Joy Chan 陈佼, who regularly posts insightful comments on China’s IT/Web2.0 world, posted an informal analysis of Chinese video-sharing sites 视频站点 on Nov. 6 that has gotten a lot of play in the Chinese blogosphere.

Chan points out that Google’s purchase of Youtube caused some anxiety among video sites in China, since it’s a path that none of…

Continue readingtop Chinese video-sharing sites 视频站点

Here’s one way to use Molive, the citizen journalism site where folks post pictures of the strange and wonderful things around them in China: bringing everyday street-level publicity efforts, the kind you see all the time in Chinese cities, to a wider stage. An apprentice journalist in Nanjing decided to help an old man passed by on the way to work, who…

Continue readingbringing street appeals to the web

This excerpt from a submission to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, written in 2002, still stands strong for anyone trying to understand how the goverment affects the Internet in China.  David Cowhig covered the Internet for the Environment and Technology Section of the US Embassy in Beijing for many years.  Check out the entire piece–it’s readable and remains highly relevant.
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Continue readingnot Big Brother, rather a loose collection of Little Brothers

Just discovered China Daily’s wonderful treasure trove, Newscartoon site.  Trying to puzzle through cartoon dialogue is a pleasurable challenge for me (Jason, however, seems to have no trouble!) — and it’s a really different way to understand what’s important in China at the moment, and how current events are being interpreted, at least from an official point of view.  The site also…

Continue readingChinese political cartoons, social commentary

You can find the top 100 Chinese websites, calculated daily, at China Internet Index System (CIIS) 中国互联网指数 .  Today’s top 10 are: 1) Baidu.com; 2) QQ.com; 3) Sina.com.cn; 4) Netease 163.com; 5) Sohu.com; 6) cn.yahoo.com; 7) Taobao.com; 8) TOM.com; 9) Vnet.cn (who knew?); 10) Soso.com.

CIIS is a joint effort by Internet research and incubator Chinalabs.com (directed by Bokee.com…

Continue readingChinese Alexa

Spend some time wandering around among the spectacular maps, objects, and Flash video tours of recently excavated materials from the Liao empire (907-1125), online at the Asia Society.  The “Selected Liao Dynasty Sites” section shows you where some of the actual sites are located, ranging across northeastern China, from Liaoning to Hebei.  “Virtual Tours of Liao Tombs” provides a 360 degree turn…

Continue readingvirtual tomb tours

Who else but Sister Furong 芙蓉姐姐?  On QQ BBS’s weekly top photo picks, over 200,000 have viewed Furong’s latest public appearance, at a hospital in Hangzhou over the weekend to celebrate the 7th annual “Men’s Health Day.”  (Do you think she went to the China Blogger Conference? Um, no).  Personally, I think Furong takes a lot more interesting photos than, say, Paris…

Continue readingFurong: they love to hate her but they watch all the same

If simply keeping up on the virtual world weren’t enough, there’s the real world as well!  Here’s a quick update on a couple of recent/ongoing important meetings shaping the future of Virtual China:

The first ever Internet Governance Forum (IGF), defined by Wikipedia as “a global venue under the auspices of the United Nations, established to
accommodate…

Continue readingkeeping up with conferences: Internet governance; Chinese bloggers

Is it uber-ironic fast food advertising with a nod to socialist realist art?  A straight ahead appeal to Chinese patriotism?  It’s ad copy and therefore a bit hard to translate, but given the rest of the copy I’d say Kentucky Fried Chicken is going for something like: “KFC. Changing for China. Creating the New Fast Food.”

The …

Continue readingthe revolution will be…”New Fast Food”?

More from Roland Soong at ESWN on how he does what he does.  In other words, tips on how to do cross-cultural media analysis.  Here he’s describing how he works with the Hong Kong media offerings on a daily basis–all of which he does online, by the way:

I begin by reading the English-language South China Morning Post and The…

Continue readingThe ESWN model, part two