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Micro-blogging in China
Cover Stories Series 2011> Micro-blogging in China
UPDATED: January 24, 2011 NO. 4 JANUARY 27, 2011
Micro-blogs Fire Up the Net
Broadcasting short items on the Internet is emerging as a phenomenal trend
By YUAN YUAN
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SPECIAL HOMEWORK: A student at the School of Journalism of Nanjing University manages his micro-blog (HAN YUQING)

What is more exciting for her is that she made a lot of friends from micro-blogging. "I found my own circle, which is a surprise from micro-blogging."

Many media organizations have already used micro-blogs for publishing news. According to Sina.com, by August 2010, there had been 466 media outlets opened micro-blog on t.sina.com, including newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations. The media can post news on a micro-blog, to reach its followers more quickly. Followers can also report their findings to the media.

Modern Express is a newspaper in Jiangsu Province. Since it opened a micro-blog on t.sina.com on October 29, 2009, it has posted more than 3,000 news items. Among its more than 60,000 followers, many did not previously read newspapers.

At the very beginning, editors just gave headlines of news stories and links to entire contents on the newspaper's website. But the practice turned out to be unattractive to netizens. Editors replaced the headlines with brief summaries of reports and posted related pictures and video footages. It works well and many readers click the links to learn more about the stories.

The Super Boy singing contest held by Hunan TV has a large number of viewers all over China. At the final of last year's competition, many viewers expressed their opinions on micro-blogs and cheered for the contestants they supported. Fairy tale writer Zheng Yuanjie posted on his micro-blog voting for three contestants. It was forwarded more than 2 million times, a record in the development of micro-blogging in China.

"Micro-blogging has been accepted by more people," said Qi Shanhong, a professor at Nankai University. "It has spread from a small circle to mainstream society."

Challenges

At the same time, problems with micro-blogging have also emerged. Some users, in order to attract attention, post sensationalized news that is false. Louis Cha, a famous Hong Kong writer, was rumored by micro-bloggers to have died twice in 2010.

"Since micro-blogging limit posts to 140, in order to attract more people, some just exaggerate or even make up news themselves," said Qi.

"Everybody can be a news reporter in the micro-blog era. This is different from past times when news was dominated by media organizations," said Yin Yungong, head of the Institute of Journalism and Communications at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "But this also brought some problems such as false news and advertisements, which may harm society. So how to supervise this new information sharing channel is what we should study next."

On March 20, Huang Jianxiang, a famous TV host at Ningxia TV, closed his micro-blog, which had 826,271 followers at that time. The reason, allegedly, is Huang copied a post from designer Zhang Facai's blog and didn't mention the original writer in his post. Zhang accused Huang of being a plagiarist on his micro-blog. Huang then fought back. In the process, a growing number of people were gradually involved, including some famous writers, who all supported Zhang and criticized Huang.

"We don't have clear rules to protect the intellectual rights of micro-blog posts," said Hu Shufen, a micro-blogger. "Although the posts are all very short, they should also be protected by the law."

How to make money from micro-blogging is a concern of service providers. In April 2010, Sina.com set up its Micro-blog Marketing Department, trying to find a way to make money from the booming micro-blog business. Peng Shaobin, Vice President of Sina.com, said the company didn't expect revenue from the first two years of micro-blog business.

"Now we have 50 million micro-blog users, and we still need more," said Peng. "Micro-blogs need more progress to make profits. Normally there are two ways to make money on the Internet—advertisements and value-added service. The latter works well in the online game business. I think the commercial potential of micro-blogging is huge, we just need more time to figure out a way to harness it."

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