A Web 2.0 blog, TechCrunch, posted about a week ago on the upcoming launch of Baidu Space. The post spurred a series of comments that reveal the craziness of commitments both for and against China’s leading search engine, Baidu. There are those who hate Baidu because it’s a mainland company and is seen as participating in government oppression of certain kinds of speech; there are those who love Baidu because it’s a mainland company and helps further the cause of strengthening China. Both sides see things in black and white. Both can be virulent in Chinese and English.
Some excerpts from the comments:
wow,come on,you guys,please!!!I love techcrunch,dont let these
chinese shit profane techcrunch.I am a loyal fan of this site.Please
keep the purity and virginity of techcrunch.I am a loyal fan, of this
site.By the way,baidu is damn evil….I can smell the strench from hell when i surfing baidu shit.:-(
In response to the post above:
不管怎么说.我都爱我们中国自己的搜索引擎 No matter what, I love our own Chinese search engine 可能我们的技术赶不上美国的GOOGLE和YAHOO Maybe our technology isn’t up to Google or Yahoo 但是我们永远是百度的忠实拥护者 But we will always be faithful Baidu users 因为我们是中国人 Because we are Chinese
if u say”chinese shit”, you are cursing you and your parents as “shit “at the same time.Why do you call yourself “shit”?
Chinese people look down upon you,and people from other countries also look down upon you.
You made us sick!
你根本不配做一个中国人。 You are not worthy of being a Chinese.
你真恶心！ You’re disgusting!
link
Time for me to do my homework on this. I’ve been personally less interested in Microsoft online products and services for the past several years, preferring to explore other options. But for understanding Virtual China, understanding MS is a must (as it would be for understanding virtual anywhere).
Did you know that globally, MSN Space had an estimated 100 million (100,000,000) unique visitors per month as of May this year? MSN Space launched in China in June 2005.
A Google search for MSN Space + China yields lots of information on MSN Space censorship and cooperation with Chinese authorities that led to the arrest of bloggers (for example, see 12/2004 BoingBoing post here and 6/2005 GlobalVoicesOnline post here). Not much else on the spaces themselves and what people are doing there.
Top Baidu searches in Chinese are all "How-Tos" such as this MSN Space Forum where you can post questions and learn how to create, manage, and promote your page, this free background generator, or this excellent blog on the latest MSN toys.
This June 28 ChinaByte article on Donews describes the upcoming competition between MSN Space and BaiduSpace. The article notes that Baidu’s July 15 launch of BaiduSpace is timed to coincide with MSN Space transition to the new Windows Live Spaces, which promises users new functionality and social networking tools, plus look and feel. It goes on to say:
In Baidu’s press release for BaiduSpace it says: Users are often disappointed by MSN Space’s speed and stability. There are often problems like not being able to open the homepage or not being able to post articles. On some websites where the Live Spaces news was released, user comments showed that they didn’t care much about how advanced the new functionality would be, rather their main concerns were about whether speed and stability would be improved. A user who participated in BaiduSpace’s beta revealed that, compared with other blogging tools he’d used, the most striking thing about BaiduSpace was how fast it was and how little time was needed to upload and download photos.
Imagine MySpace pages MSN Spaces with the search functionality of Google and all its features, and you’ll see what Baidu is trying to create: BaiduSpace 百度空间, now in beta in China. Blogger Xiong Jiezeng has an analysis (in Chinese) of what works and what doesn’t, which should be of great help to the feature’s developers.
What Xiong Jiezeng likes:
–the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which my IFTF colleague Mike Liebhold describes as "new very lightweight scripting for agile user interfaces." These allow users to customize a homepage’s fonts, colors, and so on within a set of 10-20 page templates (pretty much what MySpace MSN Spaces does as far as I can tell).
–clean, elegant text editor
–strong site visitor data, including referring webpage (which is great–TypePad also does it)
What Xiong Jiezeng doesn’t like so much:
–photo editor
–background music application is not linked to Baidu’s mp3 search bar, or to its Zhangmenren play list sharing site. This seems strange given that some of Baidu’s popularity is driven by youth mp3 searches, which is a distinct advantage over Google.
Now imagine this on everyone’s phone. They’ll get there.
(via Donews)
Update: Catching up on some blog posts, I see that Mao Xianjia at China Tech Stories posted news about what I’m calling BaiduSpace, calling it Hi.Baidu.com. He characterizes it as a personal portal more akin to a Google personal home page or MSN Spaces. Frankly, I don’t know enough about the differences between all of these to be able to say for sure. Web 2.0 stuff feels like a constant mash-up anyway!
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.
Reporters Without Borders: The Chinese authorities seem to have stopped blocking access to the
international version of Google’s search engine, Google.com. Tests
carried out by Reporters Without Borders show that it is again
accessible in Beijing and Shanghai. Google’s unblocking tends to
confirm the theory that online censorship was stepped up for the
anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June.
IT blogger Keso says Chinese laws are like Zen–reaching enlightenment will take a long time. Especially for foreign companies, who keep thinking that there is some clearcut set of rules to follow. Keso joins other bloggers in posting the "denied access" doll whose heart gets pierced every time someone tries a Google.com search and gets a blank page.
Rebecca MacKinnon says:
The text on the top left says: "This person has made it impossible to access Google." The text on the bottom right says: "A click on this website equals one needle prick."
At the bottom, Keso adds: "I’m an atheist, but I do believe that there’s a hidden force that can help us. That force is true public opinion."
Another site one could spend hours on…searching among the cartoon images on China’s leading search engine, Baidu. Go here for the search that yielded the image above, Sun Wukong the Monkey King in "Rebellion Against Heaven," this particular image from a book cover.
Go here for Baidu’s cartoon animation search. Just below the bulleted links you’ll see a pink bar, and below this the first set of links are to various Chinese cartoons, taken from book covers to film stills. Below that are European/American cartoon images, and then of course Japanese/Korean cartoon images. The last category is of cartoon/animated characters, everyone from Tintin to Sonic. Have fun!
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".
The categorization of search services in comparision with other
national/linguistic Internets, will continue to be one of the more interesting
developments in virtual China.
Baidu, China’s leading search engine, has launched one of those obvious-in-hindsight, badly needed services. Baidu College Search 百度大学搜索.
For instance, if you were interested in studying at the Chongqing University of Medical Sciences, you could find it (in Chinese) on the list and click through. Not to its URL, mind, but to a page that gives you the URL to cut and paste.
(via China Tech Stories)
Part trashing Google/Guge, part pursed-lips shock, part guide to the backstreets of virtual China, this May 10 "Daily Economic News 每日经济新闻" article spells out how to find drugs, guns, and other illegal things online–and makes the assertion that Guge/Google is not doing a proper filtering job.
The reporter’s central question: "How can we prevent the Internet from becoming more of a breeding ground and bridge for harmful information?"
The reporter compared keyword searches of 谷歌(Guge/Google) and "other major search engines." When he/she typed in keywords "gambling 赌博," "drugs,毒品," "guns 枪支," "fake ID 假证件," and "pornography 色情," on Guge/Google, there were tens of millions of hits. When entered on the other, unnamed search engines, however, this message came up: "The keyword you have entered may not conform with the content of relevant laws and regulations." “你键入的关键词可能不符合相关法律法规的内容”.
A few examples of what the reporter found on Guge/Google:
- "Fake diploma" yielded not only over 100,000 hits, but also automatically offered up such alternative keywords as "creating fake diplomas," "getting a fake ID," and "how to build a fake diploma website."
- "Buy [the drug] Ecstasy online" got over 200,000 hits. Most of the active links led to BBS discussion forums. When the reporter randomly followed some of the links, they led to sites with other semi-illegal substances such as anaesthetics, along with sellers’ cellphone and QQ numbers.
Guge/Google was given a chance to respond to the findings in the article. But the reporter was not happy with the vague responses given by a Guge/Google spokeswoman regarding the company’s technical and moral decisions on what a "Civilized Internet" should look like. Guge/Google has not joined the majority of Internet and content providers in pledging allegiance to civilizing the Chinese web.
(via Donews)
Chinese blogger Xu Jie says Baidu’s Baike wikipedia (see earlier post on its launch) is a disappointment:
Baidu’s Baike [an alternate Chinese wikipedia] has finally formally launched. but it’s nothing to get excited about…I looked around a bit and most of the articles are naked plagiarism. They’ve hypocritically put links to reference material at the bottom…Basically there’s little of value here. When I looked carefully, this is the copyright contract: "Baidu owns all of the copyrights to material found on this website." How shameless.
As of 2:24 PST today, the site has over 48,000 articles. I looked a bit more closely into some of the people who are ‘writing" the articles. I found that at least one of the most prolific authors seems to be posting articles out of another encyclopedia, as evidenced by the orderly entry of a series of articles all of which began with the Chinese word "two" 二.
Could be a nice place for Chinese net users to find encyclopedia entries, but might not be a site for collective knowledge generation as Wikipedia is.
link (in Chinese)
Recent Comments