At the Foxhole, Beginning My Afternoon Navel Gaze
14:00 CET
In search of grist…for the mill, of course!

Have you ever noticed how many English-language Chinese blogs (say that five times fast!) there are?

Sadly, I believe the time has come to drastically reduce the number of these truly redundant boards, these mostly paltry attempts to reinvent the wheel by reprising what’s already been written countless times online. We must begin to streamline these available offerings into a tight fist of “absolute-must-go-to” sites. Absolute online musts which shouldn’t be missed, in other words, with the rest somehow shunted off to the sidelines, clearly delineated as minor league attempts to achieve the same effect as the A-Listers.

I observed this recently while surfing through the offerings at Hao Hao Report, the creation of Ryan McLaughlin, a fellow “crazy Canuck,” and bionic blogger in his own right. I was astounded by the volume of stuff posted there, with seemingly less regard (not no regard, just less) for post quality or post appropriateness. It had been mentioned to me a few weeks ago by a China-blogging fellow and after devoting a considerable amount of time to Hao Hao during yesterday’s European afternoon, I couldn’t agree with the chap more.

In a situation of decentralized Chinese cities, say, where the wonders of the interwebs were unavailable to geographically-disparate expats in search of relevant information or in order to commiserate or seek out fellow-foreign succor, it made sense to have 20 different expatriate magazines or 35 different expatriate newspapers, each replicating the content of the rest. That made sense from an old world media perspective.

But in a Chinese marketplace where everything is being funneled around at the fingering of a hyper-sensitive touchpad, how many redundancies should the market allow?

Again, this seeming polemic piece might remind some of those “Top Ten” lists from a few weeks back, but it’s important to remember that just because one has a right to found and regularly publish to their own blog – thanks (or no thanks?) the decentralization of blogging tools – it doesn’t mean it should always happen.

And what’s more, I’m not telling you anything new here, either.

Andrew Keen has talked about this before in 2007’s The Cult of the Amateur

and I suspect it still holds true today.

I suppose it would behoove us to produce a list of things we absolutely need to see in our China blogs, dear China blogging enthusiasts, followed by a short list of things we definitely do not need to see.

Things China Blogs Should Have:

• breaking news content: news and attached photos that are not available on any of the mainstream media channels, either because of the geographic proximity or privileged access of the blogger to the event being discussed, or the fact that the country’s media organs are duly censored (or in Chinese euphemistic parlance, “harmonized”) and therefore news of the event in question is forbidden from being published online.
• scintillating analysis: if you’re going to lay your bare balls out (ladies too!) on the chopping block and actually devote time to pumping out a post, kindly make sure you’re shedding new light on an issue or supplying us with novel insight. Otherwise what you’re doing isn’t blogging, but rather a repository for your practice keyboard strokes. Sure, sure, you’ll say. It’s a democracy…I can publish what I like. Yet that doesn’t mean you can call yours a blog just yet. A blog means you’re an author. An author means people read your stuff, that you’ve got an audience. Audience equals readership. And readership craves novelty. If you omit any of the previous steps, you’re mentally masturbating, not blogging.
• great photography: can good blogs still exist in which photography doesn’t play a prominent role? Neither do I buy the excuse that you don’t use snaps because you’re not technologically-inclined or that you can’t find suitable images from the vast trove of online archives. As of the end of the naughts, that particular excuse has flown out the window.
• roiling discussion: there must be a way – either through comments or another means – of demonstrating to an uninvolved third-party that your blog enjoys a degree of popularity and can be vetted by a neutral source. If you can’t demonstrate this, do you even have a right to call yourself a “blog?” Sure, you may have the makings of a blog or a blog-in-training, but you’re not really full-fledged yet. Be careful to brand yourself as such within the community of your blogging peers until you’re ready to go. We talked about this the other day.

Things China Blogs Should Definitely Not Have:

• crossposting as a way to riff off your own posts: Crossposting works like this: I read a great post online and then proceed to pull apart its structure in order to create my own post. I dump in a few obsequious remarks between the original item’s clever paragraphs with few gleanings other than your ability to showcase how capably I know the English language. Just consider how much this theme and variations activity actually contributes to the glut of information and its consequent spread of rampant amateurism online. Crossposting should be banned.
• ranty anti-Chinese, anti-PRC screeds: be thankful the Chinese even give your blogging habit a raison d’etre, son! And for this reason alone, be thankful by not taking the first opportunity to slag off on those very same people and/or culture which actually form your wannabe meal ticket. Going off half-cocked about the Chinese is also bad form and makes you look like a boob. Rants on blogs is not professionalism nor shippable art. It’s just porn.
• regurgitated news: there are too many “China” sites doing this. Too many aggregator sites and too many news junkies – news addicts, actually – reproducing stuff we already know about. So how many search engine-based news boards can there actually be? How many translated news sites can there actually be? And what makes your regurgitation blog different from the hundreds – even thousands – of news blogs presently serving the same market? See what I mean? Now use this to justify why we need yours.
• posts made to satisfy your inner graphomaniac: posting for posting’s sake is not blogging, even if you think it to be the case. While this might be an outward manifestation of your inner-need to post anything on a regular basis, it does not a genuine blog post make. This, I believe, is the malaise Keen so aptly depicted in The Cult of the Amateur.

I’ll be the fist to volunteer to remove my own blog if I thought for one second that I were doing scant more than than making noise and rattling people’s cages.

So what do you think?

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