【Blog / 英文】YAHOO! BLOG

              Blogging is the latest Internet fad in Hong Kong. It involves creating a blog or weblog. It is like a diary entry which is made accessible to the public. Bloggers can update their blogs every few minutes and sometimes, once a while. It all depends on what the bloggers want to express. Some bloggers want to write about their reflections on their daily life. But the content can just be photographs, recipes, film reviews or anything that can be stored on a computer.

              In recent years, blogging has become a new journalism. Through blogging, everybody can publish their own content, without having to be a professional journalist. It makes a free flow of information possible without a newspaper.

              Once blogging attracts only teenagers, young and middle-aged adults. It has now been opened up to the city's elderly folk, thanks to a  project by a social-work group, Cyber Senior Network Development. Through a twice-weekly, month-long course launched, the association has taught senior people, the oldest aged 87, to set up weblogs, where texts, photographs and videos can be added.


              According to Peggy Ko Pik-kei, the association's secretary, 'some of the elderly people were initially shy and unwilling to write their stories.' Now, hundreds of personal weblogs by hundreds of Hong Kong people aged 60-80 have been produced, filled with stories and pictures of riots, storms, teenage courtships that occurred more than half a century ago. Looking back on their lives, some senior citizens have included in their blogs episodes of their puppy love relationship and teenage courtships. Some have documented the difficult period of the Japanese occupation. Others recorded their experiences at demolished amusement parks. Still others recall the chaos left in the trail to Typhoon Wanda, landslides and the 1976 riot.

              Dr Edwin Yu Chi-shing, a doctor specializing in the elderly, noted that blogging can help them voice their unhappiness, release their stress and form a community where they can draw support from friends.