Characterizing Patterns of Chinese Yiban Blogging Service

Blogs enable an enormous variety of expression in a simple restricted form on the Web. As compared to even shorter microblogs, blogs offer better expressiveness and still struggle to occupy a part of online publication in facing of competition such as newspapers, professional journals, magazines and mobile social media. This paper reports a measurement of a Chinese blogging service, which is one of services of Yiban platform. The fundamental characteristic of Yiban platform is that primarily college students and staff can only be invited to join the platform and invited users have no rights to invite others again. Empirical statistics show that Yiban bloggers are not sufficiently active in terms of publishing, reading, and commenting others' blogs. Further, Yiban blogging service has been fading.