China: Blog is Outdated? · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

The  4th Chinese Blogger Conference will be held November 15-16th, 2008, in Guangzhou, China.
However, in the past year, there is a continuing discussion in the Chinese blogosphere on whether blog culture is dying down. Moreover, recently bokee.com and blogchina.com, the two earliest BSPs founded by Fang dong-xing (nickname blogfather) in China, are at business crisis. Fang is looking for investing to transform the websites into multi-media community platform.
Back in July, Maitian, a rather active blogger declared that blogging is out-dated and he decided to shift to Social networking site for interacting with friends.
作为一个活跃的博客（Blog）作者，三年多以来，我一直坚持更新一个专业博客《麦田的读书生活》。在这份基本上保持每周更新的博客上，我一直以“自媒体”的模式，几乎全部文章都围绕互联网网站运营，尤其是社区和电子商务方面内容。这份博客给我带来了一些所谓“名声”和快乐，带来了非常高的访问量——但现在，我却在认真思考一个问题：是不是应该关了这个博客。
因为，博客（Blog）已经过时了。
Because blog is getting outdated.
Apart from the fact that most of the independent blogging platforms have been defeated by big internet company, like SINA, the blogger finds the interactive aspect of blogging cannot be competed with other tools, such as QQ.  However the greatest challenge is the emerging of SNS.
但我现在认为，以Facebook为代表的SNS的真正力量，是“博客终结者”——SNS应用在“自媒体”和“交互”两方面，都比博客应用更具有效率。博客完成了网民的“主体性”，SNS将完成网民的“主体间性”。
Apart writing this post, the blogger has stopped writing in his blog and moved to three other SNS. However, his article has been frequently quoted for explaining the recent business crisis for BSPs in China.
William long, another famous tech blogger, also refers back to the article to comment on the recent disappearing of many blog related services, such as BSP and RSS aggregation in China:
我们看到的现象是，BSP以及和博客相关的第三方服务正在一个接一个的消失，博客已经度过了其最辉煌的日子，正慢慢走向一个黑暗的未来，其最主要的原因，我看是因为这些博客第三方服务无法从中盈利。
为什么无法盈利呢？以内容建设的观点看，博客自身的内容质量应该比SNS、Twitter、DIGG等要高，流量也不算少，借助广告实现规模收入也是有 可能的，但是目前博客广告盈利的方式非常单一，基本上集中在Google AdSense上，这也导致了博客的盈利预期受到了Google的控制和影响。
Why can't they make a profit? The content quality of blog is better than SNS, Twitter and Digg, their traffics are high. They should be able to get income from Ads. However, at present, blogger's income is too narrowed. Basically, they depends on Google AdSense. Which means their profit is affected by Google.
Google一上来就收购或者开发了一大堆免费的博客工具如Google Reader、FeedBurner、Blogsearch等等，将这些第三方博客服务的盈利梦想彻底打破，使得类似FeedDemon的服务只好免费， 但市场份额依旧被Google Reader占领，从而导致第三方博客服务无法实现盈利，最终转向Google一家独大的局面。
However, he is more optimistic about the future of blog and disagreed that blog woud be replaced by SNS:
博客的特点就是个性化和开放性，其内容质量相对较高，而SNS相对来说较为封闭，特别是对搜索引擎封闭，这和博客的开放形成鲜明对比，SNS的封闭 性不利于信息的传播，一篇好文章难以在SNS中广泛传播，而目前国内SNS普遍都是复制美国Facebook的模式，这条路非死不可。依我看来，国内 SNS做的最好的是腾讯QQ，但你几乎找不到QQ和Facebook的任何一个相同点，更绝的是腾讯从来不说自己搞得是SNS。
The blogger concludes that the failure of BSP and other blog related services is not an end to blog, on the other hand, bloggers can build their own independent blogs.
Let's wait and see what the Chinese bloggers will say about this in the upcoming Chinese blogger conference.