Archive for the 'Portals' Category

new website rankings from 2006

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on January 11, 2007
in Auctions, Blogs, Games, Geoweb, Podcasts, Portals, Statistics, Video Clips, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 6 Comments

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).

a bit of Christmas in Virtual China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 24, 2006
in Blogs, Commerce, Design, Portals, Religion and Virtual China
. 3 Comments

We’ll be taking the next few days off to celebrate the holiday season.

In the meantime, here a few tidbits from Christmas in Virtual China:

Shenyang_santa_swimmers

market value of virtual QQ assets

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 6, 2006
in Portals, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 3 Comments

Qq_article

QQ号为什么值钱？"Why are QQ numbers worth money?" is the title of a December 4 article in the Fan Group’s Computer Fans《电脑爱好者》 .  What kinds of QQ numbers are considered the best? How is the value of numbers calculated?  The anonymous author sheds some light on these and other questions, with the caveat that the market experiences periodic changes.  Above the break looks at QQ numbers themselves; below the break looks at the value of other assets such as gaming and discussion forum rankings:

Five-digit numbers
These numbers started being issued in 11/98, beginning at 1, although Ten Cent (QQ’s parent company) held back # 10000 to use internally.  In the year 2000, the company aggressively retrieved numbers 1 through 9999, which wasn’t very difficult since there were only a few dozen accounts that were still active.  10001 - 10006 were reserved for internal use.  It was around the same time that they instituted a password system, which was really just an excuse to take back those 5-digit numbers.

88888, 99999, and 10000 were all given out, but were occupied by Ten Cent employees; still they were doomed to the same fate, as the numbers were reclaimed by the company.

10201 to 10999 are very valuable numbers– it’s very hard to get one of the 798 of them. If you want to find out the value, go check out Taobao.

AAAAA numbers
There are a total of nine of these types of numbers: 11111, 22222, 33333 and so on.  You can’t get these through ordinary means. 88888, the number of the Ten Cent CEO, sold on Taobao for 260,000 yuan (~US $32,500)!  Enough to buy an imported luxury car or a large apartment.

AAAAB or BBBBA numbers
There are 180 of these, such as 98888, 99998.  They are also rare, and priced slightly lower than AAAAAs.

Inverted numbers
Such as 98889 and 89998, which read the same way backwards and forwards. These are also pricey.

Straight numbers
1234567 2345678 3456789.  "Dragon" numbers [in mahjong].  The average person couldn’t get one of these either.

Conceptual numbers
Numbers that sound somewhat like sentences in Chinese: 5201314 我爱你一生一世 "I love you my whole life a whole generation"; 88520 爸爸我爱你 "Dad I love you";52077 我爱你妻妻 "I love you, wife," etc. Young people seem to like these!  They cost about the same as 2 HD TVs.

Birthdays, cellphone numbers, license plate numbers
These are only useful to individuals.  Online numbers are virtual things anyway, but if someone wants it it becomes valuable.

Continue reading ‘market value of virtual QQ assets’

peasant webs

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on November 19, 2006
in Commerce, Design, Government, Portals and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

Just finished the eye-opening Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of Chinese Peasants, the English translation of The Chinese Peasant Investigation 中国农民调查, originally published in 2004 and banned two months after publication.  It’s a fast, good read, and sounds awfully familiar if you’ve read any Chinese history–case after case of Chinese peasants trying desperately to make end-runs around violent, corrupt local officials.  So I decided to check out the online peasant presence, beginning at the most obvious place: a Baidu search for "peasant net" 农民网.  It yields 38,300 sites (next stop Google.com, which yields 162,000).  I’ll review some of the top-ranked sites over the next couple of weeks.

Zhongguo_nongminwang

ChinesePeasantNet中国农民网 looks like it is maintained by a government body in Hebei province, perhaps in Zhangjiakou municipality (it’s a bit hard to tell: the "About Us" at the bottom of the page is not a hyperlink).  At first glance one is struck by the relative "clean-ness" of the site.  It’s uncluttered by Chinese standards, with fewer menu choices and more white space.  As fits a .gov site, the focus is on communications from the topdown–including the texts of laws and regulations.  Will the Boat Sink the Water points out how important it is for rural people to have access to these texts, as they can use them to force official recognition of illegal activities, once they know exactly which activities ARE illegal. Front and center on the page is "Agricultural News." Overall impression: this is a one-way communication site. BBS or photo forums are absent.

At the bottom of the page is something rather intriguing–links to township and village level websites.  Click through to Maoshan Village, for instance, where you’ll begin with an official statement:

Continue reading ‘peasant webs’

Chinese Alexa

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on November 12, 2006
in Commerce, Portals and Statistics
. 2 Comments

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 CEO Fang Xingdong) and the National Bureau of Statistics.  It was born in 2004 as CISI, but was revamped and relaunched this year in October as CIIS.  They use their own standard, "CIIS value," to evaluate the direction of change for any particular website, but I can’t find any information on what goes into creating that "CIIS value," beyond the fact that they are "monitoring web traffic."  Here’s the CIIS value for IT community site Donews.com, for the last two months:

Donews_ciis_1

The site also runs down the top 100 blog services, auto sites, tech sites, and more.

CIIS also calculates the Google page rank, Google search results, and Baidu search results, all on the same page so you can compare them.  Get this: Donews.com has around 1.1 million results on Google, and more than 8.3 million search results on Baidu. 

Finally, another useful feature is the piechart that tells you how the traffic is divided on the site’s sublevel domains, so that we can see that QQ is getting the most traffic on its Qzone, entertainment, and news domains. You could track the growth of new domains with the CIIS.   

Qq_ciis

source of sources: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on October 13, 2006
in Art, Education, Film, History, Portals, Translation and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

There are lots of sites that aggregate other sites online, whether it be blog aggregators or news aggregators, but this one is worth browsing.  You’ll learn something.  You’ll find something new.

It’s the MCLC Resource Center, "maintained by Kirk A. Denton at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University, in conjunction with the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture,"

In particular, you’ll love the General Online Resources section. There you’ll find links to Chinese search engines and portals, BBS Forums such as Strengthening the Nation (ch) and the Chinese Forums aggregator (ch), print and e-zines such as the People’s Liberation Army Pictorial (ch) and the Far Eastern Economic Review (en)(which I thought was gone…?) and Modern Chinese Literature sites such as the China poetry section (en) of the Poetry International website–among many, many others. 

woocall: sina’s new embedded website chat tool

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on September 7, 2006
in Blogs, Portals and Web 2.0c
. 3 Comments
Woocall

This might be fun, but I can’t get it to work in Chinese on my Mac. : (  I can use the English, however.  It’s called woocall (available in both English and Chinese), and has been in beta at Sina for the past few months.  Woocall, as Jason reminds me below, is similar to Gabbly: it allows you to talk with other people who are at the same website as you.  It was apparently a big hit on Sina’s World Cup page, and is also available to discuss the hit TV show Supergirl.  It has its own woocall blog, and describes itself thus:

When you are watching the world cup by yourself, are you the only
one in your living room cheering or sulking over a loss with some
liquor?  When your favorite television star is killed off on the
silver screen, are you the only one banging on the TV and yelling? When you read about David Beckham’s affair with the nanny, did you hope  to yourself that Posh becomes available?

Do you want to talk about it?

Come here to find your worthy adversary on the field of discussion. Instantly exchange information with him on your topic of choice. Feed off the passion and fervor of whom you talk to.

You can put it on your own website by inserting a few lines of code.  The blog says it would good for the following kinds of sites:

1. Sports websites, during online direct broadcasts of matches.
2. News sites, during special events or on sections that will be viewed by a lot of people, such as giving a name to a panda.
3. Popular games, giving players another way to communicate.
4. On sites for popular movies or TV shows.
5. Question and answer sites.
6. Online commerce sites.
7. Personal blogs, so people reading it can chat about it with one another in real time.
8. Opinion sites, to discuss the merits of a new cellphone together, for instance. You could even arrange collective buying trips.
9. Online learning, for instance to practice English together while on an English learning site.
10. Online health sites, perhaps to chat with experts and ask questions directly.
11. All kinds of BBS, where people can discuss popular topics and issues.
12. Online books and reviews.  You could discuss a particular book with others.

(via Postshow)

The Americanization of Cyworld Avatars?

Published
by
Jason Li
on August 19, 2006
in Design, Portals and South Korea
. 1 Comment

Ladies and gentlemen,

On your left, China. And on your right, USA. They are the default male avatars from Cyworld China and Cyworld US respectively.

(The original Cyworld is one of South Korean’s most popular portals/social networks; they now have branches in China, Japan, Taiwan and America.)

20060819_cyworlds

I assume the Chinese avatar is a port, if not direct copy, of the Korean one; anyone care to confirm?

A peek inside Google’s China HQ

Published
by
Jason Li
on August 12, 2006
in Commerce, Portals and Search
. 0 Comments

Neatease gives us a peek inside Google’s Beijing office:

20060813_google1

20060813_google2

Via PostShow.

China’s blog portals: expanding public communication space

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on July 17, 2006
in BBS, Blogs, Commerce, Portals and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

Blog_market_share
Stock market analysis site Seeking Alpha’s China section has a summary of research on Chinese blogs done by China Market Research, a group in Shanghai. CMR estimates that 80% of Chinese online urban youth 18-25 (50 million people) are actively blogging OR participating in BBS.  Add in another 25 million between the ages of 25-35 and you’ve got 75 million creating a vibrant — and expanding — online public sphere.

Note that of the major blog portals, only two (blogcn and bokee) are blogging-specific sites. The CMR article points out that Sina and Sohu only launched blog applications late last year but have quickly leveled with more established blog portals.  The existence of multiple blogging and BBS portals with different economic and political positioning allows room for a variety of editorial decisions about what will be published online. In other words, Virtual China is an unprecedented domain for the creation and dissemination of diverse voices.

(via Helen Wang’s Across the Pacific)

link