Archive for the 'Web 2.0c' Category

want to see tuangou in action?

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on January 11, 2007
in Commerce, Home, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 2 Comments

Wangqun_oscars

Tuangou teambuying website China NetCrowd 中国网众 has a special "NetCrowd Oscars" page, which allows users to vote (of course…everything does today, doesn’t it?) on the best tuangou experiences of 2006, that were organized by NetCrowd. If you are interested in getting a sense of what a tuangou trip actually looks like, even if you don’t speak Chinese, go to the page and click on one of the photos that form a column in the middle of the page. Some of the crowd shots start to give a sense of the group shopping experience–kind of like a shopping tour really, complete with activities and prizes.

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).

new Chinese tech news site

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on January 3, 2007
in Games, News and Web 2.0c
. 1 Comment

I found this via an attribution on Fons’ China Herald, and it looks like it will be worth visiting every now and then, especially if more people start contributing (that’s always the issue with these web 2.0 things, isn’t it?): Chinamemes describes itself as "a web 2.0 social news site with a focus on Chinese Internet and Technology companies." It looks like it was started recently, sometime around Dec. 20 or so, and has 20 "top users" currently contributing news stories and voting on those they consider most interesting, all good stuff…and they tagged a couple of Virtual China posts : )

Chinese version of Dodgeball

Published
by
Jason Li
on December 18, 2006
in Web 2.0c
. 0 Comments

20061217_belinker

Belinker is like Dodgeball, but for China: via SMS, it alerts your nearby (within 1500m) friends as to your whereabouts, and you be will alerted to crushes (or in Chinese, 梦中情人) nearby.

You have to sign up on the internet first and there’s a fee if you send more than 50 "belinkers" a month.

Its currently offered in 8 cities (the big ones).

As an aside, I’m always interested by how they presented their imagined users:

20061217_belinkerppl

Particularly when in contrast to Dodgeball’s:

20061217_dodgeballppl

Link to belinker website.
Shanghaiist’s post on it, from July.

Chinese urban body mods

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 15, 2006
in News, P2P, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 1 Comment

Molive/Moobol brings us a series of photos of this street artist, from an unknown Chinese city, who sticks metal wires into various parts of his body with not a drop of blood.  Link.
Urban_body_mod

tuangou 团购 team buying websites

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 12, 2006
in Commerce, Home, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 10 Comments

The Wall Street Journal wrote last February (note: subscription only) about tuangou 团购 (literally, team buying) websites, where as in MeetUp.com, strangers arrange to organize themselves around a common interest.  But for tuangou, it’s all about shopping, aggregating enough people to be able to get a discount or better terms on everything from cars to home remodelling materials to real estate.  Sam Flemming posted about it here, mentioning that he got a great discount on a television through a Shanghai tuangou site.

WuYo/51tuangou is one of the more popular tuangou sites.  WuYo acts as a broker for ad hoc buying teams, organizing visits to retailers and getting from between 2-5% discounts on specific products at specific stores.  For instance, this sofa set is being offered to WuYo members at a 3% discount and can be reserved online. 

Wuyo_sofa

On the Hefei Tuangou Web you can find a BBS forum that lists the various times and places that groups will be meeting–or in some cases, would like to meet if they can get enough interest.

Wangqun Tuangou has the best photos of their buying sprees, such as this trip to a Dazhong Electronics branch store in Beijing on Nov. 26, where over 1000 people bought over $200,000 worth of electronics equipment in a single afternoon.  Pretty wild stuff! 

Wangqun_crowd

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’

Chinese on Iranian web censorship

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 4, 2006
in News, Politics and Web 2.0c
. 2 Comments

The IT news site cnbeta has this clip on it today, from China Daily: "Purifying National Culture: Iran Shuts Down Popular Websites". The Guardian reports on the story here: Iranian government has blocked access to a wide range of sites, from the New York Times to Amazon, Youtube to Wikipedia and the BBC’s Farsi service.  The China Daily Chinese=language version of the story on cnbeta follows the Guardian’s, pointing out the Iranian government’s concern with preserving "national unity", sensitivity toward "immoral Western values," and crackdown on satellite TV and publishing industry. 

I tried Baidu’ing and Googling the story in Chinese to see if I could find more commentary, but couldn’t find it.  Baidu gave me a "server connection reset" page each time I tried…From among the 33 comments from cnbeta readers:

China’s already almost the same.

What do you mean "almost the same"?  It obviously already is the same!!! Can you get on Wikipedia? ! China has locked out who knows how many websites, and monitors a record of everything you do online no matter how obscure the website (不管网址多少冷门). As long as you are going there often enough, after half a year you can’t get on them anymore!!!  I’ve got a handful of these kinds of websites!

Create a huge Intranet!!!!  It’s the goal of our studies.

Those trashy countries with no human rights do things pretty much the same way.

They’re learning from China.  Think they’ve bought the GFW? [Great Firewall]

Why report on what other people are doing?  Why not report on how China blocks Taiwanese and overseas’ websites?

Iran’s filtering capacity is lame, all they’re doing is blocking a few websites, they’d better import the GFW fast!

At least Iran comes clean and tells you which sites boss is going to shut down.  The GCD [CCP] is more shady, and doesn’t dare to admit to it.

Glorious Middle East ancient kingdom Government!!  Glorious Iranian Government! It’s carrying on the fine traditions of highly reputed 5000 year-old ancient eastern Government. At this moment it’s not a Government that is closing down websites….It’s a part of the glorious spirit of ancient Government. The "dirty" websites are dead!! — [signed] a free person

Every country has an Internet monitoring system, it’s just that the mainland’s is too strict.
How many phone calls has Bush listened in on to catch Bin Laden?  How many emails have been  surveilled?  How many unconscionable acts have been committed? And this is what some people call a democratic country. If you really want to protect your own interests you can consider becoming a ruler or you can think about going to live on Mars.  No government is likely to allow too many things that deviate from its path.  As Li An says, "Every ruler has a GFW in their heart."

Not bad, not bad!  At least no-one has come out from the "Iranian Ministry of Information Industry" to announce, "We have not blocked any websites."

Chinese adolescent humor: “Her First Time” video clip

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 1, 2006
in Dating, Gender, Video Clips and Web 2.0c
. 1 Comment

What are Chinese video viewers watching?  "Her First Time"
她第一次做鸡 can currently be found on Youtube-esque sites across Virtual China.  Since being posted on Nov. 12 it’s been viewed over 444,444 times on Mofile, one of the top sites, for instance.     

It opens with a young couple and a voice-over in a high-pitched operatic style:

Young people today, love is sweet
but buying a house is beyond their reach
educating their child, beyond their reach
caring for elders, beyond their reach
buying a car, beyond their reach

The young couple is visited by a magic "artist" who shows them the way to get rich: 做鸡, which in spoken Mandarin Chinese sounds like "be a prostitute."  The young man suggests that his girlfriend do it, and she reluctantly agrees.  Together they visit the magical artist, who invites her into his room, leaving her boyfriend in the waiting room.  "Oh my god," we hear from behind the door (in English and in Chinese, by the way).  The boyfriend finally can’t take it anymore so he batters away at the door, and when he finally gets in he finds…you’ll have to see for yourself.  It’s a pun that you knew was coming. 

It says the clip was made by the Video Spoof Studio 影视恶搞工作室 for 500 yuan (about $80).  However, a Baidu search for the Studio takes you to the VideoDVNet, a website run by the Video Spoof Studio, but on which I can’t locate "Her First Time". 

top Chinese video-sharing sites 视频站点

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on November 18, 2006
in Blogs, P2P, Video Clips, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 1 Comment

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 them can hope to follow–there are no companies like Google in China who would be interested in buying a video site. He then shares what he calls a"crude and subjective" analysis of Chinese video sites’ Alexa traffic rank, in the hopes of starting a wider conversation.  Here are some excerpts in rough translation:

After Youtube’s meteoric rise there have been a lot of Chinese imitators, probably something like 1-200 of these types of sites.  Here I use Alexa’s TOP SITES traffic rank as well as my own understanding to look at the top 7 video sites that are completely modeled on Youtube: 我乐网（www.56.com), Mofile（www.mofile.com), 我秀（www.5show.com), 土豆网
（www.tudou.com), 爆米花（www.pomoho.com), UUME（www.uume.com), 六间房
（www.6rooms.com）

…All of the 7 have received venture funding.

Comparison of Alexa Rank 8/3/06-11/3/06

Alexa_rank_2

 

Even the top-rated Chinese site, Mofile, is only 265 on Alexa. None have really broken through in terms of traffic and talk of "video sharing sites exploding in China" is no more than just that–talk.  Of course, there’s still a lot of room for growth.

Continue reading ‘top Chinese video-sharing sites 视频站点’