China BLOG search engine

We reported back in June about rather ambitious financial plans for BlogChina. Now we learn from the excellent Marbridge Weekly newsletter (reporting CCID) that the company recently released its own, Chinese language blog search engine, booso.com. The developers claim a number of advantages from special features including, they say "searching through blog archives. It [also] makes use of "blogcasting" to make possible near-real time updating of its index, making it a valuable complement to traditional search engines".

Chinese blogging is certainly on people's minds this week. Rebecca MacKinnnon has been reporting from Shanghai on what she thinks is the first ever blogger conference there. A couple of the interesting points from the most recent post which caught my eye:

• There is interest in doing more to communicate with the outside world. Language is a barrier, but people are open to distributed volunteer translation networks and other means of getting Chinese voices heard outside of the Chinese language blogosphere.
• Censorship is an issue. But people are determined to maximize what they can do within the realities of the system, and to push the boundaries as much as possible.