Blogging to me is...

Blogging to me, is like a digital diary. I can share my thoughts, what I’ve done, what I’ve seen etc. And most importantly, I can do that on a computer with just a finger touch! I can publish my work to the public (of course I can have the control of what I allow people to see :]) Throughout this blogging experience, I have learnt things, and the best part is that, I know that somebody is reading my post, which doesn’t seem like I am talking to myself (which is awful!)

I once kept a diary in my primary school, it was like, expressing all my thought to the paper, and it really felt good at that time. Time flies, with the massive use of digital devices, I turned to be using Xanga in secondary school, my classmates and I formed a blogging community with gossiping and academic works combined. I stopped blogging when I was attending HKCEE. Since then, blogging was not part of my life. Fortunately in this course, I can find back my interest towards blogging, and I really enjoy it.

I once thought that blogging is just merely a leisure activity which I can write what I want, that is transforming my thought into words, and then write them all out. But now when I attend this course, I realized that blogging is more than leisure, more than anything that I can imagine.

In my first post, I talked about my digital life, which is all about Facebook and Apple, as I am a smartphone user and frequent Facebook user. For some reason, smartphones become people’s live nowadays, you can see people poking their smartphones screen quite hard in the bus, sticking their faces on the screen in MTR, or whatever. They spent their commuting time with their smartphones, texting, browsing the Net, playing games etc. This kind of culture arises with the widespread of touch screen smartphones, which is very interesting in some sense.

In my second post, I talked about microblogging, which is a brand-new blogging device which contains less words and less content. It is related to my first post about Facebook, as Facebook is the best example for microblogging. I had also introduced other kinds of micro-blogging devices, like Weibo (the China twitter), Twitter, Google +, Plurk and Tumblr, illustrating the widespread of microblogging at the same time. Also, I also talked about the importance of writing in new media. As new media do bring people closer than before, and with commenting and participating, it does innovate quite a lot.

In my third post, I mentioned about the credibility of microblogging devices, I mean whether the message of the microblogging tool is delivering is genuine or not. And there is a rising importance of citizen journalism at the same time, and people should look into it in detail.

The thing that this blogging experience teaches me is that, I have to think before I write. As I have said before, I once thought that blogging is just only for leisure, and I write what I thought. But in  this blogging experience, I have to look into the issues in writing for new media, and reflect on it. In order to do this, I need to do some preparation work first, like constructing mind maps, brainstorming etc. Normally I won't do things like drafting, mindmaps, but it's different now. So I believe this is quite different from what I have done for my past blogging experience.


Apart from this, I learnt what is multimodality and hypertexts, which is two of the features of Web 2.0 tool. With quoting people's posts, linking others' posts etc, in some sense, I am practicing multimodality in order to make my blogging more interesting and readble. Also, I can act as a creator, a publisher and also a reader at the same time. I create and publish my own thoughts, then I also be the readers of other people's blogs. Using hypertexts in blogs are the things I haven't tried before until I am attending this course. Hypertexts definitely can convey messages in a different way, which is more interesting than just plain texts.

Thanks everyone who have read or commented on my post, I really appreciate what you have done, you guys bring new ideas to me , which I may have never heard of. And most importantly, enlighten me to new persprectives to analyse issues.  It's my pleasure to have you all as my audience, wish to see you all in the future :)

Last but not least, let me once remind you the fun of blogging through this video (we saw this already on the lesson but still I want to share it to all of you), enjoy!

P.S Here are the comments that I've made on my own post (here, here and here), on Emily's (here, here and here) on Noc's (here, here and here), King's and Kandice's.

Microblogging: rising importance around the globe?

Recently, there is a train collision in Wenzhou, China, and it raised quite a lot of attention of the public as the release of news is not from the news authority, but from the public.

As the rise of usage of new media tool, people can get in touch with the Internet though digital devices like smartphones and portable tablet computers. And with increasing usage of microblogging tools like Twitter, Facebook, Weibo etc. In China, they are only allowed to use Weibo instead of Twitter as for government’s ‘security’ concern. As a result of this, Weibo soon become the most successful microblogging tool in China. And because of the widespread of digital device and microblogging, people can use the tool to exchange information and news easily, just like the Wenzhou train crash accident. And we can see that from here, the focus of microblogging can have a great variety, and we can also look into the crediblity issue in here too.

Let’s see what the youtube videos is about.



The Wenzhou train crash had aroused much attention throughout the entire Chinese society. Microblogging soon take the role of exchanging information in between Chinese people as the Chinese government didn’t immediately disclose information to the media right away. People updated their statuses, posting pictures or photos, sharing to the public about the incident spontaneously, which caught numerous attentions of the public, and also the Chinese authority. Since the news are all over Weibo and also other media tools, Chinese government then started to react on the event and also disclose more information about the incident.

Not only the Wenzhou incident, global events are also using microblogging tool in order to exchange information or call for attention. Like the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, the Egyptian started protesting urging for election rights, freedom of speech, and look into the matter of police brutality etc.. But the primary demand of the Egyptian protesters is the end of the Hosni Mubarak regime. Before the protest, the protest organizers set up a few Facebook events and tweets of Twitter in order to call for attention of Egyptian. Eventually, they successfully overthrown the Mubarak regime, and Egyptian can practice their freedom of speech and also have the right to vote. From here, we should aware for the importance of the rising power of microblogging.

Here is a youtube video talking about whether the Revolution is a kind of multi-media uprising or not.

Another example is the Occupy Wall Street event in USA. Americans are upset about the social and economic inequality, and most of all, corporate greed. After the financial tsunami, the economy of US is still experiencing a downturn. And so protesters protest about voicing out their urge of the inequality of wealth. And the Event spread much attention across the globe, for instance, Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo, London, Sydney etc. Not surprisingly, once again, the protestors contact or call for attention by using microblogging tool like Twitter. Again, we can see the great influence of microblogging.

So is microblogging doing us good, or vice versa? One point that we have to think about is that on the Internet, the credibility is quite a concerning factor of whether the information is valid or not. Take the example of Wenzhou train crash accident as an example, with all the train crash photos all over the place, how can we actually identify whether the information is valid or not? We have to be cautious about the credibility of the information that we have gathered at all times.

In conclusion, microblogging is affecting our daily life in a quite great magnitude. And looks like for Weibo, though I agree with the fact that entertainment is still comprising a large amount of proportion, but now, news seems to be another major elements of Weibo. I think it’s a global trend as what news is looking for is the immediacy. And are people over-emphasizing the importance of microblogging? This is a question that we should be thinking about.

Writing for new media is important indeed =)

Writing for new media is an important topic which people should be interested in as it helps people to get in touch to the globe within one few seconds.

First of all, writing for new media become more and more universal around the globe as with the emergence of different kinds of new media tools. Everybody can participate and contribute to the Internet nowadays so we can all keep in touch within seconds. With the invention of smartphones and tablet computers, people can now connect to the digital world far more immediate than before, getting news updates, posting statuses, posting blogs etc. With all those kinds of new media tool, it helps to connect people together closer and closer.

Second, new media tools change our own traditional thought about media as people can fully utilize the uses of images, links, quotes and other elements to make the user interface more lively As we were already inside the digitalized world, information that we are receiving are mainly comes from texts, images and sounds, which is differ from the traditional media. Traditional media are using merely texts and images to convey their messages, but one innovation about writing in new media is that, users can participate in the information delivery process and also content creation process, which can fully utilize their own creativity.

All in all, the use of new media tool can definitely bring people closer and get in touch with each other within a single touch. And also, it changes our traditional mindset of having books to read or TV to watch, now we can participate in the creation of new media. I really do think that it is cool and innovative, because for me, I can connect to the globe within seconds, this is very convenient for me. But somehow I worried that I will encounter information overload someday which makes me hard to bear, I am afraid that I can’t handle that much information at the same time…

Innovations in writing for new media :]

There are a number of new media tool for writing, as we have heard about last week’s presentations (I really didn’t know that there are so many new media tool out there, good job everyone!). But now I’m going to focus on one new media to illustrate the innovation in writing for new media, which is micro-blogging.

Micro-blogging is a new media in writing which is slightly differ from traditional blog, as it requires less words and of course, less content. Sina Weibo is a perfect example of micro-blogging as it only allows users to write short sentences, post images or video links. It also have a quite distinct feature, which is word limit. Here I am going to use Sina Weibo as an example to introduce micro-blogging as an innovation in writing for new media.

Differ from writing traditional blogs, microbloggers post simple topics, ranging from simple or light topics like entertainment to complex topics like current news. Relatively speaking, micro-blogs are having fewer contexts than in traditional blogs. The innovations in micro-blogging are that the increase of interactivity between readers and writers and information immediacy.

Increase of interactivity between readers and writers

In micro-blogging, with the lesser context that allows to be shared by writers, writers are only allowed to post 140 words of text, images or links. Writers and readers can exchange their own updates via their own statuses, and they can also exchange their roles when they are using commenting or retweeting devices. When readers are commenting on the writer’s posts, the role of readers will soon turn to be writers. And in return, when writers are reading the reader’s post, they turn to be readers. The increase of interactivity of readers and writers can be seen in here.

Information immediacy

Sina Weibo is China’s Twitter, which information immediacy is a major characteristic feature in micro-blogging. The popularity of micro-blogging was rocketed up because of the use of Twitter as it was a new social networking tool which uses limited text as status updates by the time Facebook was still the boss of social networking tool. The pioneering move of Twitter makes information flow more immediate as with the word limit setting, people can easily update their own status with a simple finger touch. The immediacy of information can be enhanced and speeded up.

New communication platform in China

With the censorship and surveillance policy applied by the Chinese government, Twitter and Facebook are blocked by the Government. Since Sina Weibo is launched in 2009, it immediately gained attentions by the Chinese as Weibo is designed as a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook and then become a massive hit across the country. At present, Sina Weibo have over 200 million registered users. So we can see the massive impact of Sina Weibo in here, which government policies can affect the innovations of new media – introducing Weibo.

Apart from Sina Weibo and Twitter, there are quite a number of micro-blogging tools too, like: Google+, Plurk, Tumblr etc. They are all micro-blogging tools which contains fewer contents than traditional blogging like Blogger. Let me introduce them one by one.

For Google+, it is similar to Facebook. But there are something different, which is Google introduce the service of ‘Circles’ and ‘Sparks’. ‘Circles’ enables users to organize contacts into groups for sharing their own posts. The privacy setting also allow user to hide the users in the circles and also who have them in their circles, which means that the user can control what kind of information do they want to share with people, differ from Facebook. As for ‘Sparks’, it’s a front-end to Google Search, enables users to identify topic that they are interested in sharing with others. The New York Times once declared that it was Google’s greatest attempt to rival Facebook.

For Plurk, it’s similar to Weibo, which allows users to have updates though short messages or links, which can be up to 140 texts. (AKA plurks). Those updates will be placed on the user’s homepage in a timeline form and in chronological order, which is one of the characteristics of Plurk. Readers who subscribe to the writer can reply to the messge via IM, or text message. This is another example of information immediacy for micro-blogging. As its slogan said, ‘your life, on the line.'

For Tumblr, it is a micro-blogging tool which allows users to post texts, images, videos, quotes and audio to their tumblelog. They can follow other users, or make their tumblelog private. The tool emphasizes on the easiness of using the tool. I think one thing is quite interesting is that you can actually private your own blog instead of publishing to the public, just like writing a diary.


Micro-blogging as a kind of innovation of new media in writing is a global trend now, everybody talks about information immediacy, the interactivity between readers and writers, the participation of people etc. But why don’t we just step back a little bit, and see what digitalized technology change our lives, and think about is that really the more convenient the better, or vice versa? We’ll see why writing in new media is an inportant topic that people should be interested in the next post. :]

My digital life

My digital life? Let me think...without any doubt, Facebook and also...Apple!

With the advancement of technology nowsdays, people's interactions is shortened by the use of the Internet. Our lifes are becoming more and more digitalised. For me, I had indulged myself into digital life everyday I woke up already :p

As I am a smartphone user, I can get in touch with the world relatively easier by using my iPhone. Maybe I should probably say that, Apple has colonised the world already.
Or should I say not only Apple, Facebook is also doing the same thing as Apple I guess. Facebook had already invaded my life since I was in senior form. Originally I was just using because of my friends as my friends asked me for my Facebook account so that we could get in touch with each other. But after that, we all went to Facebook to type in our statuses, notes, upload photos, videos... Since then, Facebook become one of the communication tools, or to put to simplier, Facebook become one of my social life. With the help of smartphones, I can be in touch with Facebook, and also my friends more immediately apart from merely phones.

On one hand, of couse Facebook and other kinds of social networking tools like Twitter, Weibo, MySpace, Whatsapp etc, can certainly link up people from all around the world and interact with people more easily. On the other hand, it somehow makes people to talk less, what I mean by talk less, is that people are all merely look at the monitor screen, rather than interact with each other face to face, which makes the relationship much more colder. I can't really tell that whether the change is good or bad now... :(