PUBLIC MARKS with tags china & blogs

對岸祖國...也是不簡單

At the beginning of the year the Time magazine’s 'Person of the year’ cover got me thinking about issues of control and the internet in a global and local context. It focused on the proliferation of user generated content (UGC), and talks about being on the verge of a 'new digital democracy'. When 'old' media starts talking about citizens taking over, a 'revolution' and 'power to the people', perhaps it signals the opposite?

There are upwards of 27 million blogs in the world. To discover how they relate to one another, we’ve taken the most-linked-to 50 and mapped their connections. Each arrow represents a hypertext link that was made sometime in the past 90 days. Think of those links as votes in an endless global popularity poll. Many blogs vote for each other: “blogrolling.” Some top-50 sites don’t have any links from the others shown here, usually because they are big in Japan, China, or Europe—regions still new to the phenomenon.

The Chinese blogosphere has been tortured lately with some heated debates about China bashing, Japan bashing, foreigner bashing and whatever lays ready to bash. It all started so innocent.