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. :]