Suggestionsfor Speeding Up the Development of Audiobook Websitesby Changing Them to SNS

柳品亦

（南开大学，中国 天津 300071）

The collective intelligence,being one of the most important dimensions of information,communication and technology,has a great impact in every aspect of life.With the technical methods,financial institutions could come across huge amounts of transactions in seconds,educational entities are able to diversify its teaching channels,while the media industry is also benefit from big data and result in a rapid growth.The comparison between Douban.com and Tingbook.com in this essay will demonstrate how audiobook sites are able to gain a faster development by taking advantage of collective intelligence.Several suggestions will be provided at last.

China is a huge market for Social Networking Sites,taking advantage of its large population.Douban.com and tingbook.com,sharing the similar features that aspiring users to share their ideas about books,music and other literature related works and selling products,e-books and paper books for the former site while the audiobooks for the latter sites,perform differently in the Chinese market.Being a social networking site,douban.com is apparently more successful than tingbook.com,which is not yet a social networking site.The comparison between these two sites is useful to show in which means by being a social networking site helps douban.com to success in the market champion.

Basic information of douban.com and tingbook.com

Launched in 2005,douban.com is one of the most popular Social Networking Sites in China.Based on the concept of collective intelligence,it is more about connection,influence and sharing ideas.By making itself a social networking site,Douban is able to use the concept of collective intelligence and gain a rapid development.As a social networking site,it has following services:

1.Create personal home page

The application of personal home pages consists of logs,photo albums,and discussion groups such as my radio,comment board and display panels.

2.Join groups

Douban groups are small communities consist of single users.Different topics are discussed in different groups.Users are able to join any group without limitation or create new groups inviting friends to join.The information of every group members is available to other members so that intercommunications can be realized by sending private messages.

3.Stuff exchange

An online stuff exchanging platform is established for users to barter for new goods or second hand stuffs.A consumer can also communicate with former buyers by sending messages to them via Douban and scan other consumers’favorites.

Tingbook.com

Tingbook.com is one of the most popular audiobook websites in China.Launched in 2003,the website aims to create a high-quality audiobooks shring platform.Its majority functions are as follows:

1.Uploading personal works

Tingbook has set up a system called My Works for aspirated users to upload and set price for their works.Every time the works are downloaded,a certain amount of virtual money will be added to the author’s account.Meanwhile,if the users who are willing to record their voice have troubles of choosing text materials,they can join the subscribing system to finish the tasks.

2.Bo.tingbook community

Bo.tingbook.com is a subdomain of tingbook.com.Visitors can purchase audiobooks by virtual money of tingbook.com.Although users can interact with each other by writing comments and sending private messages,spreading messages is still lack of flexibility due to the limitation of related applications.That is to say,even though tingbook.com has several features of social networking sites,it is still not one of them.

How is Douban.com benefited from the concept of collective intelligence:

1.Information from all social members

As is shown in the graphs below,the audiences of douban.com are from all educational levels,relatively balanced between genders and locations.However,the visitors of tingbook.com are more specialized,specific and lack of variety while douban.com is able to collect more information and come into more rational results by containing the users from all social aspects.

Audience Demographics of douban.com

Audience Demographics of tingbook.com

2.More possibilities to be visited

One major channel for visitors to get access a site is to input keywords in search engines.With more topics discussing on douban.com and related information sharing on other linked social networking sites,douban.com is able to be found by search engines.

send traffic to douban.com

Keywords send traffic to tingbook.com

The above charts show the percentage of searching keywords send traffic to douban.com.The keywords for tingbook.com are website name or function related words,while those contribute to douban.com’s volume are mainly topic and information related keywords.This phenomenon indicates that douban.com can be found by a larger variety of search keywords,often the words being discussed by mass.

3.More ways to connect individuals

There are more subsites for users to visit on douban.com.They can share ideas of movies on movie.douban.com,talk about books on book.douban.com and barter for hot sale or second hand products on dongxi.douban.com.While for tingbook.com,there is only one subdomain available,bo.tingbook.com,a post bar for discussion,reducing the chances for interactivities.

The sites visitors can go on douban.com

The sites visitors can go on tingbook.com

4.Easily access to other websites

Although the normal way to login in is to register and create instinctive profiles,users can also become a member of Douban by other social network sites’account.Messages,articles or pages can be shared within a variety of social networking sites,enabling the users to invite their friends on other networking sites(i.e.QQ)to join Douban.

The data from Alexa.com shows that 19545 websites are able to be linked to douban.com,while tingbook.com enjoys a much less number of 339 websites.With a larger variety of resources coming from other websites,the recommendations of books on douban.com promote the sales of books more efficiently.

5.Connecting to retailer website.

To increase profits,douban.com cooperates with several retailer websites,such as Amazon’s Lending Library.Besides,the books sold on douban.com can be found on retailer sites,such as taobao.com,the largest retailer platform in China.

The sites related to douban.com

The sites related to tingbook.com

The charts above shows that visitors of douban.com can go to other sites by links and find the recommended items easily.Purchasing desired movies on verycd.com,books on taobao.com when they are not available in douban book store,and to build friend circles on kaixin001.com.In contrast,tingbook.com only offers links to those sites lack of intercommunication.

How to change audiobook websites to Social Networking Sites.

The large visiting volume,the need of connection between authors and audiences,and the business oriented features,all indicate that audiobook websites have potential to become social network sites.Rather than simply imitating douban.com’s pattern,a customized model in reversing audiobook websites into social networking sites will benefit both sites and users in all means.

Using the previous analysis and taking advantage of collective intelligence,the following suggestions are come up with:

1.Characterized recommendation based on social filtering methods

Recommendation is an important strategy adopted by marketers to urge potential consumers to purchase.To offer recommendations,websites should use information retrieval technology to record users’search history,store the search results every time and analyze the search information in order to give reasonable suggestions.

2.Group services

Internet users have nature to form small communities.However,instead of totally leaving themselves to set up discussing communities,providing group categories could be more efficient.Thousands of topics are classified into countable categories while each category contains many groups,reranking up to minute by matching-degree for different users according to their preference.Thus,confused users are able to join a suitable group and find the optimal items matching their taste.

3.Topic leaders

Using celebrities is also useful to create online fandoms for the statements of celebrities are often soundly to their fans.They share ideas in fandoms they belong to and attract other fans to join their groups.By sharing information with other group through weak ties,a wide range of intelligence could be formed to fulfill the whole websites.

4.Using the search engine optimization system

Making audiobook itself a social networking websites and being linked to other social networking sites,will boost the discussions among users.The number of keywords related to audiobook websites will grow simultaneously and the traffic for visiting the sites will increase.By combining the users (known as nodes or particles),search engine optimization can promote the use of audiobook sites dramatically.

5.Sharing works on various websites.

Users’demand of self-exposure derives from the needs to receive feedback from the public.Those friends they know consist not only the social circles in their real life,but also the ones on social networking sites.Informing the users that they are able to share works with friends on other sites can motivate them to produce more works.

Besides,the connection with other sites makes it possible for users to invite friends to join audiobook sites and the users volume of audiobook sites will increase accordingly.

Conclusion

Audiobook sites have potential to be improved by changing them into social networking sites.By injecting the principles of openness,sharing and trust among individuals as well as lower barriers for engagement and social support for sharing activities among groups and society,audiobook sites are able to be changed into social networking sites without bias.

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