internet - The story of the 50 million missing Chinese weblogs

I just talked to Frank Dai of Global Voices at bit longer about the different numbers of weblogs that are coming up from different sources and I probably have to admit I missed about 50 million Chinese weblogs. According to him it all depends on what you call a weblog. One thing is for sure: Analysys International has been much close to the truth than I thought in November, when they came up with an estimate I thought was unrealistic.
Frank Dai has saved a nice chart that originally went along with this article about the Analysis report in the Nanfang Daily. Unlike the stories the popular spindoctors of Bokee.com tell us, they are not the largest host of weblogs but have only have ten percent of the weblog-market and hold the 4th position at the end of 2005. MSN Space holds a 6th place with six percent of the weblog market.
Note that Sina, who is hosting the weblog of Xu Jinglei, the current number one at the top-100 of Technorati is is ranked even lower in this research. But that might have changed by now.
The real winner is Tencent, a Shenzhen-based company with its IM-service QQ, who has a weblog service, Q-zone, connecting its customers to its highly popular IM-service. Frank estimates that QQ now has 150 million accounts, while most people have two, three accounts (although I have talked to people who have eight accounts in the past). One third of them has a QQ-blog, connecting to them over their QQ-software, not over their browsers. That is about 50 million weblogs that have emerged since last year.
Those weblogs are mostly public, but since they have a rather complicated url, mostly only their QQ-buddies would read their weblog, says Frank Dai.
Q-zone had 30 percent of the market, according to the Analysys-report in November 2005. That means I and much of the rest of the world have been missing about 50 million Chinese weblogs. Bokee might of course say they are not real weblogs, while others say that Bokee is not really offering weblogs, but that is a very Chinese way of defining away competitors. We should not get involved into that game.
In the Q-zone people see themselves as bloggers and act as bloggers, says Frank. He says that especially the successful 'celebrity-blogging' has caused the recent hype and has helped QQ a lot. I wonder how Technorati is going to capture this part of the market.