Blogging is light as I’m in a pretty busy period, but I have been thinking: I’m hazarding a wild guess here, but I suspect that you people actually visit blogs other than this one! Am I right? If so, why not share your favorite blog urls with us? I’d like to know what our ChinesePod learners read online. (We could even create a competition.) Your list can include blogs that cover areas other than China/Chinese. Let’s hear from you.
Ken Carroll
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{ 21 comments… read them below or add one }
chinesepod.com (of course)
dcblogs.com (DC news site in the form of a blog aggregator)
http://www.sinosplice.com
johnbiesnecker.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
engadget.com
tuaw.com
I’m not all that keen on blogs to be honest, I’m more of a forum person really. I usually only really follow blogs if it’s associated with a podcast, like http://www.topofthepods.com for example.
I read chezpim.com and loved sautewednesday.com but it’s kindof defunct
Bazza,
I’d be fascinated to know why you prefer forums to blogs. Could you tell us more about that?
Ken Carroll
I’ll occasionally puruse a blog if one turns up in search results to one of my queries. I can’t say I actively follow any blogs besides this one. The pod casts bring me back here. Even one like sinosplice, which I found before Chinese Pod, I couldn’t bring myself back to the blog as a regular. I found what I was looking for at the time and moved on.
I guess I’m in the same camp as Bazza on this one.
Acitve usenet newsgroups or other forums seem to have much more interesting discussion than most blogs. Ever notice some of the blog posts with the most interesting comments started with things like “Open thread…” or “What’s on your mind…?”
I’ve been part of a blogging community for a few years now over at http://www.livejournal.com. It’s all strictly amateur stuff, mostly emo kids posting quiz results and the like, but I have managed to create a reading list of a hundred or so interesting individuals and communities that I read daily.
Some of those communities are Chinese language related, such as:
http://community.livejournal.com/chineselanguage/
http://community.livejournal.com/dailycharacter/
http://community.livejournal.com/learn_mandarin/
http://community.livejournal.com/zhongwen/
Remember that this is all kind of freeform and chaotic (and subject to spammers and trolls), but it’s easy to skip past the junk and find the meat. As for more “professional” blogs, the only one I check daily is this ChinesePod.
“mostly emo kids posting quiz results and the like” – not just emo kids. Some people (like me) who would’ve been if it existed when we were younger. It’s a nice place to whinge and pretend that someone might read it and care… Or just as an online diary.
Outside of CPod, the only blog I look up with any frequency is the Dilbert blog by Scott Adams, half for the controversial anti just about everything posts, but also for the hypercritical people who take the bait and write intolerant (intolerable?) comments showing their sociocultural weak spots. Hmm, too much liberal arts for me…
I think blogs are more suited to online diaries and daily news report. If you make comments you sometimes not sure if they’ve been seen particularly if it’s an old entries, and you very rarely have any control over your own comments. Like editing and delete if you need to.
Forums are better for in depth discussion.
With forums you can start your own topics and any of your new posts are always highlighted and brought to the top, so everyone knows about it when they next log on. You can usually get to know people better on forums as well and there’s usually an option to send private messages to others.
Blogs hold no interest for me whatsoever. I too prefer a forum or email conferencing. For web browsing, I go to a site that has information that I’m seeking.
To me the main difference is the social one. A forum (or similar) is designed for group discussion. Everyone’s equal. Some will jostle into the limelight one day, then on another topic it will be someone else. Still, it’s free open group communication among equals.
Blogs are more “speak when you’re spoken to”, you can’t initiate a topic, you exist there only in response to the top dog. If you contribute, you’re actually contributing to the top dog so that they can make it available to others. Elitist. Worship. Unequal. Technically, there is no opportunity to correct errors in a post or append a PS or to see it before it’s set in concrete. Disempowering. Governed, ruled over, narrowly defined and closely directed. Ptui!
PS
I would be fascinated to find out what on earth it is that people enjoy about blogs — especially about contributing to them. Do people use blog comments when there’s no active forum available to them on a similar topic, or because they don’t know about forums and the like? Or are they swept away with the perceived privilege of seeing their own words on an esteemed person’s page? Or something else? I can’t work it out.
I can see we’re not generally that enamoured with blogs here. I guess blogs and forums are jsut different. The BBS has cerainly been more important thatn he blog until recently in China. I think I need to do a proper post on blogging and where I think it has advantages over the bbs.
Ken Carroll
looks like somebody needs pro-blogs comments
well, interesting debate here: blog vs forum.
Actually not a debate: it seems you are a blog person or a forum person (or neither, but then you wouldn’t be reading this…).
I’m a blog person. let’s say “a RSS person”, i love my aggregator
Note that there are RSS feeds in forums but it’s hard to use it. I tried and failed, like bill clinton
One of the reason i prefer blogs: i want to be inform/entertain about the subject that matters to me. i can choose what i want to read! I don’t know how you, forum people, use the forums. how many forums can you follow?
In my A list, about chinese (and china):
http://www.sinosplice.com/life/
http://www.drawmyface.co.uk/blog/
and the chinesepod blog, of course.
other subscriptions (NB:it’s a big mess)
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/13896003347053029613/label/chinese
about China and stuff, my A list:
http://www.cwrblog.net/
http://www.chinadialogue.net/ (more than a blog, but i read it as a blog)
http://singleplanet.blogs.com/
http://www.lostlaowai.com/commentary/hhr/ (not, a blog, but the “best posts/article/…” about china.Again, you can read it as a blog)
http://chine.blog.lemonde.fr/chine/ (photoblog)
http://blogs.princeton.edu/pia/personal/epay/ (Kunming)
big mess again:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/13896003347053029613/label/china
And if you like Google reader (it’s not perfect yet):
here are my star items:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/13896003347053029613/state/com.google/starred
I think blogs are a tremenous resource, and read a bunch every day. ZDnet has a whole family of technology and business blogs all aggregated on one page – my favorite in this family is their Enterprise Web 2.0 blog by Dion Hinchcliffe.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/
some other great ones are weblogged-ed.com – one that Ken has spoken of, I think. I also read the Seeking Alpha China Stocks blog, and the China Solved blog at
http://chinasolved.com.
there are hundreds of superb blogs out there, and there are millions of lousy ones. It’s pretty easy to search filter out the bad ones.
I originally started out using IRC chatrooms because I liked the live interaction of it. The only downside is you miss things when you’re not logged in, unless you stay logged on all the time and scroll back through the logs.
I used to run my own IRC chatroom, then I created a forum to go with it. The forum was a bit of a failure so in the end I deleted it, but after that I kind of seeked out other forums and eventually lost interest in IRC and gave away my chatroom for someone else to run.
Could the preferences be a matter of whether you expect an active or a passive activity? Read blogs (and you may comment), or contribute to group discussions (and you may lurk).
Aunty,
Perhaps you’re on to something. Could you give us a little more on what you mean?
Ken
I think there’s definitely some truth there, AuntySue. Blogs are for being told what other people think (autocratic-totalitarian), or trying to tell others what you think (if you’re writing it yourself), where a forum’s a more democratic (theoretical communist) style, where everyone says and discusses what they think.
If I’m reading a blog, it’s because I think that there’s something that the person writing it might have to say that I want to read.
A forum, on the other hand, I see as a place for questions and answers, discussion and, well, community.
Ken, I think a site has room for both of these things (a blog and a forum). You just need to keep in mind what your purpose is for each.
The blog is a tool for the company to keep in contact with their subscribers. It’s more personal than a press release, has more personality, and gives a public face to the whole kit and kaboodle. You are the Great and Powerful Oz. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
The blog allows you to interact with the community, but most importantly, it allows the community an opportunity to interact with you. Consider this a place where you can do some great research about your audience and what they want to hear. Your subscribers are spread out across the globe and the one thing we all have in common is the desire to learn a foreign language, and perhaps learn a bit more about China and Chinese culture. Don’t doubt for a second that we’d also like to know more about you and the staff. Create a more personal experience for the reader, let them get to know you, and we’re not just plunking down cash every month because we like the lessons, but because we feel connected to something.
The forum is trickier. You need someone (and several someones) to moderate it, but there’s no real directing it. It’s like herding cats. On the other hand, that’s where the community can interact with one another. The downside is that there *will* be questions asked in there that will need to be answered by you or the staff and someone will need to put a sticky beak in there pretty frequently so that folks don’t feel ignored.
All of the above is based solely on personal experience and no actual hard data, so feel free to disregard all of it as you see fit. As always, your mileage may vary.
Lots of great points here. To me, a blog represents soemthing different from a BBS. The blog is usually personal, written by someone who more than just a common interest in a topic – thought leaders like Glenn Reynolds, Seth Godin, Doc Searls, for example. Good blogs aren’t about being dictatorial or laying down the law. If they were, who would read them? Blogs are just another way to engage in conversation, albeit in a different way than on a bbs.
There are lots of smart people out there and in my view, one good blog leads to another. I think it’s a fantastic way to discover new ideas or dig down into a topic.
Ken Carroll
What a coincidence that this debate sprang up here just days after we published a lesson on this very issue on ChinesePod Advanced: 论坛VS博客.
It’s interesting that so many people are so strongly pro-forums. I never liked forums myself. I always found them too full of content that didn’t interest me, with no easy way of finding the content which did interest me.
I write a blog, and I read blogs. There are definitely some blogs famous for good comments, and others with strictly good content, though. But I feel that not everything needs to be about discussion. Do you expect discussion from a book or a newspaper article? Take the medium for what it is.
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