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Let's get this straight: We were wrong to say that Xu Jinglei, the Chinese actress touted by Web portal Sina as the world's most-read blogger, is the world's most-read blogger. She is decidedly not. She is, at best, the most-read blogger on sina's blogging service, according to a self-serving study by analysts employed by Sina produced for publicity and picked up by a lazy, unquestioning wire service. Here's more on her supposedly impressive stats.

Reuters headlined Sina's claim that Xu had garnered 100 million pageviews in 600 days. But that doesn't sound at all impressive once you do some basic math — a challenge for reporters, I know. Once you figure out that that translates to 166,000 pageviews a day, it's hard to believe she's the world's most-read blogger. Even now, as her traffic has picked up, she's only doing 250,000 pageviews a day. Xu may well be, thanks to the support of her countrymen, the most-linked blogger, according to Technorati. But links aren't pageviews.

Here's an easy comparison: Perez Hilton, the gossip blogger, may inflate his numbers, but by even the most conservative measures, he gets 33 million pageviews a month, or more than a million a day. That's four times the traffic of the "most-read blogger in the world."