Another day, another 3 per cent on Baidu’s share price. The Chinese search engine is now deemed to be worth more than $12bn, which is double what the stock market thought it was worth as recently as August. Not to be left behind, portals like Sohu and Sina are on a run of their own, with gains respectively of 160 and 130 per cent this year.

For Baidu, if you’re keeping score, that puts the company on a multiple of more than 30 times next year’s revenues, and 94 times 2008 earnings.

With nearly a year to go until the Beijing Olympics, what’s the chance that this bubble will keep inflating at least that long? No surprise that the Olympics were on the lips of a senior Sohu executive when the company reported earnings today, and are contributing to a general belief that this rally is bullet-proof.

The long-run potential for the companies that end up dominating the Chinese internet sector may indeed be huge, but the US internet bubble showed how hard it is for investors to discount that back to a realistic valuation for today’s nascent internet giants - why should this be any different?

Of course, it doesn’t hurt Baidu’s cause if its market share is being inflated in unusual ways (see this report on how internet users who try to visit Google end up on Baidu.) As Sergey Brin groused last week: "Obviously that makes it very hard to do business, when your customers are redirected to a competitor."

The supposed Chinese bid to buy a US disk drive company gets more and more curious. It all started over the weekend, when the New York Times quoted Bill Watkins, ceo of Seagate, as saying that an approach had been made - though he wouldn’t say who had made it, or to whom. For good measure, he added that people were "freaking out" about this in Washington DC, since control of advanced disk drive technology could help the Chinese plunder US secrets.

Since Seagate and Western Digital are the only remaining US disk drive makers (IBM having sold out to Hitachi), and since it was Watkins making these comments in public, this seemed to point a finger directly at Western.

So what does the famously loquacious Watkins have to say for himself? He was said by the company to be travelling today, but Seagate issued a clarification to say that, for its part, it "has not received such an offer and we are not trying to sell the company."

Without denying the weekend’s story, it went on to try to distance Watkins from the report:

Seagate CEO Bill Watkins told the NY Times that he was aware of growing interest in disk drive technology from companies located in China, Korea and Japan, all of which are working in concert with their governments and have made disc drive storage a national agenda, and that in light of this there were important public policy considerations that the United States government should be thinking about.

That’s far from a denial, though. Western Digital continued today to refuse to comment. Whether or not it is considering a sale, it can’t have helped Western to be on the receiving end of comments like these from one of its biggest competitors.

We recently noted that this blog was no longer accessible in China, and wondered aloud why Beijing’s shadowy censors had seen fit to target ft.com. Well, we should probably have looked a little more closely at our blog setup. FT Tech Blog actually resides on servers run by blog host company Typepad, and it is access to Typepad that is being blocked by the Great Firewall see here. 

So there’s no reason to believe it was something we said that got us blocked - and rather than the target of some of China’s increasingly sophisticated and targetted censorship, we are merely among the many victims of a rather blunt instrument of internet control. Not that that is much comfort, of course.

China’s policy of blocking overseas websites has been noted here on more than one occasion, but it still comes as a surprise to find that FT Tech Blog itself appears to have become a victim of the government’s shadowy censors.

In recent days it has not been possible to access this part of the ft.com website from Beijing and Shanghai, with page requests just timing out - the usual symptom of a blocked site. The blog loads fine if accessed through an offshore proxy site designed to evade the censor. And a quick check on the block-checker site greatfirewallofchina.org  (see picture) also suggests we have been blacklisted.

Why is this happening and how long might the block last? There is no way of knowing, since China has never even revealed who is responsible for website blocking decisions or what criteria they use. But Beijing does seem to have a particular sensitivity toward blogs that discuss censorship, and internet "management" is a top priority for the government at the moment.

The action against a single corner of the FT’s site is also a reminder of the growing technical sophistication of the commissars. They are already targeting particular entries in Wikipedia. How long before the news sections of international papers start getting cut up by the censors’ digital scissors?

Fans of the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing website Flickr.com have been struggling to access any of its images in recent days, and the company says it seems Beijing’s censors are to blame.

Nothing too surprising there: China’s Communist party blocks thousands of international sites, even though the secretive culture commissars generally go easier on ones that like Flickr are in foreign languages and run by big internet names.

The censors never explain themselves, but Flickr may have drawn their fire for hosting photographs of the Chinese army’s brutal suppression of student-led protests centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. China’s digital scissors are always extra busy around the anniversary of the killings on June 4 every year. Flickr has also allowed users in China to see photographs of more recent protests that local media have been barred from reporting on.

What’s interesting about this case is that the censors have refrained from simply blocking the whole Flickr site, which can still be access from within China, but have instead merely prevented it from displaying pictures. Page-links and text can still be seen.

It is a relatively subtle approach that highlights the Chinese government’s sophisticated approach to internet control - but not one likely to be of much comfort to a photo-sharing website.

Rupert Murdoch’s wife Wendi may be on the board of MySpace China, but the way the new venture’s CEO tells it, the famously interventionist News Corp mogul will play next to no role in how it is run.

Local executives will be in full control of MySpace China’s operations, technology development and marketing, insisted CEO Luo Chuan on Thursday, ahead of the launch of a beta test version of the www.myspace.cn site.

Mr Luo says local management authority is the key to avoiding the setbacks suffered by other internet multinationals in China such as Ebay, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. While licencing MySpace’s technology and brand, the Beijing-based venture - a late entrant to a highly competitive market - will tailor its socialising service to Chinese tastes.

Since MySpace China is being coy about how big News Corp’s stake is (other investors include IDG and China Broadband Capital Partners) it is hard to know how seriously to take its talk of autonomy. Mr Luo did say MySpace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson were alongside Wendy on the board.

But Mr Murdoch, deeply disappointed by his failure to build a significant media business in China despite years of trying, may be willing to take a hands-off approach.

"We have to make MySpace a very Chinese site," he said when he revealed MySpace’s ambitions in the country last year. "I have sent my wife across there because she understands the language."

The Japanese search service established by Baidu.com earlier this year has been hailed as a pioneering effort by a Chinese internet company to establish a global presence. So why do Beijing’s shadowy internet censors appear to be blocking access to the new website?

Baidu is declining to comment on why baidu.jp cannot be accessed from within China in recent days, but industry observers are sure  the Japanese service’s tolerant approach to porn is the reason behind the block. As noted by bloggers writing in Chinese and English, baidu.jp’s main appeal so far appears to be Chinese internet users who find its image search function a better way to get hold of pornographic pictures than the main baidu.com service. (Take a look at the rather revealing user data on alexa.com here)

The block, even if maintained, will not upset Baidu’s business plan: Chinese vicarious thrill seekers are hardly the market the Japanese service is aimed at. And the block should make it easier for Baidu to avoid coming under Chinese government pressure to itself censor its Japanese service. After all, strict self-censorship of political or other suspect content has done the Baidu no harm at home (where it has benefited from blocking and disruption of uncensored Google.com), but it is unlikely to go down as well in international markets.

The best way to guess what Chinese internet search leader Baidu.com is going to do next has always been to look at what Google is already doing - but until now email has been an exception.

That could be changing. In his blog (in Chinese) founder and CEO Robin Li has been musing aloud about the failings of Microsoft’s Outlook email programme, and hinting that Baidu could do better. Indeed, it seems the Chinese company might go bigger in terms of online email storage even than Google’s Gmail, which currently offers this correspondent 2,836MB.

"If Baidu did email, we would have to offer unlimited capacity," Mr Li writes.

Baidu certainly has a market opportunity, since Google is reluctant to set up a local Gmail service out of concern about the degree to which it would have to cooperate with the security forces and censors of China’s Communist government. Chinese can sign up to use overseas servers, but the government’s "Great Firewall" can also make it hard to access some messages. Baidu, by contrast, is happy to censor its content and could expect a supportive government attitude.

In an intriguing exploration of the value placed on virtual life, a Chinese company has effectively held internet game characters hostage: demanding players give up their virtual goods or, get this, donate their real blood if they want to continue to play.

Moli Group recently froze the accounts of 30,000 players of its massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) title "Cabal" that it believed guilty of such abuses as using automated sub-routines to generate virtual wealth.

But the company - which is not one of China’s better known MMORPG operators but still claims to have 7m users - has offered the targeted players some interesting ways to win back access to their online personas.

One method was to simply agree to give up all the virtual wealth they had accumulated in the game, but aother was more creative: give something back to offline society by joining company-organised public good works such as street-sweeping and helping old folks. A Moli officials says more than 700  players with frozen accounts answered the call.

Most dramatically, any player willing to join an "entirely voluntary and uncompensated" public blood donation drive would also have their accounts unfrozen.

Still, this part of the unusual effort to promote good works appears to have had only limited results: the Moli staffer says just 80 players with frozen accounts took part in the blood drive. That suggests that, for most gamers, blood is still thicker than bits and bytes.

Second Life may be moving into the world of voice, but it looks as if creator Linden Labs is at risk of being outflanked in the China market by an ambitious clone game, HiPiHi. (Demo video here).

Copying sites and ideas from the US, Japan and South Korea is the established route to internet success in China, and foreign companies ranging from Amazon to Yahoo! and Google have struggled to catch up after local look-a-likes seize a market presence.

In a recent blog entry, Chinese tech expert Kaiser Kuo reckons the Second Life clone idea "might have more legs than its US counterpart" given the popularity here of massively multiplayer online role-playing games - but he also notes in a separate post a potential downside of operating in China - the Communist party’s disapproval of online sex and gambling.