Good English Blog Unblocked in China?

[elina]

We will start an English blog, there will be two categories, one for serious matters/正经事儿, the other for entertainment. We have never played with a blog, so some of my questions probably sound silly.

We’re looking for an English blog unblocked in mainland China with the following characteristics:

It’s better to be free, but if not, we could pay a small amount if necessary.

Search engine friendly.

The blog’s authors (visitors can comment) are us who are Chinese natives, and the viewers are foreign Chinese-learners, so ideally it’s better to have both Chinese and English interfaces to choose for convenience. But our English is good enough when reading some English instruction, the Chinese interface is not a must.

From the view statistics/流量统计 show, some competitors have just been falling in love with our site, and visit our site at least once per day for more than one year. So maybe not our customers, but the competitors would notice our blog at the first time, and then automatically “steal” some blog’s content, which was prepared time-consuming. Is there something in a blog, which can prevent from content theft, like watermark or whatever else?

[BrandeX]

Blogspot is the most well known:

http://www.blogger.com/

[roddy]

The trouble with any blog hosting site outside of China is that even if it's not blocked now, there's no guarantee that it won't GET blocked in the future, after you've put up a load of content and everyone knows your url.

My first suggestion would be to set it up in a sub-directory of your existing site (ie studychineseculture.com/blog ) - you've already got hosting there, and your customers should be able to remember the url.

Alternatively, I'd suggest a general webhosting package, and then install a blog on it - that's a slightly technical process, but not very difficult, and you've got experience of running websites already (not to mention all of us to help ). Just to pick an example at random, I used to use Surpass Hosting for a while - their Power package has everything you need (except the domain name) for $60 a year.

[simonlaing]

Blogspot get blocked from time to time , so be careful about that one,

Also I think it's called wordsmith also gets blocked if it gets to hot.. (usually Taiwan issues if think).

Sina.com has blogs but I don't know about their english support.

Good luck,

have fun,

Simon:)

[Shadowdh]

Hi Elina, you could try Yahoo360 which is the blog that I use, I never had a problem with it at all in China or out and have people from all over read it... its been very user friendly has loads of useful features and best of all is free... If you want to get a taste click on my signature (although I need to update my blog as I have not done it since returning). I warn you its not very interesting and the Chinese content is quite low so far...

[skylee]

I don't know about any technical things or statisics or anti-theft functions. I maintain 2 blogs of the same contents (it's silly i know). One is blogspot the other is windows live spaces. Windows live spaces has no problem in supporting both Chinese and English and I believe it can be viewed in China (do let me know if this is not the case) and anywhere else. The one drawback that I know of about the windows blog is that you can't amend the date of your post. To counter this, I use windows live writer (a very good tool) to upload my blog entries to both blogspot and windows.

PS - Both of them are free of charge. Windows live writer is also free.

[elina]

Thanks for all the input, we will do some research later.

Skylee, I can access your two blogs now, and I can see you’re a 勤劳的小蜜蜂型写手 in July, not every month though