PUBLIC MARKS from vista with tag industry

China is the world's second-largest Internet market after the United States with more than 110 million users. A survey by Chinese search engine Baidu.com put the current number of blog, or Web log, sites at 36.82 million which are kept by 16 million people, the official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday. The number of Chinese bloggers is expected to hit 60 million by the end of this year, Xinhua said, quoting a report on China's media industry by the prestigious Tsinghua University.

This explosion of new Web sites -- a phenomenon often dubbed "Web 2.0" -- is great for all kinds of Internet users. But how long can this new crop of startups survive without charging for their products? The answer, in some cases, may be not long. Simply put, many of these outfits, much like their dot-com predecessors in the late 1990s, don't have business models. The most common revenue source in the Web 2.0 world is contextual advertising -- but, as some analysts point out, the nickels and dimes earned when visitors click on ads provided by the likes of Google's AdWords barely bring in enough to cover the costs of Web server hardware. Consequently, some industry watchers believe that a shakeout is likely within the next 12 to 24 months.

Revolutions don't usually work out quite as planned. And that's what's happening now in the technology world with blogs. They are every bit as important as their boosters said they would be. But in an entirely different way. In the standard theory about technology blogs -- which was the conventional wisdom until a few months ago -- mainstream media were out of touch, elitist or simply ossified, and they would soon be supplanted by a grass-roots army of bloggers working intently at their laptops to speak truth to power.