"The number of blogs uploaded to our website kept rising after that," said Li Lu, a staff member of sina's PR department.

Li said that the contents of these quake-related blogs cover a wide range, such as first-hand experiences during the quake, volunteers' information, suggestions on reconstruction of the quake-hit area and mourning for the victims.

After years of development in China, blogs have finally shown their power as a grassroots media outlet of netizens, especially after May 12, said Peng Bo, Deputy Director of the Internet Bureau of the Information Office under the State Council of China, at a convention on the development of new media held in Beijing on May 20.

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.

According to his website, the number of blogs in China in 2002 was less than 10,000. One year later the number rose to 200,000. And in 2005, blogging began to spread among ordinary Chinese, with bloggers accounting for around 10 percent of the total netizens in China at that time

A report issued in the end of 2007 by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the state network information center, said that up to November 2007, the number of bloggers in China had reached some 47 million, which means one in every four Chinese netizens has a blog.

The CNNIC report also said that 47 percent of the bloggers write to record their personal feelings. But it also exposed that nearly 60 percent of netizens that have been surveyed do not believe blog contents.

According to sina.com, the blog users registered in their website have exceeded 23 million now and with almost 200,000 blog updates daily. Sina's Li said all sina's blog articles are updated by bloggers themselves freely and her website does not make any edits, unless the content of these articles goes against the laws and regulations of the country.

Even people without their own blogs make a habit of reading others' blogs. Li said the blogs of their website with the most views are views about social issues and analysis of some government policies.

But when it comes to popular blogs, nothing comes close to Chinese actress Xu Jinglei in 2007. Her blog logged 100 million page views within 600 days, according to the Beijing News. Xu was thought to be an intellectual beauty in China, and her blogs attract a large number of readers just through narrations about her work and daily life.

According to the latest statistics from the Media Research Institute of CASS, there are 221 million Internet users in China currently, which means more and more Chinese will have a place to express themselves to a larger readership.

"I hope to leave some memory of my life and thoughts in my blogs and share them with others, and what is more important, some times you have to express yourself in words, " Chen said. "It can give anyone a chance to be a writer, poet or journalist."

And when it comes to gender, Chen holds that the messages are different. "I think women like to write about their feelings or mood while men prefer to write about things related to social and political issues in their blogs."

In an online promotion hosted by sina.com to select key Chinese words of 2006, blogging was chosen as one of them. It's an indication that blogs are here to stay. And what role it plays during and after the Wenchuan quake is widely believed to be another milestone.