Week 12

As part of the requirement of assignment 3, I’m supposed to write down my observations of at least one blog or website I read regularly. I haven’t really touched this area in my previous blog posts because the blogs I read regularly are all written in Chinese. Of course I read English blogs, but I don’t follow any particular one. Since last year, I have been trying to find an English blog that I’m interested enough to follow, but I still don’t have any luck so far. I’m certainly not criticising blogs written in English. I’m following certain Chinese blogs simply because I’m interested in reading articles on two topics: 1) International title trading between China and other countries; 2) issues about culture difference between Japan and China.
Eventually, I decided I would just write about the blogs I really love rather than trying to say something fake about blogs I don’t read.
Grayhawk
Grayhawk is created by a Taiwanese literary agent. He usually publishes news about the coming titles he’s excited about, book reviews of the titles he’s trading, and trading news in the industry. Recently he has been talking about exporting Chinese titles to western countries. Particularly, he has been updating stories about selling Gold Mountain, the biggest title in the Chinese market last year, to publishers in Europe and North America. I have to admit his blog has become a very strong channel to promote his titles. Anyone reads his blog would be moved by his passion and enthusiasm towards the books he talks about. And anyone reads his blog would tend to share the same passion with him. Looking at the feedbacks, it’s not difficult to spot readers who said they would go to buy books mentioned in his blog after reading his articles. In fact, I bought Gold Mountain right after reading his series of posts about how he sold the title to publishers in ten regions and countries around the world.
Learning from Grayhawk, I think we have to show the real passion and love towards what we are talking about. If we don’t sound excited, how can we make our readers share the same excitement?

Jiangfeng’s Blog, Sasu’s Blog and Xiuhui Looks at Japan
Jiangfeng is the chief editor of a Chinese newspaper in Japan. He publishes features in his newspaper on his blog on weekly basis. He categorises his posts into several sections including relationship between Japan and China, social problems in Japan, problems Chinese people have in Japan, life of Chinese people living in Japan, Japanese current issues, Japanese history, etc. What I found really convenient of his blog is that he has all categories on the left side of the homepage and all articles recommended by readers on the right side of the homepage. Once I click into a particular article, I can see all the related articles under the same category on the right side of each page, which will encourage me to keep on reading.
Sasu is one of my favourite blogger and writer. I started to follow his blog after reading his book Being Neighbour with “Ghosts” (Chinese used to call Japanese ghosts during World War II). Sasu is actually an IT engineer working in Japan but he writes about everything on his blog, including current affairs, history, fiction, technology, etc. Most of his posts have something to do with Japanese society.
Xiuhui Looks at Japan is very similar with Jiangfeng and sasu’s blog. He focuses on showing the interesting aspects of Japanese society too, but judging from the titles of his posts and pictures, his blog probably appeals more to male readers.
I noticed many Chinese blogs started to include mini-blogs (like tweets) on the homepage. It’s become a more direct platform for communication between authors and readers because authors tend to write less formal and much shorter sentences on all sorts of topics on mini-blogs. Surprisingly, there are lots of people replying to their tweets in the same way as they are replying to blog posts.
Moreover, mini-blog is more user-friendly in a way than Twitter. First, if you reply to a mini blog post, both the post and your reply will appear on your page as well as on the page you reply to. It's visually more like Facebook. Second, when you "retweet" a person's mini blog post, you can write 140 words comments, which will appear with the original post on both your page and the other person's pages.