Blogging is all the rage in China today.

An official estimate from the ChinaInternetNetworkInformationCenter puts the number of Chinese blogs at over 70 million, with some 30 million bloggers actively writing them. Shanghai-based Blogbus, launched in late 2002, was one of the first blog service providers (BSPs).

Founded by an ex-securities broker named Dou Yi, now 29, Blogbus offers free blog hosting but charges VIP membership fees of less than $15 a year.

In early 2005, the Chinese venture fund UCI took a 20 percent stake in Blogbus, but Mr. Dou led a founder buyback of that stake in October and set out to raise a new round. Mr. Dou dropped by Red Herring’s Beijing office for a chat.

Q: Congratulations on your Series A funding. What can you tell me about the investment?

A: We raised $3 million from JAIC, which is the third or fourth largest VC in Japan, and Cyber Agent [a publicly traded Japanese Internet media and advertising company]. JAIC had been looking at us for a year and a half. They’re very detail-oriented. And they really know the space.

Cyber Agent is the biggest blog service provider in Japan—at least since the demise of Livedoor. They all thought we were doing better with 20 people than [competing blog service providers] Bokee.com was with 400 and Blogcn.com with 200 people.

Q: Given the groundswell of anti-Japanese sentiment that has often found voice on Chinese blogs, one would think your users might object to the source of funding.

A: If I were taking Chinese money and buying Japanese cars, they might. But I’m taking Japanese money and building something for China. Why should they object? What they care about is the service you provide, your quality—not where the venture money comes from.

Q: What do you plan to do with the money?

A: We’re not really planning to expand headcount. We’re probably not going to go over 30 people. We’ll put some money into hardware, but our hardware and bandwidth costs are pretty well under control right now. We’re looking at some M&A, and we have our eye on some platform providers. We’ll also do some low-key marketing activities.

But the main thing that we’re going to do is push forward in improving the basic blog service. At the October blog conference in Shanghai last year I said that I still hadn’t seen a real blog service provider in China.

There needed to be a company that would be able to do this right: something like what Six Apart is doing with Moveable Type and TypePad, or what WordPress is doing. No one has gotten this right yet in China.

We’re also looking at creating a blog media channel, something like About.com. But models like Six Apart, MySpace, or Korean models like Cyworld—they’re not necessarily suitable for China. China has to have its own blog media model.

Q: Give me a sense of the competitive landscape in BSPs in China. Are they pursuing largely the same business model, or different business models? What sets you apart from Bokee or Blogcn?

A: We really want to build long-term value. You ruin the user experience with advertising all over the place.

The Chinese Internet is so full of malware that forces pop-up ads, all sorts of hooligan tactics to boost Alexa rankings. And people ask me, what can you do if you’re not going to go hooligan?

You can only take a long view. We promise that there’s never going to be advertising on the front page—and if there ever is, it will be public service. On the blogs themselves, we won’t put any ads up. That’s up to the blogger, if he wants to use Google AdSense or whatever.

Q: Blogbus was the first Chinese BSP to start offering blog portability, right? Can you explain that?

A: We were the first to do a lot of things: the first to start charging, the first to use tags, and the first to send Chinese tags to Technorati. At the end of 2005, we started to allow portability, out of respect for the user. With other BSPs, you can move in but you can’t move out. With us, you can take your blog elsewhere if you want; it’s yours. We call this “moving house.”

Q: Bulletin board systems are still very popular in China. What’s the difference between someone who keeps a blog and someone who posts regularly on a BBS?

A: We talked about this a few years back. In a BBS, people are throwing bricks, eggs, and tomatoes; it’s really chaotic. It’s a big public square, and people don’t respect it. A blog is more like your living room. You have the authority to keep someone in or out, so it’s much more civilized.

Q: How many blogs do you now host?

A: Over 2 million, including blogs from Yourblog.org, and 52blog.net, which are two blog sites that we have acquired. Blogbus users tended to be higher end—higher educated and higher earning, and these two sites that we acquired rounded out the demographic. 52blog had more women and younger people. And Yourblog.org had some interesting technical aspects that we liked.

Q: Who are some of your most popular bloggers on your BSP? What sorts of things are they blogging about?

A: One of our best is Zhou Yijun, who was Xinhua’s Middle East correspondent and spent two years there recently. We also have Gao Lei, who is considered one of China’s top photographers.

And there’s Fat Rabbit Zhouzhou, a cartoonist who won the MSN Spaces blogging contest recently. He went to MSN for a couple of months just to win that prize, and then as soon as he had it, he came back to Blogbus.

Q: Why do you think so many Chinese bloggers use Sina or MSN Spaces or other sites that aren’t dedicated BSPs?

A: They all have their own appeal. People who use [Tencent’s] QQZone tend to be younger kids, who like the cute stuff—the kawai. People who want hubbub might head to Sina, which is a good place to strut their stuff. With us, more people are still moving in than are moving out.

Our servers aren’t as numerous or as fast as Sina’s. But our bloggers really care about their blogs, and we care about the bloggers. And that’s why they care about Blogbus.