Somewhere, Nick Denton and other blog publishers have to be smiling. A blog portal worth $1 billion in cold, hard American cash? Paid Content points to a story from UCLA's Asia Institute on BlogChina's (a Chinese blog portal) plans to list on Nasdaq by the second half of next year with a total market cap north of $1 billion. The company has already pulled in $500 million in seed capital from a Softbank investment fund and is working on another round of funding from US and Asian VC investors.

Maybe it's just me, but those numbers sound just wrong. $500 million in seed funding (the riskiest kind there is) for a blog media company supported almost entirely by advertising dollars? The article from UCLA's Asia Institute says that BlogChina is adding employees at a rate of 50 per month and already has 10 million blog customers, but that still doesn't justify a valuation of $1 billion.

Anyway, Susan Mernit has put together a nice China Media Watch on the latest developments in the frothy Chinese media/blog market.