While the world was eyeing on bloggers.com and wordpress.com, on this side of the globe, Yahoo!360 ruled. It was not a tool specifically designed for the Vietnam market, but the market took it anyway, with great passion and enthusiasm. Born on 29th March 2005, Yahoo!360, although still in its Beta form, rocked Vietnam social media scene. Many debates argued that its success due to the early and dominant arrival of Yahoo Mail and Messengers where most of the community has already established their contact and networks. So moving to the blog side was just a click away.

Yahoo!360 Blog, allows users to customize their screen, add friends, socialize online and offline, gather network and has genuinely created an online playground for Vietnamese Internet savvy users. Although Yahoo! global warned to close the service a few times and the Yahoo!Vietnam has seen a mix of trying to maintain the operation and investment versus tempting to close it down.

Nevertheless, emerged from Yahoo!360 is a list of hot bloggers (many of them are journalists), whom PR departments in various agencies incorporated into clients’ marketing comms and PR activities.  Other examples of influential Vietnam bloggers include:

1. Ha Kin: Writer

• Link: http://yobanbe.zing.vn/yobanbe/blog/sharebloguser.242df56743ad791be5fe57db9dbb7c15.html
• Pageviews: 1,658,925
• Profile: Writer. Author of “New York Love Story”. Ha Kin at first posted the story partly on her blog, after receiving good feedback and was welcomed by readers, her book was published. Besides, Ha Kin is a photo-lover.
• Blog content: daily life and emotion, sharing her photos.
• Readership profile: 18-28. HN/HCMC

2. Gia Bach: editor of teen magazine HHT2!

• Pageviews: 3,450,000. Ranked 2 among 67,000 blogs of Viet blog community (Source: Xemblog.com)
• Profile: He is the Chief Editor of HHT2!. His network is wide range from the North to the South. Emotionally, optimistic, sensitive, always full of love with his family and work, his blog has been one of the most famous one.
• Blog content: dairy of his son and family, tips/experience sharing about living in life
• Readership profile: 18-30. HN/HCMC

3. Expat Joe

• Pageviews: 2.000.000
• Profile: 29. Foreigner living in Hanoi since 2006, he can speak and write Vietnamese very well. Knowledgeable, humorous and intelligent, his way of writing made him become a hot blogger, then published his self-story. He is now working as an editor and MC for VTV6.
• Blog content: sharing thoughts and knowledge, open discussion topics.
• Readership profile: 18-28. HN/HCMC

The majority of hot bloggers are journalists, photographers. Unfortunately there are no specialized areas of interest. Most of local bloggers interested in entertainment, gossips, personal life stories and some occasional travel pieces.

The Viet bloggers community is popular among teenagers up to young professionals, and some occasional oldies, though maximum would be 40 years of age bloggers. Majority of bloggers and Internet users concentrates in the 2 main cities of Vietnam: Ha Noi and Ho Chi Minh City.

A young popular whereby 50% is around 20-30 years old, the social media network and its offerings is attracting more and more users. Estimated of those are active on the net, 22% has used or upload applications, 55% engaged in photo sharing, 22% for video, 31% begins a new blog. Very promising future.

Recent rumours regarding the shut down of Yahoo!360 made some current ‘citizens’ to migrate to Yume (http://www.yume.timnhanh.com/), now claimed the most popular social site for Vietnam, allowing Yahoo!360 users to sync all their content into the new format. Some suspicions over Yume buy-out hot bloggers from Yahoo!360 to have their content also on their site while most of Yahoo!360 bloggers still holding on tight their blog page, hesitate to transfer.