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The Thao Van Hoa (Sports and Culture) Newspaper has launched a writing competition entitled "Your Entry - The Life Around Us" to create a playground for Vietnamese bloggers to test their writing skills and share their thoughts and feelings about social issues and everyday life. This is seen as an acknowledgement of the role of blogging as a means of expression despite the many controversies surrounding its validity, accuracy, legal status and inability to be controlled.
While this undeniably powerful medium continues to increase in popularity around the world, including here in Viet Nam, organisers hope contests like this will help persuade bloggers to write healthier and more quality content.
According to Le Khac Hiep, the head of Viet Nam Communication Joint Stock Company and a contest juryman, his busy schedule gobbles up most of his time but he nevertheless joyfully spends hours surfing and reading the entries of his partners and relatives.
"Apart from expressing the blogger's daily life in diary form, many entries show remarkably deep insight into current issues. Others deal with the nature of humanity and relationships in our society," says Hiep.
A way to connect
24 year old Tran Thanh Van, a resident of Ton Duc Thang, said she would definitely enter the competition because publishing her own stories, poems and experiences has become the daily habit in the last two years.
"Many amateur writers spend great efforts to craft their blogs into real works of art, changing colour schemes and decorating the pages with lovely images and icons," says Van, adding that "some bloggers are very talented writers, so holding the competition is ideal for people like me."
Van is not alone in expressing her innermost thoughts and feelings to the whole world. Nguyen Viet Linh, an overseas student in England, also shares her weekly diary with the cyberworld.
"Whenever I feel lonely and homesick, I write a new entry and receive warm feedback from both friends and strangers. It motivates me to keep studying, and I know that there's real love between people in cyberspace," says Linh.
Apart from being a private website, blogging has developed into a new kind of journalism that could be called the ‘everyman's newspaper', especially in certain parts of the world where traditional media is controlled by the government or multinational corporations.
Joseph Ruelle (Joe), a Canadian immigrant familiar to many as the MC of VTV6 and a writer for Lao Dong (Labour) Newspaper, writes a blog which is very popular due to his precise observations and humorous use of Vietnamese expressions.
"The free style and impartiality of bloggers make blogging more attractive than more official forms of press and literature," says Joe.
Blogging has become so rampant, it's even been adopted by the Presidential House. Duong Trung Quoc, the general director of the Association of Vietnamese Historians and editor-in-chief of Xua Va Nay (Now and Then) magazine, was the first Vietnamese politician to set up a blog. He is well-known at home and abroad for his research on national history and culture and believes that blogging can be a useful tool linking him with those interested in the activities of National Assembly deputies.
Between virtual and real
Blogging evolved in the mid 90's from internet bulletin boards, internet forum threads, and email lists. Ever since the term ‘blog' was coined in 1999 by Peter Merholz as an abbreviation of ‘web log', the blogosphere has grown into one of the most popular alternative to the mainstream media as a means of communication.
This article first appeared on www.vietnamnews.vnanet.vn
July 16, 2008
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