I'm not generally disposed to point to new blogs other than adding them to my blogroll because I assume you're all already reading Danwei and China Law Blog, both of which do that sort of thing much more regularly than I do. However in this case I'm going to add my own nod because I'm particularly intrigued by two new blogs. In full disclosure, both have already cited Imagethief on their respective blogrolls, but I'd be doing this even if they hadn't.

The China Beat is a group blog with no less than fourteen authors, including Jeremiah Jenne of the outstanding (and very literate) Jottings from the Granite Studio, among others. This blog is devoted to a particular interest of mine, which is analyzing how China is presented in overseas news coverage. The China Beat, the blurb explains, "examines media coverage of China, providing context and criticism from China scholars and writers". I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with. My only complaint is that it is published on known nanny-bait Blogspot. Yes, I run VPNs and use proxies, but I remain perplexed that any bloggers with a natural constituency in China would use Blogspot.

Beijing Sounds is an altogether quirkier beast. Really original blogs are far between these days and most newcomers, even the good ones, fit easily into one of my pigeonholes: Business analysis; rant; expat misery; journalist; lonely English teachers; etc. Loaded with convenient streaming audio files, this blog gets under the hood of everyone's favorite Chinese dialect, Beijinghua. Good fun for anyone interested in Mandarin and especially those of us who live in Beijing. The writing is lively, too. It reminds me a bit of John Pasden's excellent and long-running Sinosplice weblog, but it's more focused on the language and conveniently multimedia. Author "Syz" is a light poster, but each post is pretty substantial.

Check 'em out.