Text/ Wang Jincheng, a reporter from the world's online business
On August 21, 2018, investor Duan Yongping posted a blog post on the NetEase blog: The blog is about to close.
He maintains the habit of blogging, and only blogs on NetEase.
There is a source for this habit of his. In 2001, he met Ding Lei, and when NetEase lost 30 million yuan and the stock price was $0.8, he bought NetEase shares in a big way, and finally brought $100 million in gains.
The day before he posted this blog post, NetEase Blog announced that it would be shut down on November 30, and many people lamented: The blog era has turned over, and the youth of a generation has passed.
Duan Yongping
The year before Duan Yongping met Ding Lei was 2000, and it was a long way from now.
Zhao Lirong, a well-respected artist Chinese, died of cancer. That year, the show business lost a young actor, and the xiangfei in "Huan Zhu Gege" died of a car accident.
That summer, the French rewrote the history of the World Cup winner not being able to become a European Champion, and the Russians were somewhat sad because their nuclear submarine "Kursk" sank in the Arctic Ocean, killing all the officers and soldiers. At that time in the United States, the president changed from Clinton to George W. Bush.
That summer was also exciting for Chinese investors, with the Shanghai market flying over 2,000 points for the first time. However, after 18 years, it has only risen by more than 700 points. One more thing that made Chinese happy was that the Beijing Olympics were finalized at that time. Two telecommunications companies, China Mobile, were established and China Unicom was listed in Hong Kong.
That year, the world's computers were plagued by the "millennium bug" problem, Microsoft released the classic Windows 2000 system, our Alibaba was only one year old, and QQ was also called QICQ.
There is one more thing that almost doesn't catch our attention at all: in 2000, "blogs" sneaked into China, and for the next decade, it swept the Internet.
<h1>1</h1>
At that time, most families had not yet bought computers, and blogs quietly entered China, followed by three years of silence.
Finally, in 2003, the beginning of the year did not go well. The SARS virus ravaged and took many lives, and we still remember the dignified air and the freedom to breathe with confidence. This sense of oppression, shrouded in the virus, did not fade until July.
In August, we met a female author named "Muzimi".
Muzimi
That year, Muzimi was 25 years old. She is a bold woman who dares to write a sex diary on an open blog. After she wrote 2 months later, a diary about her "one-night stand" with a famous rock singer in Guangzhou was reprinted countless times on the Internet, and Muzimei became a hit.
The phenomenon of Muzimei is being discussed on the Internet and in the media. When people talk about Muzimi, they pay attention to the new thing of blogging.
Blogs that have been ignored by no one have accidentally become hot search keywords on the Internet. The major portals that were not optimistic about blogs have also begun to open blogs.
The success of blogging on the Chinese Internet is indispensable to Muzimi.
Blogging, a web product that combines private and public nature, quickly became popular and brought about a new cultural phenomenon.
Blogging has become a fashionable thing, and almost all netizens have begun to sign up for blogs. The way people greet each other when they meet has also become an exchange of blog addresses.
At that time, everyone wrote seriously on the blog and communicated sincerely. Ordinary people write diaries on it to record their lives and feelings; literary and artistic youth create novels, essays, poems, and songs on it, and exchange literature with their peers; and intellectuals, who write culture, finance, and commentary, become "opinion leaders."
Blogging has inspired more and more people to create, and many grassroots authors in those years have also gained opportunities on this platform and gradually become known to everyone, such as Hu Ge and Mingyue that year.
This lively atmosphere on the blog continued until around 2010.
<h1>2</h1>
Beginning in 2005, blogging entered a truly golden age.
This year, sina blog was born, the advantages of the brand portal, attracted a large number of users to migrate the blog to Sina network. "I have already made a home in Sina BLOG, you are welcome to come over from time to time, and everyone will communicate a lot." I'll write down some new and interesting stuff and share it with you. I also hope you remember my BLOG address, you can add her to your favorites, you can also copy her down and tell your friends. This is a welcome speech for Sina Blog and the first article for all Sina Blog registered users.
Soon, Tencent, Sohu, Baidu, etc. all launched blog products that year, and NetEase moved slightly slower, and it was not until September 2006 that the blog was launched.
From MSN and blog buses to Sina and NetEase blogs, there are too many blogs, and some people simply register several blogs.
In October of that year, Chen Tong, who was the editor-in-chief of Sina.com at the time, sent an invitation email to many celebrities, including Han Han and Xu Jinglei: "In the name of the editor-in-chief of Sina.com, on behalf of Sina.com, I sincerely invite you to join Sina Blog. ”
Taking advantage of the celebrity effect, Sina Blog quickly became a mainstream platform for hot topics.
On February 24, 2006, Bai Ye posted a long article on the blog, "The Current Situation and Future of the Post-80s", commenting that Han Han's works are "increasingly unrelated to literature" and criticizing the "post-80s". Han Han responded to an article on his blog titled "The literary world is a fart, no one should pretend to be forced", and one of them has become an Internet buzzword: what altar is an altar in the end, and what circle is also a wreath at the end.
This literary controversy attracted many celebrities to join the controversy and became the focus of the time. Some insiders have commented on Han Han, who is very accurate in various sensitive topics, never travels to thunder, and knows how to advance and retreat.
At that time, Xu Jinglei was a well-deserved traffic king, and she was the first blogger with more than 100 million hits on the blog. On February 10, 2006, she wrote only one sentence in her blog: "In a bad mood, it is useless to say anything." There were 88,219 clicks and 1,102 comments.
Xu Jinglei
How popular blogs are is, it goes without saying.
There are constantly hot events happening on the blog, and there are constantly people showing creativity on the blog. In 2005, Hu Ge made a short video clip "A Bloody Case Caused by a Steamed Bun", which triggered a wave of spoofs, and he himself was also known as a sought after Internet celebrity; there was also the first generation of Internet celebrities "Furong Sister", who was also responsible for blog traffic at that time.
Blogs have also created many grassroots authors, such as Mingyue who wrote "Those Things of the Ming Dynasty", and many netizens read the book in his blog.
By 2007, the blog channels of several portals had surpassed the news channels in traffic.
<h1>3</h1>
2010 was a watershed year.
This year, Han Han is still actively writing on the blog, talking about movies, talking about popularity, more often he uses a sharp point of view to talk about social phenomena, and each of his blogs has millions of readers and hundreds of reprints.
On February 6, Han Han, who blogged a lot, sent out his first Weibo, with only one "hello" word. It was retweeted 5500 times and commented more than 11000 times, easily surpassing the articles he wrote on his blog. How similar is this scene to the scene of Xu Jinglei's sentence when the blog first emerged.
Han
Keen people have realized that the era of blogging is over. In the new era, people's reading habits have become more and more "short", and Microblogs with a 140-word limit and fragmented expression have become a new popularity.
If you turn your attention to foreign countries, the decline of blogging is at the same time as the popularity of social software. In 2011, Microsoft stopped operating Windows Live Space, and in the following years, many blogging platforms stopped operating.
More and more people are stopping, and there are fewer and fewer active users. In 2014, only 19.3% of Chinese blogs were used. Among celebrities, Xu Jinglei stopped blogging in November 2010, and Han Han updated to January 26 last year. In particular, I want to mention Gu Tianle, who is still insisting on updating the Sina blog, and there are thousands of readers below each article.
On August 20 this year, the statement of NetEase Blog was like a declaration of turning the page in the blog era. Many people are nostalgic for the youth recorded on the blog, and some people miss the growth record in the blog.
"My memories of ten years of youth are all in the blog." Some netizens lamented that the era of blogging is not constrained by non-utilitarianism, what is written is what they want to write, such content is more creative, thinking more deeply, "using Weibo and WeChat, later have been used to send work content." ”
However, the decline of blogs cannot be saved with feelings.
Blogs and computers coexist, and you can't get on the blog without the computer and can't reply to messages, which was not a weakness in the past. However, in the era of mobile Internet, people's way of accessing the Internet has shifted more to mobile phones, and people can hold mobile phones to send Weibo and WeChat anytime and anywhere. The lack of interactivity in blogs becomes fatal. When Weibo broke through the 140-word limit to send long Microblogs, and when WeChat developed a public account that could post long posts in 2011, the only advantage of blogs - publishing long articles, lost its competitiveness.
Fang Xingdong, the father of Chinese blogs, said: "Blogs are the first important application for users to create deep content. The function and value of blogs have been largely integrated into today's new generation of social media such as WeChat public accounts, Weibo, Kuaishou, and Douyin. In the wave of popularity where the Internet continues to soar, it is very normal for blogs to dissolve and return to calm. ”
In the era of high-speed iteration of products, perhaps the era of WeChat and Weibo is shorter than the era of blogs, but we must also get used to saying goodbye.