Beijing: The number of bloggers in China has soared to 19.87 million in early November, up 24 per cent over a year ago, a report by a leading Chinese Internet company said.

"The figure represents a 24-per cent rise over from the 16 million people who wrote their own blogs at the end of November last year," the company said.

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 per cent of web writers updated their blogs every day.

The number of blog service providers rose nearly 55 per cent 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.

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

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

Baidu, the Internet search company released its first report on Chinese bloggers last December. The 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 real names to register a blog or post online comments.