LIFE> Odds and Ends
Stumbling blogs
By Mu Qian (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-14 09:29

However, the report also showed that only 35.2 percent were updated within six months, meaning that most bloggers were not at all active.

Stumbling blogs

Many of the first batch of bloggers have packed up. For example, Zhu Yanlin, a Shanghai saleswoman who began blogging in 2003, has not updated hers since 2006.

"At first I felt quite excited about my blog and updated it every day," she says. "After a while I began to update it every few days, then every few weeks, every few months, until I didn't write at all and even forgot my password!

"When I look back at my blog, it was very pretentious. Everyone has some inclination toward exhibitionism and voyeurism, and these appear in people's blogs."

On the other hand, Huang Jiashi, a 28-year-old newspaper editor from Nanjing, has been blogging since 2004 and says her day is not complete unless she has updated hers.

"I seem to have become obsessive," she admits. "The blog is a record of my life. I can now check my old ones and see what I was doing on this day in all those years. Almost every person in my office has a blog. We have links to each other and often comment on each other's blogs. For me, blogging is a way of communication and a part of my life."

For Wang, who has published two collections of blog essays, blogging has changed his life. "When I share something fun in my life with others, I am chewing the cud of the fun. Doing this every day, I find that life is not that boring," he says.

Blogging has also changed his writing style.

"In the past, writing was like wrestling for me, but since I began blogging I've been more relaxed while writing," he says. "It has also widened my scope of writing and restructured my mind."

Associate professor Hu believes Chinese people are more enthusiastic bloggers than those in Western countries because it offers an important outlet that traditional Chinese media fail to provide.

"It will exist for a long time," he insists. "Because of people's need to express themselves and the revolutionary nature of blogging. New technology keeps emerging but blogs still have their place."

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