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2005-09-19
The Proliferation of Blogs
The first organizational website aimed at promoting blog in China was found by Fang xingdong and Wang jun xiu, both veteran IT writers in Beijing. Fang regarded blog as a revolutionary device to create a personal publishing platform
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2005-09-14
Chapter 3 the Situation of Blog in China
This chapter reveals the history of blog in China. By examining the past, I attempt to find out what are the factors that caused the development of blogs in China. I have divided the development into three stages: the introduction of blog into China; the proliferation of blogs; the emergence of Blog Service Providers or BSPs.
It is can be said that the initial development of the blogosphere in China, both on the mainland and on Taiwan, was inspired by the example of the American blogosphere. Further, the blog as a sweeping phenomenon in China was promoted by commercial organizations, and powered by venture capitals. The three major issues of Chinese blogosphere are, in my estimation, the Chinese translation of Blog, the exposing of privacy via blogging, and the potential of the participatory journalism of blogging.
This overview gives the background to the construction of the Chinese blogosphere and its subsequent development, which provides a context for the empirical research presented in later chapters.
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2005-09-14
The development of blog in United States
In order to study the situation of blogging in China, it is necessary to examine the development of blog in United States, where the activities of blogging emerged and are still thriving.
According to Winer, The first weblog was the first website, http://info.cern.ch/, the site built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. From this page TBL pointed to all the new sites as they came online. However, it is disputable whether a webpage listing new links but without date and any personal marks can be identified as a weblog. Barger mentions that the What's New page was started by Marc Andreesen (1993) as the first weblog ever. Dave Winer began his first weblog in February 1996, as part of the 24 Hours of Democracy website. It helped glue the community together. Cameron Barret’s blog Camworld was started in 1997, with a better-developed format, which is widely adopted by today’s blog software. Up to that point, weblog was an activity of adding an entry to one’s own website regularly, usually with a date stamp.
According to Blood, these “original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. Weblogs could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website. A weblog editor had either taught herself to code HTML for fun, or, after working all day creating commercial websites, spent several off-work hours every day surfing the web and posting to her site. These were web enthusiasts”.
There were about 23 active weblogs, as Garrett documents, known to be in existence at the beginning of 1999. This remained so until July 1999 when Pitas, the first free build-your-own-weblog tool launched, and suddenly there were hundreds of weblogs. Alongside Pitas, Blogger, Groksoup, Squishdot were also among precursors of blog-hosting services. They enable people to have their own blogs in three steps: create an account, name the blog, and choose a template. The size of Garrett’s list grew to 282 blogs by 12 Oct 2000. Hence the era of proliferation arrived.
The events of September 11, 2001 led to a remarkable growth in blogs – both political and personal commentary –and created a phenomenon known as war blogs. This began a shift in the dominant blog genre from Web design and technology to politics, according to Gill. Many blogs which supported the U.S. "War On Terrorism" quickly gained readership among a public searching for information to understand that event; many new blogs in the same genre sprang up in this environment. By 2002, many of these were supporting the policy of an invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power. By the spring of 2003, Forbes.com recommended a list of "best warblogs" representing a diversity of opinions.
From early 2002, American mainstream media began reporting on the blogging phenomena. Wired reported that National Public Radio (NPR) had devoted three minutes to how blogging was transforming journalism. It suggested that the NPR coverage meant that blogs were no longer trendy and had, perhaps, passed a sociological tipping point. Gill reports a rise of media sponsored blogs in US. Both Salon and Fox News added blogs in February 2002. Professionally written blogs now appear at MSNBC, Slate, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Seattle Times –almost anywhere Big Media produces online news. In addition, media have enticed bloggers to make the transition from amateur to professional.
Meanwhile, some famous bloggers enjoy a wide readership outnumbering most local newspapers. Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, has created what is arguably the most visited blog in the world, Instapundit with a daily average of 96,000+hits. Other popular blogs include Gawker.com, which averages 35,000+, and Gizmodo.com, which averages 37,000+..
Blogs are having a substantial influence on contemporary politics in the United States. Gill cited that political campaigns began using the Web to provide information about issues and schedules in the 1996 election. However, there was little impact due in part to paucity of Americans on the Internet. That situation has changed. Given this increased level of awareness - 55 percent of Americans use the Net regularly and 70 percent have access - recent Pew Internet and American Life research suggests that 11 percent of American Net users have read blogs and 2-7 percent have created them; this translates to between2.4 and 8.4 million bloggers. Net users with a college degree are the most likely bloggers. It is not surprising that Democratic Presidential candidates Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, John Edwards, Bob Graham and John Kerry included blogs on their Web sites. In 2004, the Democrats took political blogging a major step forward by creating Blog Swarm to coordinate the blogs in its camp.Moreover, bloggers work on political parties from the other direction. Whereas Matt Drudge doesn’t like being labelled as a blogger, the first blog-driven controversy was the fall of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who had remarked that Senator Thurmond's leadership abilities may have made him a good President. Since Thurmond had spent much of his early political career sympathetic to white supremacists, Internet opinion pages like Instapundit, run by University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, and Talking Points Memo, from leftie political columnist Josh Marshall -- were among the first to latch on to ABCNews.com's brief item on Lott's racist comments during Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday bash. Their efforts kept the story "alive" in the press until a critical mass of disapproval forced Lott to resign his position as Senate Majority Leader. Steven Outing, a senior editor at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, wrote in an e-mail, "What we're seeing more and more are webloggers breaking niche stories, and thus serving as an early warning system for traditional journalists."
A recent public survey run by web hosting company Hostway shows that the majority, 52% of the 2,500 people surveyed, said bloggers should have the same rights as traditional journalists, while 27% did not express an opinion. It is no wonder that an America blogger acclaimed that Blogs are now part of the mainstream.
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2005-09-13
The nature of blog
The origin of the term “weblog” suggests several of its innate features. First off, it should be meticulous with every record unerringly and systematically made. Hence it is necessary to have every record retraceable and with attribution, which is the hyperlink to related article or document. Further, a format containing the time stamp, the author, the text is elementary. A 1993 year blog, What’s New, provided the crudest form of an online diary with hyperlinks. Later on with the advent of blog software, the archives, with which bloggers can arrange and keep their entries chronologically in the web server, as well as feedback pages (comments), links to related blogs (blogrolling) were included in the format. By the year 2003, a widely accepted definition was that a blog consists of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first.
What is a blog? Given the amorphous nature of cyber text, it is not a straight- forward question. Rebecca Blood’s frequently referenced article, "Weblog: a history and perspective," is among the earliest efforts to examine the nature and development of weblogging. According to Blood, the term ‘weblog’ was conceived by Jorn Barger in December 1997. The shorter version, "blog", was coined by Peter Merholz, who, in April or May of 1999, broke the word weblog into halves. Barger later formulated his idea as: “weblog “(sometimes called a blog or a newspage or a filter) is a webpage where a weblogger (sometimes called a blogger, or a pre-surfer) 'logs' all the other web pages she finds interesting.” In order to make the scenario of “blogging” clearer, we need to go further to check out the original meaning of logging, which is instructive when it comes to ascertaining the nature of weblog. Log, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English, is a device attached to a ship to measure its speed through the water. A log book is a journal with a permanent daily record of the sailing speed and events during a ship’s voyage. Log as a verb indicates the action of entering facts in the log-book. Later on, the usage of Log is extended from nautical register to that of computer science. It describes the process of recording everything pertinent to a machine run, including identification of the machine run, identification of input and output tapes, identification of all stops, and a record of the action taken on all stops. Hence there are derivations such as “a computer log” or “a web log”.
Secondly and arguably, a blog is a formatted item. Gill explicitly defines seven primary characteristics of a blog including: reverse chronological journaling; regular date-stamped entries; links to related news articles, documents, blog entries; archived entries; links to related blogs (blogrolling); RSS or XML feed, and last but not least, passion. Most characteristics are derived from the blog format programmed by blog software, run by blog servers. Schaap(2004) distinguishes between personal webpages and blogs. The latter is confined by the format, defined by the blog system, or the software. Veteran bloggers such as Hourihan (2001) insists that we are united by tools, the short, informal, personal format.
Thirdly, a weblog is supposed to document worthwhile webpages and events, according to the blogger’s point of view. The journalistic aspect of blog is essential to it but nevertheless comes more under the heading of editorial. Barger responded to the question “Are webloggers journalists?” with an explicit answer: “Yes, but they're editors, not reporters, and so far they're amateurs, not professionals. (Slashdot and Media Gossip and Matt Drudge being borderline exceptions.)” Dave Winer, who is among the earliest bloggers on the Internet, also believes in the journalistic value of weblog. “A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there's also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.” With the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), bloggers are able to enliven their sites with digital soundtracks and images, even videos. The potential of blogs as a means of journalism is broadened.
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2005-09-13
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2005-07-03
Revised outline
2005-07-03
introduction (600)
1) why am I interested in the research topic?2) what are my research questions
3) How you going to do with it?4) Statement of the argument: hypothesis (impact or not; set up position)
Chapter1 literature review 2000 (what is blog or about blog, impact)
Chapter 2 history /demography/ network (3000)
Chapter 3 coverage 2000
Chapter 4 characteristics of Chinese blog
Chapter 5 methods (small survey via email questionnaire )
Chapter 6 case study
Conclusion (500)
To do list before 8 July
1 literature review ( to be done before 4)2 questionnaire of survey (to be done before 7)
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2005-06-20
Thesis project Blog
The Blog community in
Blog, or Webblog as a social network software (SNS) has caused immense impact in the field of media and culture studies. It is said to constitute a vigorous part of the online free culture. It serves as an innovative personal knowledge-management portal, and will revolutionarily promote the emancipation of the self. Further, ideas such as Copyright, intellectual property would be dated, obsolete, parochial and reactional under the light of this new form of sharing and disseminating knowledge and original thinking. Bloggers inChina
I research questions:China IV the time table of research
June 1-30 preliminary research and literature review
July1 – 30 the empirical research : online archive research and interviews
August 1- 30 the writing up of the thesis and revision.
September 1 submission
chineseblogresearch
this blog is the workbase of my recent research on chinese blog and bloggers.
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