Chanced upon Sina’s smart “assassin” embedded in the feeds. Take a look at a normal blog post (above) first.
Atom OR RSS feeds are not popular in China; not at all though blog platforms like Sina Blog does provide RSS feeds (you can get it from firefox address bar for example) though it’s not obvious on the interface. Social networking sites like RenRen offers blog like function which also allows users to import blog posts by providing blog URL into its platform.
Sina inserts one line of texts with link to a special landing page promoting Sina Blog service:
I asked friends previously when I was importing self-hosted wordpress blog and no one actually realize I have a self-hosted blog, not to mention which platform I was using. The above imported blog post is in my current renren account and it’s a pretty good tactic from Sina to promote its blog service and win more users.
However, from usability perspective, it could confuse normal users and some may think blog author inserted it. On the other hand, Sina seems not ready to monetize the feeds yet.
