MSN's blog space gains popularity in Chinese blogging circle

According to the ranking list from technorati, three blogs written in Chinese are among the top 100 popular blogs in the world. However only one of them from mainland China, and one is from Taiwan, and the last one of them from Canada.

The top Chinese written blog SUCAIKU is mainly focusing on the technical modification of MSN SPACE.

36 spaces.msn.com/members/sucaiku
5,675 links from 3,859 sites.

The blog holding the second position seems to be the blog dedicated to Jimmy 幾米. I had hard time to figure out the meaning of those pictures on that blog, and for this stupidity of mine, I am pretty sure I will experience another culture shock if I go back working in great China area. The generation gap is definitely widening and I am a little afraid of communicating with those kids born in 80's.

54 spaces.msn.com/members/jimmymsnspace
3,009 links from 2,867 sites.

The third place is held by a young Chinese girl from Toronto area. I guess it's not what I am interested in (because of generation gap again?), except we may have one thing in common: both are overseas students.

88 spaces.msn.com/members/princesscecicastle
3,542 links from 2,090 sites.


Overall, these top 3 blogs are all residing in MSN space, which is said having good relationship with Chinese government and can be freely browsed in China. It is well known that MSN filters sensitive keywords and is not at all friendly towards political bloggers. Nevertheless, every mainland Chinese would be happy seeing that MSN explicitly labels the location "Taiwan" as "China Taiwan" in Chinese. I guess this is one of agreements in its secret deal with the Chinese government.

What is the implication of this over-popular nonpolitical blogging atomosphere in MSN space? and How it will influence the younger generalizaion of Chinese people? Compared with blogsphere in US, seeminlgy Chinese popular blogs have been sanitized from the politics. Good, or Bad?
If China is going to experience a chaotic transition and eventually become a democratic country, can we expect these future voters grown up in this specially protected blogsphere to be politically savvy?

BTW: all these 3 chinese blogs are topped by one blog written in english by a young female Hongkonger. Unfortunately, I also have hard time to figure out why this blog is so popular.

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Beccary Mmm, Tofu
By Rebecca Wei
4,152 links from 4,028 sites.