Digitalwall: Media, Community, and Blog (3) Deconstruct Blog

We can treat Blog as a "personal publishing system."

[+] Blog is about keeping a diary online.

"Blog" can be translated to Chinese as "Wang Zhi" (literally "online journal") semantically, or "Bu Lo Ge" phonetically. In China it is also known as "Bo Ke". If we follow the semantic translation, we can know that Blog is actually about writing journals via the Internet. You can keep your diary on a website that offers Blog functions.

What to write about then? Well, you can write whatever you feel like, from petty things in daily life, thoughts about work, gourmet's reviews, to dating experience and a great many. If you feel it's a bit unorganized this way, Blog websites also provide categorization facilities to help you arrange your articles. Some of them allow you to upload photos or to choose your favorite layout.

We can treat Blog as a "personal publishing system". All major news websites have a publishing system at the backend to allow editors to publish their news articles to the webpages of the websites. Blog websites provide such function to ordinary users so that they can publish their articles on the websites too.

Once you register an account on the website providing Blog service and select the layout your desire, you can start writing your own diary. This kind of free Blog website will usually attract a lot of people to write journals on it. These many journals will then be grouped into different categories, giving a sense of tribal units, which makes "Bu Lo Ge", meaning tribes in Chinese literally, a vivid translation.

There are also paying Blog services offering sophisticated facilities, huge capacity and personalized URL's. You can have functions originally designed for large-scale news websites with affordable monthly subscription. Seeing this, I cannot but sigh with envy: I could have spared a lot of efforts should Blog have been available at the time when I was writing the program of my personal website Digitalwall.com.

In fact, Digitalwall is a kind of Blog. Although there is no such term as Blog when my websites first appeared, if you put aside the technical issue, you'll find that they are absolutely a Blog whether in terms of practice or substance.

[+] The Blog spirit echoes to the calling of the me generation

This is a time of the "me generation", and "We the Media" is very much the embodiment of the time. Yet there is a difference about Blog. With Blog, people are not only free to speak whatever their want, but their words and ideas can be "published" onto the Internet, which has become a sort of mass media, in a very inexpensive way.

In the past, without being reported by the media, there is no way that your words and thought can be known to the world. The mass media even have the right to "interpret your words" and to "garble your statement". Now you don't need to cope with these reporters and intermediaries any more. You can write whatever you want to the world.

Blog also stands for a belief about life, the essence of which "I think, I write, and I reflect upon myself". This is the purpose of keeping a diary, and there is nothing extraordinary in it. Regular writing on the Net naturally prompts one to review and introspect oneself.

The beauty of Blog is that it allows users to give responses and to create links. Readers can voice their thoughts about your articles; links can be set up to connect two different Blogs. If you refer to someone's article in yours, you can build up links between these two through standardized procedures.

Are there other forms of Blogs in addition to diaries? The answer is definitely positive. Blog is a "personal publishing system" for individuals. Some Blog websites are operated as if they are news media. They release news articles regularly through the efforts of "volunteer reporters".

Usually Blogs offer RSS subscription. Once you have RSS reader installed and the RSS feeds of your favorite Blogs configured, the reader will capture the most updated articles for you. It is very much like email newsletter subscription, except that you don't need to leave your personal information even email address.

[+] Blog meets the criterion of Quality Content

The difference between a Blog and a traditional online forum is that the latter is similar to a "public hall" where anyone can come and talk. On the other hand, a Blog is more like "a private room"; you are welcome to pay a visit, and maybe give some opinions on the decor.

Compared with the casual chatting, small talking or even spamming in online char rooms or forums, the content on Blogs is at least the efforts of Bloggers, no matter they are good in style or not. The subjects of Blogs are of a wide variety; so that readers can easily find some things that they have feeling for. As it is "a private room" of the Blogger, s/he will surely pay more attention to writing.

Maybe we can say that the development of the Internet during these years has led to the maturation of standardization of technology and the decrease in bandwidth and storage cost, which has enabled individuals to create their own Internet media. These small websites may not be as fancy as big Internet media run by deep pockets, yet they are complete in every sense.

For Blog service providers, the whole websites were made possible by joint efforts, the content is finally qualified as attractive in some way. Yet there are still obstacles lying ahead. There are still costs of bandwidth, machines and equipment. Are they to be covered by selling advertisements or by subscriptions? These problems remain to be solved. (
2005/03/20 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to
China Internet/Telecom )