Baidu, China's most popular search engine, plans to launch a new blogging service to rival Blogger and MSN Spaces. Baidu Spaces will also take on local players like Bokee, Blogbus and BlogCN. It's scheduled to launch on July 13th. Although Chinese bloggers tend to go under the radar for most English-speakers (including me), the Chinese blogging market is huge: there will be 60 million Chinese bloggers by the end of this year and 100 million by 2007. About 15% of blogs are in Chinese, while 30% are written in English.
The world's most popular blog (according to Technorati) is also Chinese - it's written by Chinese movie star Xu Jing Lei. The blog attracts over 1000 comments per post (!). What's more, China is the second-biggest Internet market overall, with 100 million citizens online. And Baidu itself ranks as the fourth most popular site in the world, behind Yahoo, MSN and Google. With that in mind, it's no wonder that Technorati is keen to roll out localized versions of its blog search.
English-speaking sites still dominate the market, and it seems that it's easiest to launch your service in English before rolling out regionalized versions (see also: MySpace). But the Korean phenomenon Cyworld is about to try the opposite - bringing a foreign language social network to the US - so it'll be interesting to see how Americans take to it. Either way, it looks like Baidu could soon be hosting a decently-sized portion of the world's weblogs.
