A notable fairy tale writer, Zheng has been infatigably editing a magazine himself for more than 22 years. But when he was put in the Internet age, he found himself as a writer being upstaged by other young, snazzy, blogging girls and boys
“It’s by no means a fair competition”
“A blog, as I see it, is supposed to be judged by what the blogger writes, so a writer will surely and easily make it big with blogs, but I’m sort of puzzled by why there are numbered writers and novelists among the Top 100 Sina Bloggers, we all understand blogging is a kind of platform du jour where we all are in the fair competition, and ordinary folks can entertain and gossip. But why are there some writers are outblogged in this big words competition?” He once said to Acosta, the Top 3rd Sina blogger.
I knew why Zheng got pestered: Zheng is old and barely handsome. He can by no means outshine the good-looking youth when he was put in the spotlights of acting, singing, runway shows, cameos. What make him outdo the youth is nothing less than words work, so Zheng thought he had a chance to compete with others at a time when the blogging is so much pervasive, he ended up biting the writing dusts, outblogged by some fresh faces who made their ways into the A-lists and get astronomical hits and clicks by merely putting some pictures and video clips on their blogs.
In the fact, it’s not fair to bring a conclusion that some blogging writers and novelists are quite scarce. Nowadays, we have at least 10 writers or media professionals, say, Han Han(2nd place), Hong Huang(4th place), Guo Jingming(5th ), Dong Lu(7th), Li Chengpeng(9th) and Zheng himself(10th). I speculate Zheng had some beefs because he thinks there are some writers out of a large quantity of entertainment celebs on the Top 100 Sina Bloggerss , though they can write, what they blog is just to bring some hits and click-throughs for their blogs.
So it came to us as no surprise that Zheng also didn’t cling to the purely writing on his text-heavy blog. A cursory look at his blog will make you feel his blog looks like a multimedia section of a newspaper. On his blog, Zheng has “Zheng’s Washroom Time”-a video clip about his thoughts, opinions, and photo gallery of “Zheng’s nonsense”-a talkshow among others, Zheng has turned his blog into a splashy multi-dimensional hodgepodge. The blogging, says Zheng, has upended his ordinary life. “I used to live a Spartan live somewhere, now I’m omnipresent across the country.”
Sina blog is reportedly to be the biggest cabin for people who want to blog. If we judge Sina blog by what big visits and hits for its bloggers, we can get to know a Top 100 bloggers list is to some extent a harbinger of what the current blogging meme looks like in China. After going through the list, we seem to get what we think are the seeming blogging fads:
I. Grass-root bloggers are struggling to outblog the star bloggers.
Celebs are still the major force on the list, However, some undersung grass-root bloggers do have what it takes to make them like a real star, so some star-makers are scouring around, find some and give those fresh faces’ star career a kicks-tart, or make them at the frontpage of tabloids, or help them steal the spotlights from others super nova in the celebrity universe. As some people say, blogosphere is the same as the “celeb universe”, it’s still where the real stars and planets are outshining, some star-makers create and launch new stars, and new place star groupies fell swooned for their icons. As some blogospherical Cassandras predict, an age of massive grass-root writing as writers has not been upon us yet.
II. Young and cute faces are still the weapons.
A blog is, etymologically and by definition, a weblog where “the words are presented as the major feature,” says Zheng. But, anyone can put his or her photos, pictures and video clips on the Internet, so “the later 1950 crowd” will inevitably be left behind by “the later 1980 crowd” a time when we judge person not by what he/she does. The cute, gorgeous and knockout faces have virtually replaced the sharp wits as the biggest factor to shape up the visits, clicks and hits of a blog.
III. Boys are outperforming girls.
Say female fans and groupies, they remains most loyal legions who try whatever they can to dog, hound, stick to, cling to their favorite stars, they can splash , ecstatically big RMBs vicariously for the beloved. Like the star-makers of films, TV, label companies do with male stars, the star blogger makers are embracing for getting the star out the massive young bloggers. Just look at Top 5 Sina bloggers, you will get Han Han, Acosta and Guo Jingming the 3 snazzy twenty-somethingsVI. Always be friendly to the young iconic bloggers.
The young iconic bloggers have a big fan base which is taken over by slants, not the rationales. When Guo lost the court battle, and was accused of the plagiarisms, his big fans are still stubbornly behind Guo, making no public apologies. And the Guo’s blog didn’t get the plagiarism shock waves; instead, it got a visit surge. One more scenario, Bai Ye, a middle-aged critic, ruffled Han Han’s feathers, You might have guessed what happened; there was a so big Bai Ye-bashing from Han and his fans that Bai Ye ended up surrendering and cut and running. Bai finally pulled a plug on his blog. Hong Huang, a veteran media professional, once tried to screwed her courage and tested the blogging-bashing water, but she got literally drowned in a sea of blasting when she portrayed, with her new Shanghai dialects, Han and Acosta the ilk as the “later 1980 star bloggers” who feel themselves “ more like stars than literatis.”
Well, if you say that Han, Guo and Acosta just have some cute faces, you don’t judge fairly. Personally, I like reading them very much because what they wrote is free from the shackles of minds and thoughts or ethereally written or beautiful melodies. Not only do they capture the imaginations of peers but also they grab the psyches of some dubious middle-aged esthetes. And it’s more self-evident: they are young and swanky, but they combined perfectly and successfully their sharp wits and their looks together to create among readers a special chemistry which transforms into the charming aura, like the rainbow.
Probably that’s what Zheng and others call “an unfair competition”.
Tim Hartford, a beloved FT columnist, had a piece-“Pretty vacancies”-in which he explores the why pretty faces are always better at bringing good chances everywhere. Tim talked about what could be a possible standard of beauty in the West-. It’s at least a sign that China is not alone in being a country where star worships and star making permeated so much. But if we slingshots the history back, we will find the young beauty has its roots as a commodity and a way to consume in the old West at a time when marketing economy was already nothing new there. Like the western countries did, China is just following the suit of western beauty.
Why celebs blog?
Let’s get back to the point, as we can not judge a hero by his failure or success, we can not make a judgement of how a blogger is famous or not according to the mere clicks, we even can not go so far as to gauge the local blogging is a good fad or not on the Sina Top 100 bloggers list.
Last year I happened to talk to some celebrities about how the Chinese blogosphere is going when I was working on the Chinese middle class investigations. I put some parts of scripts here:
The first interviewee was Hong Huang, CEO at China Interactive Media. As of March 4th, her 4th place Sina blog has more than 38,520,000 hits.
Q: You are quite busy with your work, so why do you squeeze some time to blog?
A: I like that.
Q: Do you blog out of your hobbies, or out of its underlying business value?
A: I don’t think there is some business value in a blog. When you look around, you can have several people buzzing about the value of blogging. Probably, blogging can bring you some shades and shreds of business value, but how can a blog generate its value? Can I have my blog get IPOs? Can I sell my blog to others? That means can I sell myself. Why don’t I go find a job?
Q: Why does your blog have such huge hits?
A: I think, I don’t take my blog as a blog, I take it as one of my columns.
Q: You work hard on blogging?
A: Not so much, I just like writing, I found it quite entertaining. And I have a rather different writing style from other Chinese writers’ style.
Q: Your fame helps your blog get so many clicks, doesn’t it?
A: It did possibly. Being famous is always a good thing. But you can not say your blog hits are about your fame. Look at Xu Jinglei’s blog, it’s really red hot. Xu is not as famous as Gong Li, Vicky Zhao and Zhang Ziyi, but Gong’s blog is has much lower hits.
Zhang Guangtian was the second I interviewed; he is the screen play writer and director of Che Guevara, a theater play.
Q: You have a new blog at Sina. Do you think your blog can bring you some flows of cash?
A: It’s impossible. What is still getting the top Sina execs scratching their heads is how they can turn the celebs’ blogs into some commercial profits. What a blog can do is just: by using it, you can communicate with others, and you can spread yourself in some areas.
Q: It seems to me that a blog itself can have some economic values, doesn't it?
A: Well, first, if you want your blog to have unbelievable hits, you MUST be a Xu Jinglei-like celebrity. But we are working in the culture industry; it’s unlikely we can be a celebrity. Second, the whole blogosphere relies on Xu to get more business opportunities for it. So if Xue quits blogging one day, there will still be many people who line up at Xue’s doorstep because a star is like a commodity, the star can be of business values in this industry and in that industry. It doesn’t so tightly relate to a blog, does it? blogs benefit us because we can easily read the celebrities we like. It strengthens our communications.
I finally talked to Fang Xingdong, CEO of BlogCn. Fang is eulogized as the founding father of Chinese blogsophere.
Q: People say you are first person to use blog(博客) the word in China, right?
A: Yes. When I began using it, I was only there waving the blog flag, people gave me many cold shoulders. Later, they came to use the Chinese word. I had been writing about the Internet from 1996 to 2002. I found that I didn’t have any right to voice my opinions, I wanted to have an article, but there was no place where I can write my article. Since blog was in China, I have become an active speaker. So I came to realize there will be the future of Internet in a blog. The Internet is not about what new hi-tech will be there, it’s about how Internet users change into an active person from a passive person. That’s exactly about the future and the revolutionary significance of the Internet.
Star sky and grassland
In China, Hong and Fang are definitely the notable celebrities like shining star in the sky. And although Zhang Guangtian is wandering off the Top 100 list, he is indisputably a Chinese household name. However, it’s a stretch to say Chinese blogosphere is like a night sky where planets, stars, meteorites, man-made stars and moons are trying to outshine each other.
A Chinese government stats suggests that there are totally 132, 000, 000 Internet users (just following the user number in the US), in China. And 20,000,000 of them own their blogs, and 3,200,000 users often update the blogs.
Personally, I like dropping by some real grass-root blogs, or peeling into what are inside some strangers, or getting to know what make ordinary people happy or sad. Following the Top 100 Sina blog list, thousands and millions of grass-root bloggers are emerging as the de facto pillars in the Chinese blogosphere. They could give celebrities short shrifts, they don’t dream about being a true star blogger whatsoever. What prompted them to blog is just about self-entertaining or telling their close friends about their ordinary life. They never wanted to bring them fame and brass by blogging. Nor did they spat over trivia. If the Sina list is like the star-shining sky, there are uncountable grass-root bloggers like glamorous, kaleidoscopic grasslands. When a star shoot across the sky, there will be a big focus (metaphorically the huge blog clicks ) among many people who look up into the sky, but over time we could have sore necks, and we feel uncomfortable in our eyes after meteorites vanish into nothing. When we overlook a small garden or unknown grassland, Obscure as they might be and it might be too small for all people to see(the tiny hits), but what we can get there is the tranquility, the aroma of the flowers, the singing of birds and the fresh air that makes us feel our oats.
Chinese blogosphere can be a night sky; it also can be moisturized growing grassland, that’s what inspired Fang to create BlogCn.
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链接名已改为“秦爱网志”，另外译言的链接也已更正，欢迎常来常往啊！
对了，你文章中yeeyan原文的链接不对。；）