:: 大众对于病毒式传播的视频广告逐渐产生审美疲劳。尽管制作精良，

// AjS

:: China’s Web 2.0 space is in constant flux. Companies rise and fall, and the ones that remain are forever adjusting their positioning, rolling out new services to compete in new sectors, and even changing their corporate identity altogether. And that’s without accounting for the hand of the government in all-things digital.

:: with hundreds of millions of Chinese Internet users these days, if you are a Chinese netizen and have a question about something, there’s a good chance that someone out there knows the answer. But how do you connect with them? Through “ask” sites, of course. Listed below are ask sites that range from broad, general interest information to specialized topics, from the intelligence of crowds to authenticated experts, and from free for the asking to paid answers-for-hire. Nothing guarantees the quality of any of the answers you receive, but if you’re a savvy Internet user, you already double-check the accuracy of anything you find online.

general knowledge on baidu knowledge ::
As China’s leading search engine, any additional features that Baidu adds to its core compentency get an automatic boost. This can be a good and a bad thing. Baidu Knowledge is an excellent resource for general knowledge questions. The website operates on a points system. Anyone who posts a question on Baidu Knowledge needs to ante up (fortunately, registration automatically gives you a chunk of credits), and you can attract a better quality of responses by promising a larger bonus for acceptable answers. If you don’t feel confident to judge which answer is best, a vote can be called once time expires so that netizens can decide for you. The system works best for general knowledge questions, particularly those for which netizens can simply search the Internet for an answer and copy over the results. More specialized questions, and ones that require offline data, are not as successful. It’s also great for language issues: obscure chengyu, dialect expressions, and filthy slang all attract decent responses. But even an innocent ask-answer website needs a dose of celebrity glamor: The Baidu Knowledge blog recently launched a feature called “what the stars want to know“. In the installment linked here, Huang Yali, a 2005 Super Girl star, asked a question: “I am afraid of snakes, so what I am going to do when I encounter a snake?” There are 97 answers to this question so far. Real life credentials are an important factor for people to decide whether to take one particular answer seriously. Baidu has a expert board, which is composed primarily of real-life professionals in certain fields. Brands have taken advantage of the opportunity: for example, one user was having a hard time choosing between two smart phones, the HTC Touch Viva and the Moto A3100. Rola, a Baidu-accredited expert who is also a Motorola marketer, offered her opinion: after listing all the fancy features about the A3100, Rola only mentioned the HTC as being “not as good in terms of quality and basic functionality, and not as practical as Motorola, whose user experience is more guaranteed”. Sohu’s Sogou search engine has a similar Q&A service, Ask, which also features an expert board. Users who apply to be experts must answer two questions per week to maintain their status. Fighting spam answers is a major challenge for most Q&A websites. To solve this problem, Baidu offers prizes to users who report spammers. Currently, the user who reports the most “worms” in a month will win a USB flash disk.

other portals ::
Although they’re not as popular or well-known as Baidu Knowledge (partly because BK results show up so high in Baidu searches), other portals and search engines offer their own approaches to the Q&A game. Tencent’s Soso search engine has a Q&A feature called Wenwen, which is categorized, with QQ-related questions pretty near the top. Wenwen fosters community involvement through a typical rankings system, but also through a “Stars of Wenwen” feature: So far, 26 separate answerers have been voted to become the subject of extensive profiles, complete with photos, mini-bios, and space for other users to post their impressions. The Stars are drawn from Wenwen’s registered users, who have their own SNS-like channel. One cute feature Wenwen has is a keyword cloud that shows what words and phrases turn up most frequently in questions. Currently the top selections range from interesting curiosities (“how did the ancients brush their teeth?”) to net-slang (思密达, a Chinese phonetic transcription of a Korean sentence-ending word that’s used in post-90s net-speak) to pure weirdness (Panda Blood, anyone?) Sina’s iAsk search engine calls its Q&A feature “Knowledge Person” (知识人), and promotes it as “a billion netizens helping you with your problems.” It too has an expert channel for when you’re not satisfied with answers from ordinary people. There’s a section for mobile phones, questions rated by rank and by the number of votes received. By voting on Sina iAsk the user can also collect “points” and win prizes. Marginally related to the Knowledge Person service is Sina’s iAsk Resource Sharing – think of it as the answers you receive when you ask for specific books, music, or other media. It’s supposed to be more than just a den of pirated content, of course, but it’s a fairly novel way for individual Sina users to share their wealth of information with other netizens.

harnessing the power of forums on qihoo ::
Qihoo, a website originally known for its anti-virus tool “Safeguard 360″,  now bills itself as “the Q&A website with the most complete answers.” Its Q&A system is based on its blog and forum searching service. Questions are not answered by netizens directly. Instead, the system harnesses forum content to return blog entries and forum posts according to their relevance to the questions. The site’s front page features a scrolling list of questions asked just seconds prior: How do you use a mobile phone battery to make it last as long as possible? Is it true that if you pluck one grey hair, ten more will grow back? What are the priciest luxury brands in the world? The usefulness of this approach varies. When it works, you turn up tons of relevant forum posts that are talking about precisely what you’re looking for; in less fortunate cases, the experience is not much different from looking for answers through a typical search engines like Google or Baidu (although Qihoo does narrow its search range to forums, so you’re not paging through government boilerplate). To amend this weakness and harness the wisdom of the Internet crowds, Qihoo has another section, a “prize-for-answer” community, which is similar to Baidu Knowledge. However, Qihoo does Baidu one better with its “PK” (head to head) feature, which takes place in a “voting bar“. A questioner who has received several different answers to a own question, but who is uncertain which one is better (or who wants to know what the silent majority thinks) can put it to a vote. Unlike Baidu, the votes are featured prominently on the site. For example, a high-school student failed this year’s college entrance exam and wants to know if he try again next year, look for a job, or go to a vocational college. The results indicate that most users want him to prepare for another year and try again. Qihoo has also extended its question-answer service to mobile handset users, who can send their questions through wap.qihoo.com. Some individual discussion forums have their own Q&A sites. Tianya has a Q&A function which its membership can participate in. Oddly, it does not seem to be filtered as much as more general Q&A sites: there is quite a substantial amount of sex-related searching going on in the recent search listings. Questions are categorized, sometimes fairly specifically: clicking on “Study Abroad 留学“, for example, leads to a whole subsection about moving abroad to study including a post about how much it would cost to study in Britain.

specialty sites ::
Maybe you have a more specific question and want to seek out people knowledgeable in that particular area. There are Q&A sites for all kinds of obscure interests. OK Wave is a direct import from Japan, where it is the biggest question-answer search engine. Its Chinese version became active at the end of July, 2009. The questions that are asked on OK Wave seem to be Japan influenced. How does one learn Japanese in a new Japanese speaking company, for example? From the “hot tag words” list — study abroad, visa, travel, Japan, employment, food, spa, cherry blossoms, university — the Japanese focus is fairly obvious. OK Wave has rudimentary SNS functionality in the form of “My Spaces,” but the registration process is quite lengthy. How about Law? Don’t want to put your technical legal question to the unwashed masses. Ask a Lawyer is part of the comprehensive law site Guangdong Lawyer. Asking a question involves entering a specific question, wait for an answer, and then rating it. The Ask a Lawyer Q&A site says it deals with marriage law, criminal cases, employment law, and traffic accidents. Many questions on the front page involve accidents and monetary compensation. Infant-oriented website Cradle, which is all about mothers, pregnancy and taking care of newborns, has an affiliated search site, Ask Cradle, which separates the searches into categories such as weight loss (for mothers), nursing the baby, and children’s sex education, among others. It also lets users ask questions according to the age of the infant. A typical question asked is “Does my baby move too much?“, which is filed under the One Year Old section. Are you a practicing Muslim who wants to know how you ought to interact with your non-believing neighbors? The Gansu-based Islam Q&A, part of Window on Islam, features a number of scholars (阿訇) who answer questions from netizens about various Islam-related issues. Questions are generally visible to the public, but they can be made private, too. Given the nature of religion in contemporary China, the scary-looking front-page should come as no surprise: rather than a welcome screen or a list of topics, there’s a ten point list of content that’s not to be submitted as a question, with citations to the State Secrets Law and various digital information regulations.

paid sites ::
Sometimes your query is a little more complicated. Call it a “task” rather than an “ask.” Well, the Chinese Internet has that covered, too. Witkey (威客) is the name for a system by which individuals or companies seeking to accomplish particular tasks can draw upon the talent of Internet users. At witkey sites, questions are posted (often for a fee), and site members contribute answers, for which they are compensated if their answer is chosen. Remuneration varies. On Witkey (威客网), the top recommended task seeks a slogan for China’s Sports Lottery and offers 10,000 yuan to the winner. Most of the other featured tasks are creative in nature: advertising slogans and logos, mostly. The site has a SNS-like feature where members can post their skills and interact with colleagues and potential clients. At VikeCN (威客中国) features a wider selection of lower-paying design tasks alongside online drudgery: “300 RMB: 0.5 yuan per forum post; the more you post, the more you earn” reads one, which is apparently recruiting 50-cent gang members to astroturf for a medical company. You can also earn cash by clicking on Google adwords. Not all witkey sites have the word “witkey” in their name. Zhu Bajie, named after the Journey to the West character, is just one of the several dozen other witkey sites out there. It’s got a busy design that’s reminiscent of human resources websites (which tend to be big advertisers on witkey-style websites). Tasks range from the technical – 2,000 RMB for developing a JSP-based website, which as of this writing has 28 applications and 8 submissions; to the whimsical – 100 RMB for lyrics to a corporate theme song, which currently has 65 applications and 28 submissions; to the sketchy –  500 RMB for an original, 40,000-character master’s thesis in computer science. For more tasks, see the extensive list on the Witkey website, which indexes a whole bunch of general ask sites and more specific witkey task sites.

// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]

:: under China’s current press rules, anyone who wants to launch a new magazine is required to first register with the General Administration of Press and Publication in order to obtain a publication license that is tied to distribution area and content type. These publication licenses are hard to come by, and practically out of reach of small start-ups who lack the backing of major state-owned publishers. There are grey-market ways around this, but for many magazines, it might be easier to reach a target audiences by publishing exclusively online, where regulation is significantly more relaxed. It’s also less of a risk, a way to roll out a magazine without the capital outlay involved in printing and distribution.

China’s e-magazine marketplace is home to small, short-lived titles as well as digital versions of major print publications. Many of them are downloadable in executable files of about 30M in size (which means they are only readable on Windows machines), or are viewable as a Flash application in a browser window. Although a small percentage take advantage of the multimedia possibilities offered by digital publication, the vast majority basically reproduce the experience of reading a print magazine, “enhanced” with virtual page-flipping, (cheesy) background music, and an animated advertisement or two.This also means that the text is frequently non-searchable (and non-copyable), but despite the limitations, e-magazines are still a surprisingly active sector of the mainland Chinese internet. Below is a snapshot of a few of the ways they’re used online in China.

celebrity brands ::
e-Magazines have been around for years in China, but it was only when Xu Jinglei launched Kaila in early 2007 that they really attracted much attention from the mainstream media. Xu and other celebrities have extended their brand to the e-publishing world, giving them some of the benefits of a personal magazine without the hassle of the print regulation system in China. Kaila builds each issue around a particular theme (the current issue is all about weddings) and features writing by well-known columnists and ordinary readers alike. In the past two years, the magazine has extended its brand to two new titles: Kaila Street Photos (开啦街拍), which focuses on pictures of fashionistas, including Xu herself, and Kaila Workplace (开啦职场), which is even more closely-targeted at urban white-collar life. As e-magazines, the presentation occasionally takes advantage of digital functionality like audio and video clips; the current issue of Workplace features a parody of a song by pop-group Shin done by a graphic design office in Shanghai, who sing about pulling long hours to edit their images (it’s also viewable on Youku). Readers can interact with the magazine through Kaila’s forums, and there’s a sub-board devoted to article ideas, including a post seeking submissions for the August issue. The new celebrity e-mag H-Sports (最体育) was launched on June 26 (Paolo Maldini’s birthday) by Huang Jianxiang, a high profile TV presenter with a long history in football commentary. The magazine takes advantage of Huang’s extensive connections in the field: the current issue features race-car driving novelist Han Han on the cover and a lengthy interview that Huang conducted with him. The e-mag presents the interview as a video, but it’s also available on Sina, which is one of the magazine’s sponsors and the host of its official blog. Two other celebrity e-mags that are fairly popular belong to the “Oprahs of China,” Yang Lan and Chen Luyu, and like Oprah’s O Magazine, they’re primarily aimed at women and feature the two TV personalities on the cover. Yang Lan’s is hosted on Tencent, while Chen Luyu’s is on Zcom.

online glossies ::
SoMode is an online magazine agency that publishes several fashion-oriented titles. Its flagship publications are Me (Me爱美丽), a women’s fashion magazine, and Wo (Wo男人志), an FHM-style men’s fashion and gadgets magazine. Both magazines are available as downloadable executable files (Windows only) and as a set of full-page images readable online. The men’s magazine gets the most publicity on the Internet because of its scantily-clad cover girls and racy photo sets, but the online BBS discussion forum is almost entirely devoted to the women’s magazine. SoMode also publishes a travel title, LaVie, an e-magazine aimed at 25-35 year-olds. There are flash graphics for most of the spreads in the magazine, which sometimes feel like adverts for hotels and furniture. Some sections of the magazine even have a smoky female voiceover announcing the labels and comfortable cotton clothes that are ideal attire for going outdoors. Here’s one for Sander Mulder, a design label from the Netherlands. Another online glossy magazine is Aria (ARIA阿丽雅), a music magazine published by Kuke, a digital library of classical and other music styles that are not mainstream pop. It’s a downloadable, Windows-only executable, but some of its articles are available online in text form as well. The full e-magazine features musical selections from Kuke’s library of albums, accompanied by liner notes and other text.

zines ::
The e-magazine format is also used by non-professionals looking to produce periodical publications. Although they’re not as readily readable as plain text blog entries and the like, PDF and flash-based e-mags are more convenient than print and less influenced by keyword filters and censorship than blogs and discussion forums. Besides, there’s a certain special feeling that comes with producing a single, 80-page digital publication that’s not found in a list of links to separate blog posts. New Realms of Fantasy and Science Fiction (新幻界) is a SF zine produced by fans of the genre that aims to provide a space for new writers to publish their material in an edited journal and for readers to critique SF and fantasy writing that appears in other venues. China’s SF and fantasy audience is fairly Internet-savvy, so the online community is quite active, with a Douban group that fosters interactivity between the magazine’s volunteer production team and its readers. As a PDF of text and images, it does not utilize the multimedia capabilities of other e-mags, but it has taken advantage of relaxed content regulation as compared to print magazines: the novelette Darkroom (暗室) by the well-known SF writer Han Song, which was featured in the June issue, had previously been killed by print magazine Science Fiction World for being too sensitive. The e-mag format is also a relatively easy way to produce a publication tied to a particular event. Young China Speaks (少年中国说), a magazine of politics written by post-80s Chinese young people, is affiliated with Wang Xiaodong and Huang Jisu, two of the authors behind the recent nationalist bestseller Unhappy China, and its launch was timed to the media frenzy surrounding that book’s release. While a short-term print magazine would have been overly expensive and logistically difficult, Young China Speaks was able to release five full issues before the Unhappy China phenomenon faded from public view. The magazine was produced in PDF format for maximum readability, and had an associated Douban ID and group which, along with the Sina blog, allowed for reader-writer interactivity.

digital print ::
Tons of print magazines have digital versions for sale (providers like Dragonsource handle digitization and subscription services for hundreds of titles ranging from popular fashion to arcane academia), and a number of titles turn up frequently on e-mag-specific websites. e-Magazine portal ZCom (see below) for example, has a digital version of China National Geography (中国国家地理) as a featured brand on its front page. The latest available issue, from March 2009, focuses on the Yangtze and the three other great rivers in China. The magazine is downloadable but cannot be read online, and is one of around 60 other travel e-magazines. ZCom also has an extensive list of business magazines, ranging from CBN Weekly (RMB 409 per year) to The Founder (RMB 229 per year). These digital versions are mostly identical to their print counterparts, meaning there’s virtually no online-specific content for any of these titles. In an interesting reversal of the print-to-web process, Blogbus, a blog host, recently launched a print magazine, iCity, that draws content from its stable of bloggers. iCity is oriented toward a well-off, urban, white-collar, creative readership (the same sort of people whose blogs make up most of the magazine’s content). It has published three bimonthly issues so far this year, all of which are available both online and in print. With netizens active in the production process as well as making up the readership, iCity is an interesting example of e-mag interactivity – it even claims to be “The First Interactive Chinese Magazine (中文第一本互动杂志).

e-Mag providers ::
Although some e-magazines are self-produced and independently hosted, the vast majority of China’s huge range of e-magazines find a home at one of a number of e-magazine providers. ZCom, founded in 2004, provides software for designing interactive e-magazines and offers hosting and subscription management services. It’s the 500-pound gorilla of e-magazines in China: it has a hosting deal with all of the four celebrity magazines mentioned in “celebrity brand” section above, and a large stable of digital versions of popular print titles to boot. In addition to providing reading material, ZCom also hosts a magazine-oriented SNS, where netizens can discuss particular titles, articles, or other e-mag-related topics. As befits an SNS portal that grew out of a photo-sharing service, Poco’s e-magazine section features the photography magazine Interphoto at the top of the front page. Poco’s flagship title is Pocozine, a fashion-oriented urban lifestyle magazine. Brand presence in Poco’s in-house titles matches the promotional campaigns that appear throughout the rest of its online offerings: ice-cream brand Magnum, for example, is running a game on Poco’s SNS (see this earlier Friday 5) and has a section in the current issue of Pocozine that features a number of photographers and a free photo instant message promotion (page 21). Poco also hosts digital versions of major titles like Betty’s Kitchen and Auto Magazine along with a vast array of e-magazine startups. iebook is an e-magazine developer with a slightly different focus: corporate and organizational publications. Listed on the front page are ready-made plans for e-pamphlets for companies and government agencies, advertising circulars, media and educational institutions, and wedding photography. iebook has a few brand-name clients, such as the Ray Li stable of fashion magazines.

/// AjS

[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]