Web2.0 is great. You can share your video clips by uploading them to a professional video-sharing sites; You can upload your photos to image-sharing sites and tag them for easy discovery; You can listen to the streaming music without paying a penny; You can easily discover which books your friends are recent reading. If you believe Blog is the space for sharing everything you have done in your Web2.0 life, I dont think any of popular BSPs (Blog Service Providers) in China can make you 100% happy.
LifesterBlog, started in summer 2006 in HongKong, provides its solution. Edmund, founder of LifesterBlog wrote to me, “With the rapid growth of photo and video sharing sites, bloggers would like to communicate by sharing a wide array of multimedia content, which often include a combination of text, photos, videos and audio. However, they are often frustrated by the complicated process to embed media objects into their blogs, because most of the blog hosting services only focus on text entries.”
What mostly differentiate LifesterBlog with other Chinese BSPs is that LifesterBlog much focus on the integration with other web services. With very friendly Ajax-based user interface, the users can easily import (embed) their contents hosted in other web2.0 players such as YouTube, Flickr, Amazon, etc.
Edmund also told me soon they are going to release a more localized Chinese version which will integrate the services from some big local players such as Tudou (video-sharing), Yupoo (photo-sharing), Douban (books) etc. That will be a very good move, but it would not be easy, I have to say. In China Internet, Web2.0 does mean sharing your Contents, but it is NOT for sharing your Services, yet. If you go through the Chinese web2.0 directory, you will be very lucky to find a site offering a nice API or even RSS export. Due to many reasons (I will address this in another post), most of them are not willing (or not ready) to encourage 3rd party to integrate their services. This probably explains why almost all the popular BSPs are not interested in Service Integration.
In the coming months, several new features will be rolled out, including:
- Allowing users to create their own sidebar widgets
- Personal news aggregator (similar to Facebook’s news feed)
- More functionalities in groups and more focus on social networking aspect
If you like blogging, I highly recommend you give LifesterBlog a try. It does not provide some convenient features like Blog Relocation (which can help you export your posts from one BSP to another, e.g. BlogBus is good at that.), but it does gives you a fresh experience on blogging in the busy web2.0 life.
I got the same email from him as well.
To be honest, I would normally go check out such a site – but I did not, because I felt like I’d been spammed.
As for media sharing in China, I think it will be interesting if someone can make a chinese version of tumblr.com
Thanks Rick for your comments.
Tumblr.com is very handy indeed. Hope LifesterBlog can be a nice combination of BSP and Tumblr.
Lu