After one week research on homosexual issue in Hong Kong, I find that nowadays the homosexuals in Hong Kong, no matter gays or lesbians are active in the social affairs and the supporters even those who are from church also try their best to fight for the equal rights for the homosexuals. There are a lot of websites, blogs, and forums which are related to the issue. I choose six from them which will help me on the final project.

In-media
In-media of Hong Kong is an independent media website which works on pushing the development of democracy and social motion in Hong Kong. They pay attention to all kinds of social affairs which are related to the social development. Homosexual issue in Hong Kong is always a hot topic in their agenda. Recently, they are a main party in the debates between RTHK and the Broadcasting Authority. As I mentioned in the outline last week, there are dozens of articles about HK homosexual issue published in the website of In-media. I believe the power from In-media will influence the mass’ attitude towards gays.

Abai

Abai is a Chinese comprehensive website which offers latest news, arts information, articles on homosexual to the Chinese gays. It searches the information on homosexual all around the world and very convenient for me to catch the latest news not only in China or Hong Kong but many other regions such as Russia, Canada and Australia.

News From Now

“Now” stands for National Organization for Woman which is the largest organization of feminist activists in the United States and female homosexual is a main part of their career. As we all know, the homosexual issue experienced a big change in the United States in the past ten years. This website shares large numbers of information on how homosexual people in the U.S.A fight for their equal rights, which I think, are valuable for HK homosexual development as well as my project.

Sexual Orientation Equal Resource

It’s a blog of the Association for the Advancement of Feminism in HK (HKAAF). This association is devotion to fight for women’s rights including the equal opportunities for lesbians. Its website and blog provides information of regulations on homosexual issue in HK and introduce many legal rules and cases from other countries such as the U.K and the U.S.A. It’s quite helpful for me to know the legal items and the government’s attitude in HK on homosexual as well as the corresponding rules in the other countries.

A Cup of Cybercoffees 

It’s an individual blog of a gay (I suppose the author is a gay, but I am not sure.) in HK. From his/her blog, I read many touching stories of his/her and the author’s friends. Besides his/her feelings as a gay, I also read their opinions and attitude towards the society of HK.

Rainbow Station  

Rainbow Station is known as the most activist homosexual organization in HK. It is active in the social affairs and plays a significant role in push homosexual action in HK. In its website, it often updates the members’ actions and also news, articles from supporters and opposites. It’s an informative website for me to know the motions of HK homosexuals. But I don’t know why its RSS icon doesn’t work.

At the very beginning of J.D. Lasica’s article, he points out a common question for all Netizens that “As the number of blogs and niche news sites continue to soar, how do you keep on top of everything?” In fact, heaving under the weight of billions of web pages, it’s really a chore for modern people to keep up with the internet. But a tiny orange icon— RSS and “newsreaders” such as Yahoo reader, Google reader, virtually solve the problem.

Since 1999, the RSS was firstly issued to the Netizens, today most websites have RSS feeds function for readers to subscribe their contents, and more and more people enjoy convenient reading from RSS feeds and newsreaders software. But different websites get different flavors when they make use of the feeds.

To me, NYtime.com has a clear and complete RSS feeds section. Besides the homepage RSS feeds, it offers several RSS feeds for use in news readers and blogs. The section is divided into two parts News and Features, and there are several subdivisions for each of the two roots, including business, education, health, international, book reviews, arts, fashion and so on. Some of the subdivisions have their branch RSS feeds, for instance, “international” is divided into: Asia news, Europe news, Middle East news, etc. Thus readers can choose different RSS feeds according to what we like to read.

The BBC feed factory also does a good job in this part. It has two main parts “our top feed” and “entertainment”. “Our top feed” subscribers will get latest promos from the homepages and “entertainment” offers latest collective site features. So in sum, BBC and NYtime.com basically have the same concept in offering feeds. They both generally divide those “feeds” into two parts and make it more selective for readers. Personally, it’s a warm design for subscribers.

The Standard Hong Kong takes a more simple way in using RSS. A very small blue icon is in the left category of its homepage and it’s the unique icon for Standard’s subscription. Although it is not as detailed as NYtime.com, for me, it’s really simple and convenient for readers to handle. Just one action, we can get the latest news from Standard.

The South China Morning Post is an interesting website which hides the feeds in its technology section. You can click the technology button (if you have the password to login) and then click the flash icon marked with “click here” and then you will get a page named “Podcasts”. Podcasts are audio files - typically MP3s - available for download over the internet, that is to say, we can subscribe the audio files via Podcasts as subscribe articles and blogs via RSS. I do think it is a trend that Netizens could subscribe all types of files such as audio ,video as well as words but I just find out the Podcasts feeds from SCMP and I am not quite sure whether it has RSS feeds for other files or not.

RSS is really a good tool for people to manage time and make our surfing on internet efficiently. Besides the well known advantages that clearly listed in the article Feed 101, to me, RSS feeds make reading online become more individual. As World Wide Web worked by one man, Tim Berners-Lee(by the way,he is really a great person), in the age of personality, Netizens today enjoy the individual reading experience. People read in their own way and focus on the subjects that they are interested in without interruption by ads or other articles. We don’t need to wait for a long time and just get our favorite words, photos and even videos, and what’s more we don’t need to find the articles and latest news which we spent a lot of time to search from fancy websites pages, but the news come to us as J.D. Lasica said.

It indeed changes the reading habit and the way of getting information on the web. Apart from the strong points it brings to readers, RSS feeds and Newsreaders also have some weak points for reading online. As for me, I started to use RSS feeds to subscribe the news from last year, after that, it become seldom for me to go surfing to websites, on the other words, it’s seldom for me to read the articles that the feeds don’t provide to me. I missed many other things that in the websites pages which might have drew my attention and only focus on few parts of the “www”. Secondly, because most of the RSS feeds only take the content of articles without comments, personally, the communication and sharing function of internet is weakened by Newsreaders to a degree. And I strongly agree with one of our classmates says in his blog that “If readers choose only to read news on the browser without going to the websites of the organisations, opportunity of earning revenues from advertisements will certainly be reduced.…for news organizations, it might be a risk”. No ads are really benefited for the readers but for news organizations and the IT companies, it might be not that optimistic.

All in all, I enjoy the tiny orange icons which bring joys to readers and challenges to the newspeople. Anyway, it has already become a part of our lives.