China's Ministry of Information Industry plans to strengthen the management of blog services and has commissioned the Blog Research Team under the Internet Society of China to carry out studies on the development of a weblog real name mechanism.

Under a real name mechanism, users would be required to officially register their blogs under their official names and with official identification.

The Blog Research Team of ISC held a seminar earlier this month where they discussed six major topics related to the real name mechanism, including the application range of the real name mechanism, each involved party's rights and obligations, blog writers' registered information, measures to ensure the authenticity of blog writer's registered information, potential problems during the management process and schedules of the management. Copyright, rights violations, privacy and responsibility are key issues related to a blog real name mechanism which need to be carefully solved before the mechanism can be put into practice.

It may be difficult for China to adopt the real name mechanism for blogging services as it involves hundreds of blog service providers and thousands of individuals' own blog sites and domain names, which can be hosted anywhere in the world. Current large blog service providers in China include CNBlog, ChinaBlog.net, MSN, and Sohu.com.

The Blog Research Team of ISC was set up on August 2. It has 13 website members including People.com, Qianlong.com, Sohu.com and Sina.com and Netease.com and five IT and legal experts. The latest statistics of CNNIC show that by August this year, there were 17.5 million blog writers in mainland China and the total reader number had also reached 75 million.