find, download, link, share: check out playlists at Baidu 掌门人

Now THIS is what I’m talking about. Wanna hear what’s on playlists generated by Chinese young people?  Here’s a song from a playlist called “Perfect World,” put together by Ah Yang.  Ah Yang’s playlists are number one on the user-generated Top 20 list (however, it’s not like we’ve got hundreds of thousands of voters.  It’s not SuperGirl.  He has 250 ratings).  We’ll definitely have to spend some time with this.  If you’d like specific, translated directions on how to navigate, let us know and we can post more details complete with “push the button that looks like THIS” images.

And all courtesy of Baidu, China’s leading search engine, which launched a new service on Tuesday called Zhangmenren 掌门人.  China Web2.0 Review describes it perfectly so I’ll just give you his words:

Zhangmenren, which started beta test quietly in December 2005,
allows its users to set up and share their music playlists, which is
called “album” in the service. For example, you can create an album
named “Best Songs of Jay Chou“,
write a short description for the album, and list out the name of songs
in your album, and assign tags for it. Then Baidu will use its mp3
search engine to get the search links for each song in the album. Users can rate and comment on any album.

Besides personal album, the service provides a collaborative open
album function. Any users can add songs to a open album. But it seems
that so far users can not set an album to be an open album for
collaboration, since I can not find the function when creating an
album.

The playlists are categorized as “Top20” “new,” “popular,” and “essential”.