Friday, June 30, 2006

Why do Bloggers stop Blogging?

I went to a presentation at the OII yesterday by Visiting Fellow Dr Jianbin Jin from the School of Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University, China.

The title of the talk was The sustainability of blogging: a look at Chinese bloggers and the audience were treated to some fascinating statistics around the topic of blogging in China.

furthermore...

In China in January 2006 there were:

• 111 million Internet users
• 15.8 million pople blogging
• 66% of those blogs were not updated more frequently than 2 months

Dr Jin went on to explain the methodology for research into this area. I couldn't help wondering about the relationship between blogging and BBS, because the latter has had such a wide popularity in China. Here in the West, the BBS has lost its popularity because of the internet.

Statistics are crucial to this kind of research but it was clear from the presentation that there are significant problems in collecting the neccasary data. Bloggers stop blogging for many reasons and these may include:

• Dissatisfaction with the BSP
• Time Pressure
• Lack of response from target audience (no comments from visitors)

These reasons are certainly going to be the same as in the UK, Europe and the USA, but it seems (we learnt from Dr Jin) that, in China, the main reason for blogging is to communicate with immediate family and friends. There are some political blogs and these are regarded as famous.

Another point to pass on; once you have blogged for a while and built up a good number of posts, it can be difficult to transfer to a new BSP or different system, so people tend to drop one and start another. I have read questions around this on the ExpressionEngine (the system that I use) forum. EE does have import tools for MovableType, and other systems do allow export to MoveableType. I think the BSP that Dr Jin referred to would have been a hosted system rather than an installed system. It would be interesting to find out about the proportion of bloggers who sugn up for hosted systems like Blogger.com as opposed to server installations. This latter does at least give more control over identity through domain registration, but maybe this is not common in China.

I wonder if I can keep this blogging thing going? Yes, of course!