The number of bloggers who use Chinese reached 19.87 million in early November, according to a report released by Chinese Internet company Baidu on Wednesday.

The figure represents a 24-percent rise over from the 16 million people who wrote their own blogs at the end of November last year, according Baidu.

Bloggers updated their blogs every 7.6 days on average and 3.02 million were active bloggers who posted new writings within seven days. Just 4.6 percent of web writers updated their blogs every day.

The number of blog service providers rose nearly 55 percent in the past year to 1,460.
Qzone, which was run by Tencent, had the most bloggers and visitors. It was followed by Sina.com, MSN Spaces and Sohu.com.

The growth in the number of Chinese bloggers slowed over the past year, leading to 20 percent of the top 100 providers to abandon the service.

Professional blogs specializing in topics such as medicine and education grew rapidly in the past year.

Baidu released its first report on Chinese bloggers last December. The Internet search company plans to launch a special blog search service soon.

A survey made by the Internet Society of China says the population of Chinese bloggers was 17.5 million at the end of August and the society confirmed that the government is considering requiring people to provide their names to register a blog or post online comments.

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