PUBLIC MARKS with tags industry & blog

China is the world's second-largest Internet market after the United States with more than 110 million users. A survey by Chinese search engine Baidu.com put the current number of blog, or Web log, sites at 36.82 million which are kept by 16 million people, the official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday. The number of Chinese bloggers is expected to hit 60 million by the end of this year, Xinhua said, quoting a report on China's media industry by the prestigious Tsinghua University.

Revolutions don't usually work out quite as planned. And that's what's happening now in the technology world with blogs. They are every bit as important as their boosters said they would be. But in an entirely different way. In the standard theory about technology blogs -- which was the conventional wisdom until a few months ago -- mainstream media were out of touch, elitist or simply ossified, and they would soon be supplanted by a grass-roots army of bloggers working intently at their laptops to speak truth to power.