THE rise of the blogging phenomenon has transformed ordinary folk into Internet celebrities. Xu Wenwen speaks to some of the noted netizens whose online postings have propelled them to such lofty heights of cyber stardom.

Not too long ago, Huang Jianren was a common guy working for his boss; today, he works at the same office, but his boss sometimes flatters him because Huang is now a celebrity.

The 29-year-old grassroots Internet sensation, as a blogger with thousands of followers, is having his moment in the spotlight on www.19lou.com, a leading Hangzhou website about everyday life. Each of Huang's blog posts has attracted between 30,000 and 100,000 clicks.

Huang Jianren is not his real name, but a blogger name. It literally means "Yellow Bitch," "yellow" in Chinese refering to "porn."

He gives himself with such a cheap name because he insists "to act cheaply is to fight, and to give up the respect is to win another respect," which are words from "The Golden Age" written by Wang Xiaobo, a noted Chinese writer who died in 1997.

But it is not the "yellow" name that makes him so popular on Internet; it is his black humor regarding life, work and society.

Huang writes about his daily life, such as having meals with friends, hunting for girls and satirizing his boss, which is similar to a lot of other people's, but he does it with humour that raises much laughter.

"My blog is like junk food doing nothing but teasing people," evaluates Huang. "Life is full of wrongs, but writing about those wrongs in a self-mockery way reminds me that everything is not that bad."

Huang began blogging in 2006, when he was feeling low and wanted a means to vent, but his strong sense of humor soon attracted online fans. One of his loyal fans even wrote a slogan for Huang: A nice day starts from reading Huang Jianren's blog.

Since he became popular on the local website around two years ago, his blog postings have been transferred to many other Chinese websites, including the influential Netease and Sohu; the media came to solicit contributions; publishing houses offered to print his online musings as books; and he has even dated one of his fans.

"It just happened all of a sudden," says Huang. "I've been working hard on my blog for two years, but since people started to transfer my essays, I became a grassroots star.

"It has gratified my vanity," he adds. "I just chose the Internet as a channel to release my emotion to a large extent, like many other bloggers do."

It's true that many Chinese people write blogs nowadays.

According to a recent survey by TNS, a world leader in market research and analysis, four out of every five netizens and more than half of respondents in China have written their own blog or entries.

Sensitive topic

While Huang took two years to become popular, "A Lancet," another blogger on www.19lou.com, only spent six months because her blog focuses on a very sensitive topic - death.

In 2006, A Lancet who was an army doctor for several years, wrote her first blog posting "Why would I write 'how do people die'," narrating her experiences about observing all kinds of people's organ specimens and talking to dying people in a sophisticated manner.

Tens of stories about souls, suicides and deaths involving philosophy and life experiences followed on her blog. Less than six months later, A Lancet rose to be a star blogger and published a book "My Memory of Life and Death" in 2007.

The woman in her 50s, who is currently working as a journalist for a TV station, once said: "I write my blog because I don't feel pressure here. There are no requirements about what I can say and I can quit anytime I want."

Besides writing posts on blogs, some bloggers gain popularity by posting photos and cartoons. Fat Rabbit Zhouzhou is a cartoon series that used to be published on MSN Space, and is now transferred to Sina.com.

The illustrator Zhou Zhou embodies himself as a lovely bunny in the cartoon while his wife is a cute monkey. He draws cartoons about their daily life, which is full of mistakes, jokes, thoughts and philosophy.

Zhou's life changed in 2006 when he entered an MSN Space competition to win his wife a car °?- and won.

Since then, Zhou has published Fat Rabbit Zhouzhou books, and toy figures of the bunny have been manufactured. His cartoons are not only about trivial life but current affairs, such as the recent Asian Games and the Shanghai apartment block fire.

"Blog is a grassroots platform that the public decide whether the blogger deserves a praise," says Zhang Lei, a sociology professor of Zhejiang University of Technology.

"Usually, blog articles are short, which are in accordance with the 'fragmentation trend' of reading," he adds.

Although blogging has created many stars like Huang and Zhou, it has stopped expanding while weibo (Chinese equivalent of Twitter) is on the rise, making stars in a new way.

At the First China Weibo Developer Conference, Sina.com, the country's leading weibo website, stated that by the end of last month, the number of Sina weibo users reached 50 million, and users post more than 25 million threads every day.

Such a huge number signifies that the website is capable of making stars. At the end of last month, it initiated a mirco-novel competition that accepts novels of less than 140 Chinese characters, which is a sort of star-creating show.

Given that over 80 percent of Chinese netizens own a blog, the development of blogging is steady while boom of the social-networking sites and weibo lures users away from blogs, or carves up users' timespent online.

Example of Huang Jianren's blog postings:

"A few days ago several pals told me about a restaurant that has good cuisine and a pretty manageress. I was excited and I called my buddy Fan Tongfan.

Every time I am going for a meal, I think of Fan. Why? Because he is such a splendid spirit he always pays the bill! I almost paid the bill once, but Fan tried his best to stop me and dashed to the counter to save my money. Where else can I find such a generous species?

So we went to the restaurant with the good cuisine and the pretty manageress at the weekend. Fan ordered four bottles of yellow wine and we soon got drunk. We had one more round for the road, and then three more rounds later ?

It was time to go to the toilet, so I left Fan some time to pay the bill, but Fan, Hi, Fan, hey, hey, why are you lying on the table?

Anyway, it was a nice meal, but it would have been better if it wasn't my treat, and it would have been even better if I didn't have to help the 90-kilogram fat Fan home."