East-West-Connect

In April 2010, CNNIC released their report on Chinese rural Internet development in 2009. For the most part, it’s a comparison of urban and rural internet usage in China. Here are a few of the insights that you might find interesting.

By the end of 2009, the number of rural Chinese Internet users had reached 107 million, which is a 26% increase since last year. The number of rural mobile Internet users increased 79% to 72 million. Two-thirds of rural Chinese Internet users access the Internet via mobile device.更多

At NMG, I get a lot of emails from people looking for a Baidu pay per click (PPC) management service. That's great, Baidu has a great system and it's the most popular search engine in China. I would recommend it for many clients, but for some, I would actually recommend using Google first.更多

I just posted a list of some of my favorite China blogs. Check it out. If there's something you think should be added, let me know. I'll be adding to this list over time.

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."更多

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.更多

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!更多

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:更多

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:更多

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).