According to him, after the Wenchuan earthquake, the blogs in Tencent, Sina, NetEase and Sohu, four of major websites in China, totaled 2.33 million with 2.36 billion page views and 613.2 billion posts by then. The number of news reports of these four websites during the same period, meanwhile, totaled 130,000.

"This shows that the influence of blogs or podcasts has exceeded Web news and forums," Peng said.

Min Dahong, a researcher of the Media Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said in an article on sina.com that blogging has played an important role in information dissemination and communication after the quake, becoming a major supplement to the reports of mainstream media.

"The nature of a blog is a participation-style medium and this has been clearly shown in the after-quake reports this time," Min said.

Part of life

Since 2002 when blogs first appeared in China, blogging has been a major part of many people's lives. Most celebrities have opened their blogs in big portal websites, but ordinary people have also established a home online. Here they share thoughts, experiences and pictures, and with peer pressure blogs are now almost essential for young Chinese.

"Generally speaking, blogging helps anyone express their intellect and creativity through the platform of the Internet," Fang Xingdong, Founder and CEO of blogchina.com, one of the earliest blog websites in China, explains his understanding of blogs.