03.16.2010 at 10:50 am | Have your say »

Vietnamese Blogs: It’s not only blogging

A Boom of Blog

Before 2005, if you ask some Vietnamese questions like “What is the blog?” or “Do you have a blog?” the usual answer would be “What is it?”, “I don’t know”, or “I don’t have it”. These answers were given amid the existence of so many blog sites on the Internet.

In 2006, Yahoo’s blog service, Yahoo! 360, was launched and a year later became so famous among young Vietnamese resulting to around two million subscribers in Vietnam alone at the end of 2008.

Yahoo! 360 was also available in United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, and Japan but did not get enough web surfer’s favor to survive in the web industry, thus, at the end of 2007, Yahoo announced that they would no longer provide support for Yahoo! 360.

However, because of the volume of request from millions of Yahoo users in Vietnam the company announced that they would open Yahoo! 360 Plus specifically for the Vietnamese market.

It is said that Yahoo! blog has opened a new way for Vietnamese to share their thinking about everything in daily life from food, fashion, movie, to education, economy, and even politics. While some people use Yahoo! blog as a way to connect to friends and people, some writers uses Yahoo! blog to pre-publish part of their work to estimate the rate before deciding to print their works, and some people used the blog to express their opinions in many fields. It is interesting that some blog sites became a kind of news channel which brought web surfers some news that newspaper did not have.

Keep Blogging

Many Vietnamese did not move their blog to the Yahoo! 360 plus, but turned to use other blog services. Some have moved to Blogger.com, others have moved to Wordpress.com, Multiply.com, or change to micro blog like Facebook, and Twitter.

Many normal people in Vietnam became well-known as the hot blogger as their page attracted thousand viewers per day. Most of them then lost their title along the death of Yahoo! 360, though they keep their writing on the Yahoo! 360 plus or the other blog service. But it is very fascinating that some hot bloggers can keep the view rate on their new blog site. Most of them are the blog about the economic and politics.

In the boom of Yahoo! blog, editor of newspapers in Vietnamese have found a new way of source. Some editors spend time to surf blog of other people and find good writing works to put on columns of newspaper. A blogger in Hanoi after having become famous with his entries on his Yahoo! 360 blog and then got an offer to write article every week for a newspaper. He then collected his entries and published them in a book which then became a bestseller book.

Entries on blogs of someone turn to a good article on some newspaper. By that way blog turns to be a useful source for journalism in Vietnam. There is a boom of online newspaper in Vietnam today with dozens of official news web and around 2.000 unofficial news webs. Besides, blogs also act as a channel for Vietnamese today to get the news and information.

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