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Unlike their quarrelsome American counterparts, nearly all of China's milbloggers are in at least tacit agreement upon a central objective: the need for China to increase its national strength through the modernization of its armed forces, collectively known as the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

This consensus reflects a combination of sources: a well-documented groundswell in Chinese nationalism over the past decade, a system of online censorship that Chinese bloggers know restricts their opinions from criticizing the government, and a widely shared belief that the U.S.

and its regional allies seek to contain China's "peaceful development" through a program of military encirclement.

While these trends restrict debate about fundamental questions of politics, China's blogosphere has an active and energetic debate about questions of great import for the future direction of China-the development of the country's military capabilities, an area that Chinese milbloggers appear free to discuss relatively openly.

Although a large portion of the bloggers are boastful of China's military capabilities, a lesser number re...

There is always more “room” for a high quality, engaging, and compelling blog to find an audience.

That’s why I’m a little puzzled by comments by those such as Andy Beal, who writes that the future of the blogosphere is “not quite as bright as we all thought.” Mark Evans takes Heather Green’s analysis So like any craft, Those who are the best and most successful at it are driven in large part by something other than money or accolades.

In essence, you have to love it enough to do it even when you don’t feel like it.

You have to stretch to find something to say when you don’t...

In fact, some would argue that she's just the most visible - if not the most historically egregious - tip of an iceberg that has been around since Internet discussions began in the early 1980s.

"Between now and the early days of Usenet, the level of abusive behavior has been distressingly constant," says Tim Bray, a veteran blogger and director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems Inc.

The difference is, with 70 million blogs in existence today and 1.4 new blogs created every second, according to blog search engine Technorati Inc., there are just more people participating in online discussions, and "the more crazy people you've got reading them, the wilder the whole blogosphere can become," says Richard Silverstein, who advocates for a peaceful approach to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his blog.

And he should know.

Like Sierra, Silverstein is the victim of online harassment, in the form of hostile comments on his own blog, in external discussion groups and on blogs created solely for the purpose of maligning him.

Given the topic that he blogs about, Silverstein is no stranger to abusive commentary.

"It's part of the territory - if you want to write a blog like this, you're going to deal with unpalatable people," he says.

But when the external blogs - whose creators were anonymous - grew increasingly threatening, including what he saw as pornographic photographs, he began to feel persona...