I don't know how many people remember this happened in China : 10 years ago, in about 2003, the most popular internet products was the portal web: 163, sohu, etc. Then, 4 years later, the blog appeared and quickly become very hot in every internet users group. However, now, it is the time of micro-blog. SInce the beginning of 2013, there are 500,000,000 users in sina micro-blog, and the number of daily active users was 46,200,000. How does the micro-blog replace the status of the Blog?
we can find something interesting about the content. The blog's maximum words of the article is 10000 (Chinese) while the micro-blog is only 140. That means, no matter how communicative you are or how much you know, you can say only 140 words in the micro-blog. It seems making a limitation for those who want to write more. But the fact is that it is easier to play for everyone!
For example, you see a friend's blog talking about food. He wrote lots of words and looks like very professional. Although you feel interesting but you are neither good at writing nor cooking, so you can just give a short comment for his article. However, if it is happened in micro-blog. What you do is -- taking a picture of your dinner (whatever it is ), add a short sentence (like: it is f**king good!), done! In a popular Chinese slang is '140字你写了不吃亏，140字你写了不上当，真正的物超所值，写啥啥实惠!'
The attractiveness of the micro-blog is easy, fast and convenient.
The form of the content largely influence the form of the users' relationship. In the blog, the author is in the middle of the relationship. All the comments are for him and he gets most of the attention. Even there are some discussion among the commenters, the relationship is weak.
In the micro-blog, the action of forwarding is combing comments and publishing. The easier the publishing way is, the more people take participate in the communication. The importance of the first author weaken and every user tend to plays an equal role. In this form, the communication is reticular and the value of single user strengthen.
Here is an example.
This is one of Hanhan's blog which has 445338 times reading and 17129 comments. But in these comments, seldom is replied. Users' relationship shows in this picture:
Compared with that, a micro-blog activity called 'plays ugly' attractive many users.
The users post their photo and the photo attractive more users. The form of users' relationship shows in this:
The users post their photo and the photo attractive more users. The form of users' relationship shows in this:
But what I want to say is not 'micro-blog is better than blog'. Although now the micro-blog has more users, the weakness is obvious.
Blog focus on the original author. it makes the professional, technical or what we called 'good' one can stand out from all the users. In other words, the valuable information can be took care. However, in the micro-blog, it has a tend to make everything equal. Words lost its characters when it has to reduce to 140. Aslo, 140 words is not enough for logic, academic, technology or any careful thought. A good example for this is now we using the blog to finish the homework instead of twitter.
Thanks for your sharing and this is an interesting paper which focus on the contrast of different blog styles. I always intend to ask certain questions when I read blogs,however,your blog describe this topic so clearly that it is difficult to put forward a question. With a faster and faster life style , not only blog,anything intend to be 'miro-' while I think this may be irreversible. What's your opinion about this?
回复删除Thanks for your sharing and elaboration between blog and micro-blog. It is quite new to me and even have not heard that before and I am surprised that it grows rapidly. I think convenience, speedy, simple and equal role are the characteristics of micro-blog and has it own advantage. On the other hand, I agree that as you said it can never replace the traditional blog since the original and core idea of blog is to give room to one who loves writing and sharing literally.
回复删除Micro-blog also cater the need for rush daily life nowadays, users can finish 1 or even more while on the way to work or home. I think able to express is enough.
回复删除WOW~ interesting blog!
回复删除When we started to know about micro-blog, all of us thought about the difference between micro-blog with blog. But you really think it in a deep way. The class of Social Networking is useful!
You have done a good job!
It is really a interesting blog, more people like to use micro-blog nowadays as we use it to share our feeling timely. Sometimes, I want to say something and Blog is so professional and I do not have such time to write a whole articles at that moment, and maybe after some minutes, I have time but no feelings. So I prefer to use micro-blog as I can write a few words when I want to say something.
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