12 Good Reasons to Learn Chinese

From Ethan’s My heart’s in Accra:

Basically, the Chinese language blogosphere appears to be exploding in popularity. And the 12 Chinese blogs listed in Technorati’s top 100 may be just the tip of the iceberg.

All 12 of the Chinese blogs are hosted by MSN. This isn’t entirely surprising – research by my friend Matthew Hurst on pingserver data suggested that a huge percentage of total blog posts are coming from MSN and that a substantial percentage of MSN Spaces blogs are being written by people in China. Using data from a paper Matthew is publishing in a few weeks, I estimate that MSN is hosting a minimum of 2m Chinese language blogs, including Chinese and Taiwanese bloggers. That’s an amazing figure, as Technorati and Blogpulse each index roughly 20 million blogs in total – MSN’s Chinese-language blogs alone might represent 10% of the blogosphere.