By Frank Yu
Across China on personal desktops and laptop computers, an army of writers, teachers and even technicians write down their daily journal and thoughts about life and leisure of 21st century China. Known as "bloggers" a bastardized shortening of web loggers, these hardy souls are motivated by their need to share their experience with others on a very public and global forum.

Lets take the typical China foreign blogger John X as a fictional example. John X gets up very early each morning, before he goes out to teach his English language class, to update his blog with his latest thoughts and writings. Unless he has a burning issue on his mind that he needs to opine on, like the deplorable sound of Chinese Pop Music, he will trawl the web for China related news or simply read the links provided by other bloggers.

Finding some recent news tidbits of some funny stories like the op-ed piece of a writer in the China Daily calling the term "Peking Duck" racist since it perpetuates the old colonial linguistic usage of Peking, John X will now proceed to write a short essay, linking to the original article, and explaining to his readers that the China Daily writer is quite surely smoking crack and/or is a terrible hack writer.

After reading over his new posting, he checks it for any politically sensitive terms which may cause the government to block his site. Such taboo terms as ***** **** and **** ***** will get him locked out or shut down by over enthusiastic censors. Although he is not concerned as much about being shut down, he does not want all the writers that share the host server with him to get locked out as well. Living in China, we learn to pick the battles that we feel strongly about and let the host of other indignities pass through quiet compliance.

After checking that things look as if it can pass muster, he uses his Movable Type blogging software to post and update his site. Immediately, RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication) gets sent to other blogs so that they know that he has posted an update to his site and can further link to what he has written. If some of the bigger blogs in the states picks up his recent postings of how "Peking Duck" is not a racist term, than like wildfire, other people begin discussions of that topic while linking to John X's blog as well as to China Daily and the original posting. All hell breaks loose when www.Instapundit.com reads and links to it.

Before you know it, the whole Blogosphere (the term bloggers use to describe the buzz) is talking about "Peking Duck." As each person links to the article and the post, Peking Duck now begins to rise in its Google Rankings. Whenever anyone types in "Peking Duck," the article by John X will now be the lead link and not the recipe for directions on cooking Peking Duck.

Soon, the regular media will pick up on the story and start their own debate of the legitimacy of the term "Peking Duck" and even interview John X himself on his opinions and perspective. Just as the crescendo of hype begins to build, some other blogger in Iraq writes a posting on their blog of why Oakley sunglasses look cool on US soldiers and the big Cycloptic eye of the media and blogosphere turns away to gaze and stare at Iraq now.

The next day John X checks out his traffic log and sees the big spike as users from around the world flocked to read his blog. A week later, only the loyal 10-15 people who are friends of John X continue to read him on a daily basis. The Chinese censors move too slow to read every blog and posting that pops up. John X's next few postings is just about how bad the toilets in his school are which not surprisingly fails to catch the attention of other bloggers even in China. So much for his next 15 minutes.

However, deep in the bowels of Google's servers, the links and the articles are still there. Waiting and cached for posterity, Google never forgets…it just buries the dead links until the time is right.

About the author:
Frank Yu is a Program Manager at Microsoft Research Asia's Advanced Technology Center. A Harvard graduate, Frank has worked in Hong Kong, Singapore and now Beijing for 8 years in the field of technology and banking. Views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not those of Microsoft Corporation. Frank can be contacted at [email protected]