East-West-Connect.com

China's leader Hu Jintao recently started microblogging. His microblog on People's Daily's microblogging site gained over 14,000 followers since it was setup yesterday. For comparison, the next most popular microblog on People's Daily has about 2,500 followers.

From a Tom.com article published on Feb 22 (Chinese):

"Yesterday, a new special name appeared on the "People's Microblog" which was launched this month - the country's chairman, Hu Jintao." Read more...

Competition Spurs Development of Many Feature-Rich Chinese Microblogs

While the English microblog market is characterized as being ‘Twitter and challengers we compare to Twitter,’ the Chinese microblogosphere is bursting with competition, creativity and copying. Multiple contenders jostle with each other for 400 million Chinese Internet users that haven’t yet decided which microblog they would prefer to use, if any. To add to the confusion, Chinese government censors have already shut down a couple microblogs. Read more...

Like many native English speakers, you may have been impressed by the use of Chinglish - the name “PPStream,” the mean bank machine, "Fuk Hing Stationary," the “Nigger-brown" couch – there is so much creative Chinglish online for our entertainment! Read more...

I've been playing with Yeeyan for a bit recently and I've come to realize that it could be a great free marketing tool for English businesses that have newsworthy articles. Yeeyan is a Chinese-language community website with members that translate articles from English to Chinese. All members do this for free. If you're a business or website owner that doesn't know Chinese, you may still be able to take advantage of this to: Read more...

On the right are 50 user profile pics that I random downloaded from Twitter and on the left are 50 random user profile pics from Zuosa. Zuosa is a Chinese-language micro-blogging website like Twitter.

Can you see any differences in online culture between Chinese and English users from this pic alone?

I just tried out Zuosa today. In many ways it is a Twitter-clone. The idea, design and even the colors are much alike, but like any good clone, it has grown apart from the original in many ways. Here are some things that are different: Read more...

A law has been drafted that may see the eating of dog and cat meat made illegal in China. Support this? Disagree? Comment below.

See the original article (Chinese).

This post is outdated. For up-to-date info, see www.east-west-connect.com/chinese-internet-user-demographics-jan-2012

The January 2010 “Statistical Survey Report on Internet Development in China” was recently published. The report itself is 90 pages long, but here's what I think you might find most interesting... Read more...

One of the video game projects that I work on, Runes of Magic, is what's called a "massively-multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG for short. If you don't know what that is, it's like World of Warcraft. I'm one of the Chinese-to-English translators on the team so I translate quests, character names, items, instructions, etc. Unlike most of what I translate, I am actually permitted to talk about this one. :) Read more...

I'm starting a meetup group in Edmonton for people interested in doing business with China. We'll set the focus at the first meetup, but I'm thinking that each meetup will consist of introductions, a 10-20 minute presentation, then casual conversation and networking for the remainder of the evening.

Anybody that does business with China or is considering doing business with China in the future should attend.

See the meetup group for more info!