The 'blog' revolution sweeps across China

Remember the old saying, you can fool some of the people some of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all the people all the time.

The New Scientist reports on "The 'blog' revolution sweeps across China".

It took a chance online encounter between a software engineer from Shanghai and a teacher in a remote province of China to start shaking up the power balance between the people and the government of the world’s most populous nation.

Try as they might Chinese censors are no match for bloggers.

Blog services are now sprouting all over China. By the end of October 2004, China had more than 45 large blog-hosting services. A Google search for bo ke will return more than two million results, from blogs for football fans to blogs for Christians.

And while the larger hosting companies have become subject to censorship regulations, smaller companies and individuals do not face the same pressures. Any tech-savvy user can download and install blogging software themselves, bypassing the controls.

They have even discovered "moblogging".

Meanwhile blogging seems set to grow as a national hobby for the younger generation. Providers of China’s 300 million mobile phones are beginning to provide “moblogging” services, with which users can send text and photos directly from their phones to their blogs. For now, most blogs are personal, but their potential for building networks of people and disseminating news cannot be underestimated.

The original inventors (and that does not include Al Gore), had no idea they would so totally revolutionize the world let alone communications.

Hat tip InstaPundit
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