She is the world's 'most widely read blogger'

Chinese actress-turned-director Xu Jinglei became the world's most widely read blogger this month when her blog logged 100 million page views within about 600 days, the Beijing News said on Thursday.

And Xu, who has a reputation for a high intellect and integrity, has done it without writing about sex or providing a catalogue of kiss-and-tell stories -- but focusing on her work and day-to-day life.

The 100 millionth hit occurred on July 12, according to www.sina.com.cn, a popular Chinese Web site which provides blog services to many Chinese entertainers, including Xu who started hers in October 2005 and published a book of her blogged articles in March 2006.

The 33-year-old blogger has invited 20 fans, selected from online submissions, to her party to celebrate her latest success.

Xu won international acclaim when she won the best director award for "Letter From An Unknown Woman" at the 2004 San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain.

Leading blog search engine Technorati has said Xu's blog recorded last year the most incoming links of any on the Internet, according to the online edition of the China Daily.

After various sources pointed out that Chinese actress/director/blogger/celeb extraordinaire Xu Jinglei's mega-popular blog flew completely underneath the radar of blog search engines and ranking sites such as Technorati, the folks over at Technorati made some changes, and now Xu's blog has displaced Boing Boing as its top ranking blog. Keso, a tech blogger quoted in the Danwei post on this subject, had this to say:

We say that the central concept of Web 2.0 is the centrality of the user. A blog is an individual's online identity; it's neither an independent domain name nor an independent URL. But when Sina's blog developers planned its system, they thought not of the users but rather of what was convenient for development. For example, I can search for all returning links to my blog, which includes not only my home page but any individual post as well. But for Sina blogs, you can only search for links to your blog's home page.

What I want to say is that even if Xu Jinglei's blog has claimed the top spot on the Technorati 100, compared with the leading advantages of Boing Boing, it in fact should be much, much higher than Technorati's figures. The vast majority of actual links have been swallowed by Sina's selfish blog system - these links all point to the non-existent blog blog.sina.com.cn/u, or to Sina's blog home page.

For those of you don't know who the hell Xu Jinglei is, you might want to read this or this (in Chinese). If you want to buy anything relating to her, including the movies that she's acted in, directed, and the books she's written (there's only one, which is mostly transcriptions of her blog), you can do this search on Joyo.