DisOrientated - A Weblog by Philip Sen - Living in China

October 05, 2004

Living in China - a Critical Digest

One reason for not posting here recently is that I've been spending some time trying to figure out the best directions for Living in China.

A way to do this is to analyse and sift through the comments, suggestions and criticisms that have been made over the last few weeks, and for transparency's sake I reproduce them below.

As you'll see, it's impossible to please everyone all the time and some of the suggestions are downright contradictory, but once certain people are available again I've got a couple of ideas in mind for improving matters slightly.

Read on and add comments by all means.

Mark – Single Planet

Leave the aggregator alone and leave it focused on one country, rather than split it up.

Keep the screen simple and clean.

Make a Living on the Planet 'Central' if necessary where people can go to find more information.

Forget all the categories. People will make their own minds up on what they want to read. A 'community' soon knows whose posts they want to read.

Don't be "selective" - let anyone in, "within reason".

New layout is confusing and takes longer to scroll through.

Like Adam, I am tending to use Simon World - although with some reservations - instead of LiC.

I just don't read most of the blogs on my own links list simply because they are focusing on topics that I, personally, don't find interesting. This narrowing of focus affects maybe two-thirds of the China blogs. If it's not the US election, it's internet censorship, armchair Zhongnanhai punditry, or endless debate on a desperately limited rage of topics.

Those blogs that do have a focus seem to be the strongest, and maintain a healthy readership. As examples, both Fons' China Herald and T-Salon both have a very strong focus on a specific area, and a discipline to stay in that area. Both these blogs highlight the news and issues in a narrow field - they are pro-blogs - and so attract readers that are knowledgeable in those fields - pro-readers, if you like.

The questions over the health of Living in China may be premature though. The desire to be published and read remains strong, and if the owners of a community blog can maintain some kind of focus or some kind of quality, then there is probably an attraction for writers who no longer have the ability or interest to maintain a frequent posting rate.

The aggregator, however, may have a hard time going forward if there is no quality control on the blog membership: the change in design and the number of poor quality diary-style "My fish died" posts makes the aggregator less valuable.

It may be impossible for Phil and the LiC people to please everyone, but perhaps pleasing the well-established known entities like Peking Duck, Brainysmurf and the rest of the China blog mafia may be more productive than casting the net blindly in all directions.

Ellen – Crackpot Chronicles

With all those links to other Li __ sites, it dilutes the impact of the individual communities. I think the single link solution would be perfect! People could surf around to their heart's content, but the impact of the locality-oriented aggregator list focuses each site's readers and contributors and promotes loyalty and return visits.

Richard – Peking Duck

I agree that original content is the key, and for a long while there seemed to be plenty of it. Why that momentum was lost I don't know.
And as Adam notes, Simon's Asia by Blog is now more useful than the once-invaluable LIC aggregator.

…go take a look at the aggregator and you'll see it's cluttered with a lot of crap. Now, that is a terribly subjective judgement, but somebody's got to say it. By becoming a clearinghouse for every blog in the region that wants in, it has become something of a cesspool. (I know that's strong language, but it's exactly what I was thinking last night, as I saw there were about 20 posts in a row by a new blogger, each of zero interest or relevance to the LIC readers.) I know that nowadays about 50 percent of my own posts are irrelevant to LIC. Maybe they need to discriminate, and bounce posters like me. But I don't think so -- they just need to look with a critical eye at anyone who wants to be included and ask, "Does this blogger contribute enough that is China-related to make it worthwhile?" Right now, it is so diluted and amorphous, it's all but meaningless.

In addition, instead of becoming more user friendly and simple, the exact opposite has occurred. The aggregator now shows the post headlines -- but it doesn't tell you what blog it's from!

There used to be a simple link to see the list of contributing bloggers, but now you need to hunt for it.

And somehow, it has lost its sense of community. Last summer it was the place to go for the latest news and commentary, thanks to those featured articles. Now it's dead.

All I know is it was absolutely great for a while, and then it got more and more diluted. As cruel as it sounds, maybe there needs to be a screening process for blogs to be included, or a committee that chooses the blogs for invitation-only participation. If they decide some blogs like my own aren't relevant enough, so be it. But something has got to be down before it collapses under its own weight and drowns in its identitylessness (new word).

John – Sinosplice

The picking good entries process could be automated. It could be set up so that all entries in the aggregator are fed through an admin system. Then you just click on the entries you want to be added, make any necessary edits to the excerpts or titles, and publish.

Also... You were all speculating on why LiC started out good, with community support and all, and then was abandoned. I suspect that a large part of it was that it seemed to quickly transform from a lively community hub into a faceless cog in a massive corporation-like entity. I think the global "planet" structure turns a lot of people off, just like people don't like the idea of a New World Order.

I don't know if it would be worth the trouble, but maybe you guys (read: Brad) could even create a "My Living in China Feed" where users can choose which blogs to include, and this aggregator can be given a name and accessed by other readers. (Kind of like customers on music sites making "favorite albums" lists) If that's too much trouble, you could just let editors make aggregators of their personal favorites. That could be popular, and would still cover a range of topic areas.

You seem focused on getting more original content, but I'm not convinced it's not a lost cause… However, you could choose to go in another, slightly different direction. You could take the http://www.worldstargazette.com/ approach. Basically, just pick all the GOOD entries and link to them on the front page with excerpts. Adding news might be good too. Of course, original content is always great, but if you're short on original content, at least you'd have other (recent) stuff there.

Jeremy – Danwei

For me, the problem is that Living in China has become rather overwhelming. If it was up to me, this is what would be on the homepage of Living in China:

An aggregator that displays the name and author of the blog together with a very short excerpt
A section for original content
A link to Living on the Planet page
A little text of encouragement for new people to submit content, with email address or submission guidelines

I believe simplicity would be great help in getting new people on board, and in getting people to contribute content.

When Living in China started, it was focused. It was the only meeting point for anyone interested in English language blogs about China. Furthermore, it was only a meeting point for China blog people. It wasn't linked to Living in Moldania and it wasn't part of some faceless network of blogbots. There was a team of people who put energy into making Living in China. They were very friendly and social and wrote personal emails to people who got involved. Now Living in China is an automaton, the HAL 9000 of the China bloggers.

Design and technical changes happen without notice or explanation.

It is recycling the same series of photographs again and again.

The aggregator, which is its best function, changes format.

If Living in China wants to succeed, someone needs to explain what the whole setup is about. Who is in charge? Who owns the domain name and what are their plans?

But if the plans for Living in China are for it to be a part of Living on the Planet, I don't believe it will succeed. As Adam wrote in his post, "Who isn't a site that calls itself 'Living on the Planet' aimed at?" Or, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde [actually Groucho Marx, I think, Jeremy], who wants to join a club that will have anyone on the planet as a member?

Alex – Angry Chinese Blogger

On the content side, I see that Asia by blog is now the most prolific poster ever. Maybe summaries of other blogs should be something that is relegated to an in brief section.

An archive for aggregated news would also be something good, if we could use LIC to pull up all articles on a certain topic or from a certain period, like this months news, or this weeks news etc.

A most read articles section would be good as well, it would keep popular articles in view for longer.

I quite like the way that you can view all articles by a specific author, maybe you could expand on that idea and put a guest columnist section or a dedicated columnists archive.

Adam – Brainysmurf

Anyway, the more I think about it the more I think the aggregator — at least the way it works now — isn't useful and instead we should look at letting users do keyword searches. That would be far more useful to more users. Keyword searches for blogs already exist at places like Technorati, but as far as I know you can’t do regional sub-searches. Not all of us talk about China, but most of us do, and when I want to know what the hood is saying about someone, or something or other, instead of looking through a list of randomness, I wanna see a search result.

How about collecting a bunch of news feeds and letting users do keyword searches on them. That way, when someone wants to see the scoop on Tung's getting hit on the forehead with a party pooper they'll have a reasonably good chance of finding everything in one place. (At least in English.) Having a restricted set of RSS feeds to search through will turn up more targeted results.

Part of the reason why I was so vocal in my last post on this topic is because there is still no one place to go to find information on Chinese current events. Google News China is disappointing to say the least in its lack of inclusivity (if you’re searching from the mainland anyway). So my feeling is that we must make it ourselves.

Simon's updates have also rendered LiC's aggregator as useless and primitive. I far prefer a human editor that categorizes things to a cold summary that doesn’t offer any hints as to whether or not I want to read what's provided.
LiC's parent group Living on the Planet suffers from a lack of any context, as well as a pretty lame name. Who isn’t a site that calls itself "Living on the Planet" aimed at?

Death by lack of focus if you ask me. Just a bunch of links with no indication of what’s going on at all.

Matt - Metanoiac

For small-time bloggers like me who feel like they have some unique perspective or can perhaps capture something in a different way than others, the Living in China website has done me nothing but good. While it doesn't bring a whole lot of traffic to my site, it brings some, and I certainly won't complain about that.

Certain sites (not this one) seem to have a certain air of snobbishness about them concerning who can be placed on their 2 and a half mile long blog roll, which is a bit difficult for me to understand. The Living in China site seems to be a den of inclusiveness and I kind of feel that that should be the driving spirit of the blogging community. I also have trouble understanding the grumbling because it is a community-based project and I'm sure there would be ways for people to filter out posts they find uninteresting. My personal angle, of course, just concerns how the site benefits me. Anytime I try to go and check the site out for myself- to see what others are putting out there-
it seems poorly organized and also loads up very slowly, often incompletely.

Andrea – T-Salon

Very good idea in terms of the keyword search on a smaller sub-set of blogs/sources rather than on the world-wide-web!

The one thing I would like to see is more first hand accounts on what's happening outside the three major cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong.
I didn't really like the new format of the aggregator as it is not quite what I was used to - being able to read information, views and news from people I "know" at a glance on one single page.

Judging from the appearance, I can only say that not having all posts in one page makes loading faster.

Having the content rather than the author's /site's name appears first in each aggregator post forces us to be a bit more open minded and read a post based on the content and not of because of the blogger's name (although my brain doesn't naturally work that way, since I tend to pay more attention to those whose views I know, care and trust).

It seems having each aggregated post stored in a database (and thus a unique URL or a trackback) opens up many new possibilities to do something creative and interesting with the content aggregated from around the blogosphere (a more targeted and accurate search on the community is one possibility).
As Jeremy says, any technical changes need some explanations to the users.

Having said all that, I prefer the old format and the new functionalities. Can't we have the best of the both?

I remember Dave Winer once said that making the aggregator (feeding it with feeds) is like a curation. It's actually not easy to strike a balance between being all-inclusive and making it relevant, useful and interesting.
Perhaps one possible solution, as I have said a few times before at other places, is that we put feeds into categories and come up with topic-based aggregator (i.e. current affairs aggregator, business & economy aggregator, etc.)

This approach has its own problems too. As human, it is natural that we have diverse interests and hence our blog will cover a wide range of topics. Until there are better blogging tools that allows us to better categorize each post, and send each post (rather than the entire blog) to the appropriate site / aggregator, we are stuck with the current way of content aggregation: being all inclusive and no focus; or focus but exclusive.

Everyone can now practically build and run an aggregator whether on their own desktop or on the web (bloglines or kinja for the those with no programming skills and maggiepipe, radio userland, etc. for those who knows how to code), do we still need community aggregators similar to the Living in China blog aggregator? Why and why not?

Shanghai Slim

I would suggest that a model that depends for its content on the vagueries of charity is not a stable model. The fact that you used to get free quality writing was probably unique to that time and place. Now things are different, your model needs to be adjusted to changing circumstances. What I'm saying is, if one of your central complaints is that people aren't submitting enough content to keep the site vital, then perhaps it's time to forget about people submitting content.

The featured posts are now few and far between, and often of marginal interest.

The aggregator is usually clogged with crap-links to pointless single-sentence blog posts.

Would it be possible for the aggregator to give a better description of what lies at the other end of each link? I have no idea what kind of technology lies behind it. I assume the original authors submit their links - if so, could they be requested to add a one-sentence summary? This would allow readers to avoid the "Today I bought a new bowl" posts.

It's such a bother to sift through so much chaff to find the nuggets of interest, that I have taken to "making the rounds" of worthwhile blogs on my own, nullifying what is for me the main reason to visit LiC - it's useful function as meta-blog.

Roddy – China Forums

I was thinking it would be a collection of the best of blogging - I'm not a big blog fan, but the best of it ain't bad. However, I think for months now it's failed to be about the best of blogging and has instead been the (diplomacy) not the best(/diplomacy) of journalism.

It's confusing, and I was initially unsure whether I was on the 'blogzine' bit or the aggregator. What does Living in USA [CN] mean?

Why do aggregator pieces have more links back to livingin*.com sites than to the blog itself? Why is there a weather link that doesn't work? I click in constant fear I'm going to wind up on livinginthenorthwestsecondringroadBeijing.com and not be able to get out.

If you want to rescue it, strip it right back to what it was before the whole livingontheplanet stuff started. I'm not sure it's worth it though - your aggregator makes the 'blogzine' bit redundant 9 times out of 10, and a desktop RSS reader makes your aggregator redundant slightly more often.

Posted by Sendover at October 5, 2004 01:03 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Good stuff, Phil!

Posted by: Andrea at October 5, 2004 02:26 PM

Nice Blog ! Comme have a look at a french blog (many nice pictures). Bye.

Posted by: nellooo at October 6, 2004 12:43 AM

1) I think it's going to be next to impossible to get a lot of good, original material for LiC because people are going to want to save the good stuff for themselves.

Perhaps for the main part it would possible to code some sort of Google News-like bot that would detect the moment more than one China blogger links to a particular article and automatically generates an entry for the main page. At the top of this entry would be an excerpt from a random blog and then underneath would be a list of the other blogs commenting on the article.

2) I think the less administering or human intervention in the aggregator the better. I actually liked the old, side-bar aggregator. The reason why I prefered the old LiC aggregator to Simon's round-up is because the aggregator felt more eclectic and spontaneous. (That's not to say that Simon's round-up isn't a useful service.)

Perhaps a list of the last 15-20 entries on the side, coded to show only one entry per blog (so that if someone makes a bunch of several quick posts, all those posts won't knock off other posts). Also, is it possible to code the aggragator to include/exclude posts based on the Category set in MT?

Posted by: wayne at October 7, 2004 09:20 PM

Yah, I missed the old community aggregator too. But now that there are so many easy-to-use web-based aggregators, even I am not sure whether we still need to have one on LiC given the many issues arised from it. At any rate, the LiC one was very useful in a sense that new blogs are included every now and then. I am not sure whether I would discover those new blogs were I to maintain a personal aggregator on China.

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