New Media, New Generation

In 2010 there was an explosive growth in China's new media industry. The following are brief introduction of major elements of China's new media.

Micro-blogging
Micro-blogs appeared on the time netizens had already lost their interests in long articles and asked for strong but short messages online.
Last year micro-blogs experienced a “big bang” with the number of Sina micro-bloggers (known as Sina weibo) almost doubling in no more than half a year. Seeing the huge potential, the other three popular web portals including sohu.com, qq.com and 163.com set up their own weibo services in the rest of the year.
And now even government officials joining this trend and registering their weibo accounts, it is predictable that in the future China's micro-blogging services will play a more and more important role in connecting the government and the public.

Search engines
As the most widely used search engine in China, Baidu's dominant position will challenged by several competitors in the coming year which including sohu.com, Bing comes from Microsoft and goso.cn from the People's Daily, the biggest newspaper published by the Communist Party of China.
Additionally, China Mobile, the leading company in mobile networks, is also preparing to produce their search engine together with Xinhua.

Team-buying
At the time Wang Xing, founder of twitter-like “fanfou.com” established meituan.com-the first group purchasing website in China mainland, it was a new page for China's group purchasing websites as a dramatically growth in 2010.
According to figures from a Beijing-based Internet analysis firm, at the end of July 2010 the number of online team-buying websites has already reached 900. What's more, most of them are small or medium size firms.
It is obviously that online team-buying will attract more and more Chinese netizens in the future. Experts warned that as a new consumption channel, the lack of supervision from laws and regulations will increase the risk, and online consumers should pay more attention to it.

Social networking
Compared with the fast developments mentioned before, social networking websites faced a really bad time in the latter half of 2010. Many small-size sites closed, even the leading kaixin001.com announced the reducing of daily hits.
The embarrassing situation came with the misunderstanding of social networking among most Chinese netizens. According to a survey, majority people join social network purely for games, and the most popular one is stealing vegetables and fruits from friends' farms. Also, many users admitted that the purpose of join networking site was interested in others' private information, while unwilling to share their own information.
"Networking itself is not the goal. What these websites should do is to create their own innovative products that can help netizens achieve more value through networking.” Media Expert Li Wenhuan advised.

Government websites
It has become a new trend for government officers to collect public opinions and feedback online in 2010. However, a staggering 78.5 percent of some 450,000 Chinese citizens surveyed were unsatisfied with government websites, according to a 2010 report.
The common complaints including that most government websites were not updated in time and there was no reply to netizens' comments. Additionally, many pages and resources could not be opened.
It is possible to protecting and achieving people's rights of knowing, participating and monitoring. And on the other side it will improve government's transparency and democracy. However it won't be easy to accomplish and there still have a long way to go for Chinese government.