Exploring the Chinese Blogosphere: The Motivations of Blog Authors & Readers

Abstract

As blogs have gained popularity across the world, they have garnered more and more attention from academia. Most previous studies have tried to explore why people blog, focusing only on bloggers, the people who establish and maintain one or many blogs on the Internet. However, few studies have paid attention to blog readers and asked why people read blogs. In addition, most existing studies have focused mainly on English-language blogs, neglecting those in other languages. Aiming to fill in these blanks, this exploratory study analyzes the behaviors of blog authors and readers in the Chinese context. Through an online survey, semi-structured interviews and content analysis, this study identifies and explains the motivations for Chinese blog authors to write blogs and, more importantly, for Chinese blog readers to peruse them. The uses and gratifications approach has been adopted in this study as a theoretical framework.