By Star Chang, posted Sep 4, 2010 at 1:55 PM, 291 views,

94% Chinese netizen claim affected by micro-blog

A survey showed that 94.3% of Chinese internet users confirm micro-blogging is changing their life, and 70% of the respondents said that they would double check the information on micro-blogs everyday. They always kept a close eye on their updates and even some main stream media said micro-blog is almost like a news agency. The survey collected information from 3,282 people, more than 90% of them are younger than 40 years old…

About half of survey respondents browse information on micro-blogs frequently, micro-blogging has already became a kind of grassroots media in China. Chinese internet users don’t use twitter, because they are not allowed to, the service has been banned in China. They are using local copycat service, known as Sina micro-blog (‘新浪微博‘). The Twitter-style service provided by sina.com has become China’s most popular micro-blog platform so far, and it has 20 million users since it began in August 2009. There are another three local competitors which also provide similar services, catching up with Sina.

The information on Sina micro-blog gets update constantly and covering a large variety of topics, it turns out to be an important news source for Chinese internet users. Due to the overwhelm popularity, Sina micro-blog service suddenly went into beta mode during July, and later users found that they could not post working links to any foreign-based web sites. It was suspected that the Chinese Government are worried that micro-blog will be playing a larger role in spreading unfavorable news, so they might ramp up the management of micro-blog, since the Chinese netizen are getting so addicted into it.

Source: ChinaDaily