博客:从自由王国到商业战场

Blog's Commercialization Trend

博客——博学的博，刀客的客——是个引人神往的名字，神秘幽远而又豪爽大气。这个中文译名远远超越了英文原名blog，尽管它们有着相同的本性：自由、开放、免费、共享。

The influence of Blog is growing rapidly with the number of participants soaring. More and more people are endeavoring to look for business opportunities in Blogs, while Blog is being transformed from a totally free platform into a business vehicle. Especially when those big IT players are increasingly involved, it is almost certain that Blog would lose its biggest characteristic - Free. Last December Microsoft launched a service named MSNSpaces which is regarded as a big change to traditional Blog. This March Yahoo also launched Yahoo360, which is similar to MSNSpaces both in terms of concept and design. Actually before Microsoft and Yahoo, another big IT player,Google, had already taken over the world's biggest Blog website, Blogger.com, through buying out its parent company-Pyra. In China, BlogChina is gearing up for its overseas IPO. However, Fang Xingdong, the founder of BlogChina, told reporters that the lack of a clear profit mode was seriously hindering the company's IPO. His job now is to find a clear profit mode to win investors' hearts before IPO.