Er, you know, the celebrity blogs on Sina seem to me a bit un-bloglike to the degree that they are practically advertised ad nauseum on the Sina home page and the
Sina blog home page. (They remind me more of what will be possible when bustop billboards go completely digital and people like Xu can share their latest random bit of wisdom, or mundane observation about how wonderful their famous friends are, with the waiting masses on every street in every city of China.) I mean, I wonder how many hits Boingboing would get if Yahoo just advertised it 24 hours a day. Also, re: that Sina Blog ranking bar (which doesn't change)... er, what exactly is the point of that? They should call it a Rank-Support System. It is pointless. It's not a ranking index, it's a big billboard ad. Gee, I wonder if Xu is Number 1 and Hanhan Number 2 again today? Whoa, who would have guessed! ("This ranking sponsored by Chicken-or-Egg.com") I've got nothing against Xu's blog -- except that it's sort of vapid and reminds me of the Void toward whose gaping maw we are all plunging -- but Sina's massively and selectively advertised celebrity blogs are depressing in that they exhibit almost exactly the opposite of what made blogs cool in the first place. Also: if there was anyway to rank the quality of comments on any given blog (say, in terms of some kind of IQ analysis based on the content/vocabulary/sentence complexity of the comments), I wonder what kind of rankings would be possible.

By the way...

WHAT IS "TECHNORATI"? I've heard people talk about this mythical site, but because I've never actually been able to venture out side the Great Firewall, I'm not sure what it is. My browser tells me that Technorati is something to which it "can't establish a connection."

Awesome! So, there's a big debate among Chinese bloggers about the ranking of a celebrity blogger on some mythical site rumored to exist "beyond the wall" but which can't really be proved to exist because we can't access it?

Intriguing.
Perhaps Technorati could email its latest ranking results by carrier pigeon?

One of the biggest uses of Technorati is to provide information on which blogs are linking to which other blogs - the rankings really don't mean anything, I don't think, but many people use it to quickly find out (a) what other blogs are commenting on and (b) if anyone has commented on one of their own posts.

It's been available in Beijing up until a short time ago, so you must just be behind the curve there....

What did make blogs cool in the first place? Remember when no one would shut up about Kottke or one of the other blogebrities and what they had for lunch? Sure, Sina's front page is a huge billboard in some respects (and that's pretty much by design), and yes, there are lots of vapid blogs plunging into the maw, but I have just two words for you: LiveJournal. MySpace. There's nothing unique about the China situation, really, except for the current breathless reporting about it in the media.

Interesting that Technorati changed their ranking system, rather than Sina changing their messed-up URLs. I suppose it's part of the "current breathless" pandering to all things Chinese.