suits against bloggers.  in the side bar on the left-hand side, "The Bloggiing Boom," are numbers provided by Technorati, the blog search and directory service.  Technorati says there are some 53 million blogs, 12% of them in Chinese.  This would mean that here are only 6.4 million Chinese language bloggers.  

There are likely differences in counting, and the Chinese government surely doesn't include Taiwanese bloggers.  But that's still a big difference, with the CNN number about three times as large as the Technorati figure.  No matter, there are lots of Chinese bloggers and their number will grow dramatically over time. Maybe even to the extend that it becomes the predominant language of the blogosphere.

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