Jason posted on Citybar/City8.com last summer, and I thought I’d give a little update because I love it. City8 gives you a beautiful high res full-screen photo of the place you choose, which you can navigate for a 360 degree view, move closer and farther, annotate, and see others’ annotations as well. (Tip: click on the middle of the green nav tool. It will take you to full screen. Wait for it to resolve). The short video (in Chinese) on their homepage with "Little C" shows you what the site can do. You can follow it even if you don’t speak Chinese (there’s a City8 English tab at the very bottom of the page but it only allows you to search in Shanghai and Beijing, and it has much less functionality than the Chinese version).
At the home page you can click on the images of 8 different cities (Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Jinan and Wenzhou of all places) and just play with the locations they give you (places to eat, tourist spots, places to shop). The site is also searchable by street or keyword. You can also enter your own spot to see what’s there.
You can drop into, say, the Five Horses Mall in Wenzhou and get a pretty good feel for what street life looks like in Wenzhou on a nice day. Great stuff!
Go here to see a real-time map of Twitters–short messages from random people who are letting us all know what they are doing. Warning: it’s hypnotic. You can see the different Twitters popping up nonstop all over the world…people in the middle of the night, just leaving the house in the morning, getting ready to go to bed, pondering. The map isn’t that good for China–it kind of looks like everyone is somewhere around Wuhan.
But watch for awhile and you’ll recognize the names…Isaac, Flypig, Engadget Chinese, Sinanews (!) [Update:] Fons Tuinstra, and so on. You can sign up for your own account here.
MeMedia vol. 3 sums up some of the Chinese chatter on Twitter. There’s even something similar in Chinese, now in beta.
Looks like the big news is that Sohu is no longer in the top 3 portals in China, but has been knocked out by Tencent. 55% of Chinese Internet users used Sina last year; 51% hit Netease; 48% used Tencent, according to the Internet Guide 2007 China Internet Survey Report (in Chinese), put out by the Data Center of the Chinese Internet. The rest of the top three rankings as follows:
blog sites: Sina 33%; Qzone 19%; MSN 16%
IM: QQ 79%; MSN 34%; Sina UC 11%
search: Baidu 81%; Google 36%; Yahoo 26%
car sites: Sina Auto 17%; Sohu Auto 12%; Pacific Auto 11%
games: QQ 37%; Lianqun/Ourgame 20%; Shanda 20%
podcast/video sharing: Toodou 10%; Yoqoo 9%; Mofile 9%
C2C auctions: Taobao 55%; eBay 37%; Paipai 20%
mapping services: Baidu 33%; China e-Map 中国电子地图网 19%; Go2Map 图行天下 11%
Link to Chinese BBS post (via TOPChinaLabs).
城市吧 CityBar looks like a cool Web2.0 map hack that uses photographs to show what the street would look like if you stood there, facing that direction. Unfortunately, I haven’t got the site to load properly and so I couldn’t test it out myself.
Via PostShow.
In earlier posts I mentioned the wonderful customizable maps of "My E-City", (我的E都市). It looks like the same graphic interface has been launched in real world places throughout the city of Hangzhou as well. My E-City has maps for Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Xi’an among others; don’t know if they’re visible on those city streets too.
link
(via Tim Wang’s eLearning blog)
In an earlier post on a digital map of pickpockets in Hangzhou I mentioned the website from which it came: "My E-City", (我的E都市). I spent a bit more time today poking around on My E-City–it’s similar in idea to Google Earth (except there’s no client to download) or Windows Live Local, insofar as it provides a virtual experience of largescale landscapes. It covers 7 Chinese cities: Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guizhou, Foshan, Qingdao, Shenzhen, and Xi’an. Cool things about it:
- allows you to tag your own spots in the city and to view others’ tags.
- you feel a bit like you’re in a video game.
- as you scroll over the cityscapes, the names of buildings and parks pop up.
- you can search by building name, store name, neighborhood name, or address.
Once in the map you find
what appears to be a mix of official, paid, and user-generated tags. In Xi’an, for instance, you can find everything from specific restaurants and shops, Internet bars, museums, hospitals, universities,
public toilets, to the above map of of "beautiful women." Note the Shaanxi Coca Cola Arena in the upper lefthand corner. The only tag on the map so far has been posted by sparkleo. It’s the Shaanxi Provincial Library. "A lot of girls here, girls with the scent of books…" Below his tag, other registered users can delete or comment on his tag, or add their own. The only thing I wasn’t crazy about were the long red scrolls that float around on balloons, offering advertising space or even promoting national slogans.
Chinastic reports on an emerging map of places where pickpockets hang out in the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou. It was originally posted on a site called "My E-City", (我的E都市) which claims to be the world’s first "online 3D urban simulation." The site allows users to view, navigate, and add information to online maps of several Chinese cities.
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