It is can be said that the initial development of the blogosphere in China, both on the mainland and on Taiwan, was inspired by the example of the American blogosphere. Further, the blog as a sweeping phenomenon in China was promoted by commercial organizations, and powered by venture capitals. The three major issues of Chinese blogosphere are, in my estimation, the Chinese translation of Blog, the exposing of privacy via blogging, and the potential of the participatory journalism of blogging.

This overview gives the background to the construction of the Chinese blogosphere and its subsequent development, which provides a context for the empirical research presented in later chapters. 

Blogs are having a substantial influence on contemporary politics in the United States. Gill cited that political campaigns began using the Web to provide information about issues and schedules in the 1996 election. However, there was little impact due in part to paucity of Americans on the Internet. That situation has changed. Given this increased level of awareness - 55 percent of Americans use the Net regularly and 70 percent have access - recent Pew Internet and American Life research suggests that 11 percent of American Net users have read blogs and 2-7 percent have created them; this translates to between2.4 and 8.4 million bloggers. Net users with a college degree are the most likely bloggers. It is not surprising that Democratic Presidential candidates Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, John Edwards, Bob Graham and John Kerry included blogs on their Web sites.  In 2004, the Democrats took political blogging a major step forward by creating Blog Swarm to coordinate the blogs in its camp.

Moreover, bloggers work on political parties from the other direction. Whereas Matt Drudge doesn’t like being labelled as a blogger, the first blog-driven controversy was the fall of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who had remarked that Senator Thurmond's leadership abilities may have made him a good President. Since Thurmond had spent much of his early political career sympathetic to white supremacists, Internet opinion pages like Instapundit, run by University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, and Talking Points Memo, from leftie political columnist Josh Marshall -- were among the first to latch on to ABCNews.com's brief item on Lott's racist comments during Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday bash. Their efforts kept the story "alive" in the press until a critical mass of disapproval forced Lott to resign his position as Senate Majority Leader. Steven Outing, a senior editor at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, wrote in an e-mail, "What we're seeing more and more are webloggers breaking niche stories, and thus serving as an early warning system for traditional journalists."   

A recent public survey run by  web hosting company Hostway shows that the majority, 52% of the 2,500 people surveyed, said bloggers should have the same rights as traditional journalists, while 27% did not express an opinion. It is no wonder that an America blogger acclaimed that Blogs are now part of the mainstream.

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introduction (600)
1) why am I interested in the research topic?

2) what are my research questions
3) How you going to do with it?

4) Statement of the argument: hypothesis (impact or not; set up position)