Baidu, the Chinese search engine which Google sold its stake in just last Friday (June 23, 2006), will soon be launching a blog product called "Baidu Space" (targeting July 13). The service is said to combine search thus offering bloggers the ability to easily find additional content through the platform. Since Baidu is the leading Chinese search engine "Baidu Space" could grow very quickly like MySpace and mirror that of Google's Blogger platform.
Pete Cashmore makes some excellent points about the potential for "Baidu Space" and the Chinese blog market in general by saying:
"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."
Wow, 1000 comments per post! I wonder what kind of movies Xu Jing Lei is in?