BlogChina to list

Even as Rebecca MacKinnon reports on more Chinese blockage of international blog sites, we see reports of a planned $1 billion NASDAQ listing of BlogChina which claims to be the country's leading blog portal. Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, reports the company's founder and CEO Fang Xingdong as saying ""I expect we will surpass Sina with our [initial public offering] next year."

The report suggests that Fang was the person to coin the Chinese translation of blogger, "bo ke". First round funding for the company came from Softbank with a second round of $10 million recently obtained from six VCs in China and the US according to the newspaper.

BlogChina claims revenues of Rmb2 million a month (US$250k) from advertising by companies such as Dell, HP and IBM.

Given that the article suggested $500 million in first round financing (which is obviously wrong), we think somebody may have been muddling their zeroes as they put this report together. $1 billion seems awfully rich even when you combine the China hype with the Internet/blog hype.

...and no word of what you're allowed to discuss on BlogChina although we think we can guess what you can't.