Websites by or about ethnic minority groups in China can be hard to find; and because we do not normally mention our ethnic background when we write posts or chat, it can be even harder to tell if the people who use these sites actually belong to a minority group themselves.
Phayul.com is a website that is popular among expatriated Tibetans, but unfortunately it cannot be accessed from inside The Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). Phayul is a Tibetan word that roughly translates into “Homeland” and the website mainly deals with issues that relate to the Tibetan societies around the world. The majority of the people who post on the site seem to be Tibetans.
The site has a news section, a variety of message forums, chat functionality, book and movie reviews, and a music/radio broad casting service. The message forum topics range from “Humor” over “Buddhism” to “Express Yourself”, but the topic “Issues and Causes”, where users can “bring burning issues to the other’s notice” is the category that most people use – it has over 22 thousand posts, the oldest thread dating from 2002.
Our Taiwanese contributor Nydia Chen points out that the famous "Asian Backstreet Boys," aka the "Backdorm Boys" 后舍男生, have a lot going on these days. They’ve become celebrities in China with many videos beyond the original "As Long As I Love You."
They have their own blog, with all of their video works here (I can’t see them here on my Mac. I guess one really needs a PC to navigate Virtual China, when it comes down to it…or a new Mac that can run virtual Windows). You may be better off seeing their various clips on Youtube, including a live performance at the 21CN First Annual Net Popstar Competition in December 2005.
The Backdorm Boys graduated this week from the Guangzhou Arts Academy with degrees in sculpture. Check out their final projects:
If you read Chinese, the Baidu’s Backdorm Boys forum has pretty much everything you ever wanted to know, compiled by meticulous fans. For instance, the BB chronology shows that the "As Long as I Love You" video was released in March 2005; by August they were starring in the delightful Moto phone ad, "Radio in my head." Ogilvy & Mather says the ad has been downloaded 60 million times.
Google has its "zeitgeist" feature which allows you to take the pulse of most popular search terms for the week, month, or even year; Baidu has a similar feature called "list of hottest Chinese searches" 中文搜索风云榜. Neither are particularly intuitive to me, frankly, since they both divide the search terms into strange categories–e.g., Google’s "spring break" list in April 2006. On the bad side Baidu doesn’t do a weekly or monthly tally; on the good side they include the actual number of searches per day.
Baidu’s rankings also offer the following:
- a scrolling list of some of today’s actual searches, interesting to watch and see what rolls by, and clickable if you see something you like.
- Top 50 Gaining Searches today. I guess these could help you track searches that have just come up even if the number of people doing the search is relatively small. For instance, today’s top gaining search is "answers to June 2006 level six" 2006年6月六级答案, or in other words, the answers to a recent test for sixth graders, with 14,212 searches. The second gaining search is "answers to English 2006 level four." Lots of students using Baidu.
- Top 50 "hot searches," which also indicates whether the search traffic is going up or down. Doesn’t say what this means, since these are not the terms with the most searches overall, necessarily. At the top of the list today is "Audition," 劲舞团, a Korean online game, with 99,448 hits and declining. Second: "Popkart Crazy Racing," also a Korean game. Third: qq (the Chinese online messaging platform). Fourth: World Cup. Fifth: mp3.
- Top Ten Hot Women, Television Shows, Games, Songs, Novels, People, Publically Traded Companies, Hot Men, Cartoons, Universities, Cars, and Scenic Places. If you look through these you’ll find searches with more traffic than the #1 "Hot Search," such as singer Jay Chou with over 206,000 today; the song "Perfume Can Be Poison" at 268,281; and actress Liu Yifei at 148,922.
Update: Jason points out that Google Zeitgeist also shows monthly results for its Chinese language searches–it’s unclear whether this is limited to .cn searches or also includes off-mainland Chinese searches. It looks like Google users really are a different group than Baidu users, older and more professional as has been suggested by the CNNIC China Online Search Market report: the political term "Eight Honors Eight Shames" 八荣八耻 is number one for April. #2: Li Yuchun, Supergirl singing contest winner; #3: Kartrider; #4:Jinshan software dictionary; #5: China Merchants Bank. Link.
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".
Photo: The Standard, Friday May 12, 2006
link to article
It looks like Hong Kong is taking a different approach to filesharing than the rest of the mainland.
A 16 year old Hong Kong student was arrested yesterday by the Hong Kong Customs Anti-Internet Piracy Team for hosting and sharing 600 pirated songs and about 20 movies. The maximum penalty is 4 years in prison. This, six months after what the Standard calls "the world’s first criminal
conviction of a movie uploader," when a Hong Kong man went to prison for 3 months for using BitTorrent. Officials were tipped off by a complaint from the International
Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents the worldwide
recording industry.
The Standard reports he used "a high-speed data line and special software to convert his computer into a server." Xinhua says this was done "by means of a
"Dynamic IP Re-direction Service" provided by a U.S. website." The Standard goes on to report:
The Web site, which Tam said had been online for
about three months, asked other users to upload music onto the server
so that the Web master could organize the files and make them available
for download.
The offender used a data line that carried a
bandwidth of up to 100 megabytes per second - far stronger than a
standard home connection of about six or 10 megabytes per second.
After
discovering the Web site, investigators managed to successfully upload
and download copyrighted the material, mainly songs by local Cantopop
artists such as Justin, Janice Vidal and Eason Chan. They also found a
few local and Hollywood movies, including Brokeback Mountain.
According to the Shanghai Daily,
Hong Kong’s music and movie industries - among Asia’s most vibrant - have also stepped up their fight against pirates.
Companies in both industries have tracked down Internet addresses
where illegal file sharing is suspected of taking place and sought
court orders demanding Internet companies provide personal details
about the alleged offenders.
The Hong Kong record industry has reached legal settlements with at
least 16 people who allegedly uploaded music for illegal sharing.
(via p2p net)
Another excellent Pacific Epoch interview, this one with Buddy Ye, the co-founder and CEO of Wangyou Media, a company that provides a platform for users to share audio, video, and photo content, with mobile services as well. They call themselves a cross between Myspace and Youtube, and you can see elements of both in the interface. The kicker is that the company also turns that content into mainstream media content by creating a weekly radio show, monthly CDs, and possibly a TV show in the future. So users get to hear themselves on the radio and buy their own CDs. Reminds me of blurb.com, which takes personal digital content and turns it into old-fashioned hard-cover books.
And check this out: you get "points" for including ads in your content (3-5 second spots), with which you can claim prizes. You can also get points for reporting "inappropriate content," if it manages to get past management.
Wangyou claims over 3 million users.
What’s missing? At first glance, at least a good system for rating and sorting the content, beyond "new" and "hot".
link to interview
link to Wangyou site
link to Wangyou videocasts–you may have to register to view them. I’ll be exploring.
Reading the recent review of the April 8 Rolling Stones concert in Shanghai by New York Times writer Howard French, I decided to see if I could find some online photos or reviews of the concert. First stop: Flickr. Perhaps there aren’t any Chinese Flickr users who could afford the tickets to the show in Shanghai, but there were a few from Neil Z J Y. Much more interesting were the sets from Shanghaistreets, a 28 year-old expat living in Shanghai, which document Shanghai’s contemporary live music scene. See here for a view of some of China’s own rock and roll veterans; the photo above is tagged: "Jimi poses with Beijing hardcore band Miserable Faith after the show at Shuffle."
Sina has its own home for the Rolling Stones show, which includes links to media reviews and blog posts on the show, here, in Chinese. Sina’s BBS doesn’t seem to have anything, at least not without digging deeper than the first page. Tom.com BBS doesn’t have anything today–at least it’s not a hot topic, even in the music section, but the April 9th Tom.com homepage music section does have a series of opinion pieces, including this one that accuses the organizers of shutting out Chinese media access to he group, and favoring foreign media. Does anyone know of a good site for online reviews and photos of live music in China?
In January I attended an event in San Jose put on by market research firm In-Stat, looking at a range of small but growing markets in Asia and specifically in mainland China.
They have some great downloadable ppt reports that include basic background and informed forecasts of online gaming, IPTV (which they define as "video service displayed on a TV through a telecom carrier’s IP broadband network"), and digital music markets.
link [requires registration for downloads]
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