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. :]