:: 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.]

:: you’re an active consumer, but you don’t trust advertising or mainstream media. You’re new in the city, and you want to find some great places to eat, but you don’t know anyone who can give you any tips. You want to go south for the holidays but you don’t want to end up getting fleeced in some Disney-fied tourist trap. Or you’ve just bought an amazing / terrible new digital camera and you want to convince the rest of the world to buy one too / not buy one. Where is the best place to accomplish this, share your point of view, and get answers to your questions? The web of course! The Chinese Internet has a wealth of resources for rating products, from restaurants and travel destinations, to cosmetics and technology. Heck, you can even find out which universities and professors to avoid.

Of course, you’re not going to simply believe anyone who claims to be an “ordinary netizen,” so you’ll have to rely on other Web2.0 community tools to get a feel for which reviewers are trustworthy. And if the review website appears to have integrity, you’ll probably be inclined to view its brand partners favorably as well. Brand presence on review sites is mostly limited to straightforward advertising at the moment, but there are a few interesting partnerships going on, and lots of opportunity for further development and full-on brand engagement in ways that add value / unique information to review site communities.

restaurants ::
Dianping (大众点评 http://www.dianping.com/ ), which managed to grab a URL that all other review sites now wish they had, started out in 2003 as a website on which Shanghai residents could review local restaurants. It gradually expanded to Beijing and Hangzhou, and then to other parts of the country, and attracted investment from Sequoia Capital. Eateries are still the main focus of the site: members rate establishments on taste, environment, service, and average price per person, and their ratings are analyzed into various rankings: best restaurants (http://bit.ly/3NIhKi ), tastiest (http://bit.ly/qmfWG ), hot this week (http://bit.ly/vUImd ), top OL (“office lady”) choices (http://bit.ly/PBZhZ ), and top student picks (http://bit.ly/10Ixjy ). The website also provides an online reservation service, and has photos and menus contributed by community members. Other categories in addition to food include shopping (http://bit.ly/13sAfA ), entertainment (http://bit.ly/lqKo ), and services (http://bit.ly/oCtqv ) — it turns out that no one really thinks all that highly of Beijing Railway Station, for example (http://bit.ly/EteS3 ). For the past few years, Dianping has been publishing annual print guides to restaurants in major Chinese cities (http://bit.ly/2XMVUS ) that are produced using ratings and comments from netizens. The website has also been at the forefront of copyright disputes (who owns netizen comments?) and libel disputes (can restaurants sue over bad netizen reviews?); a summary is available here (http://bit.ly/YeYOG ). In terms of business partnerships, Dianping offers a membership card that is good for discounts at many of the restaurants it indexes and that accumulates points redeemable for mobile phone cards and gadgets. Promotional offers available to card-holders (http://bit.ly/jdoyG ) often take the form of a week or two of Dianping-related incentives to visit local businesses. Currently, Dianping members can get a free cup of coffee at any Sculpting in Time cafe (http://bit.ly/12bMOm ).

travel ::
Visiting someplace new with an untested tour agency can be an unsettling prospect, so many Chinese netizens turn to specific websites that offer peer recommendations and ratings. General review sites for travel include the popular portal for booking plane tickets and hotels, Ctrip (http://www.ctrip.com/ ). CTrip features a destination guide (http://destguides.ctrip.com ) whose landing page lists top-rated destinations, which at the moment are Hunan’s Zhangjiajie (http://bit.ly/oPHbt ), with over 11,626 reviews, and Yunnan’s Lijiang (http://bit.ly/yoij8 ), with around 1,600 reviews. Each review page has a combination of photographs, routes to nearby tourist and scenic spots (such as the Tiger Leaping Gorge outside of Lijiang), and a temperature graph for the area. In addition to rating the sites, netizens can ask and answer specific questions. The review section of travel portal Let’s Travel Together (http://www.17u.com/comment/ ) is more comprehensive, with destinations in every major city including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong, and smaller ones such as Wuhan and Suzhou. The website has community features in addition to straightforward reviewing: 17u hosts a blog section (http://www.17u.com/blog/ ) whose posts can be promoted through a “digg”-type system. On a smaller scale is the Yododo travel website (http://www.yododo.com/ ), which lets netizens search for reviews and upload videos from their favorite destinations (http://bit.ly/LYxf1 ). Yododo’s reviews are short and quick (http://www.yododo.com/review/ ), more like a message board than the in-depth analysis encouraged on other sites, and feature only one or two lines for each city. The range of travel review websites is quite broad: many individual destinations have websites devoted to them alone, where netizens can appraise food, lodging, and attractions. Zhangjiajie, for example, has a travel site with a review section (http://www.zjjok.com/dianping/ ), and the city of Wuhan hosts a travel website (http://www.gotowuhan.com.cn ) with a review subsite (http://dp.gotowuhan.com.cn/ ), as well as blogs (http://blog.gotowuhan.com.cn/ ) and a BBS discussion forum (http://bbs.gotowuhan.com.cn/ ).

cosmetics ::
Cosmetics and personal care products are quite possibly the most popular items for netizens to review online. I Am 2ya (http://www.i2ya.com/ ) is a multimedia cosmetics review site. Members can rate products and upload photos of their own stash (http://www.i2ya.com/ddx.aspx ). Highly-recommended products are listed among the site’s top rankings (http://bit.ly/VDscT ). Apart from web ads, brand presence comes in the form of “test groups,” promotion activities in which qualified members are offered the chance to review new products. The current campaign is from Yves Rocher, a French natural beauty label (http://bit.ly/4hhHl1 ). Ten sets of Yves Rocher body-slimming products will be handed out to registered reviewers who will have to write up a review if they’re chosen. The page features existing reviews of the product by girls in their twenties, some of whom have lost weight using the product. I Am 2Ya is affiliated with Niu’er Beauty Net (http://www.niuer.com.cn/ ), a cosmetics portal run by Niu’er, who’s apparently a well-known beautician. He’s got a special section on I Am 2Ya, too (http://bit.ly/176apD ), and clips of his presentations, as well as excerpts of a Taiwan beauty show (http://bit.ly/ixYy1 ), form the multimedia section of the site. Beauty Make-Up (http://www.5i5p.net/ ), whose URL decodes to mean “I Love Being Beautiful” (我爱我漂亮), bills itself as a “professional cosmetics review website.” Top reviewers, some of whom have assessed more than one hundred products, are listed on the front page alongside a category breakdown that lists products by type and region of origin (domestic, Korean / Japanese, Euro/American, and other). The website also hosts a forum (http://www.5i5p.net/bbs/ ) where members share shopping strategies and swap beauty tips. More radically, some review sites focus on plastic surgery procedures and specialists. Plastic Surgery Review Net (http://dp100.net/ ) reviews plastic surgeons and hospitals, and displays pertinent information such as professional CV, specialty, and age. The front page currently features nose-jobs (http://dp100.net/xiangmu/65 ), with five doctors and three hospitals recommended for the procedure. Recognizing the possibility for astro-turfing, the website allows netizens to evaluate the usefulness of other netizen’s reviews by voting them “useful” (有用) or “fake” (太假).

IT ::
After cosmetics, IT seems to be the most popular product category for netizens to review. Major tech sites like Donews (http://donews.com ) and ZOL (http://zol.com.cn ) provide ratings functionality alongside more professional reviews and product promotions, and IT is featured prominently on more general-interest review sites. For example, Holaba (http://www.holaba.com.cn/ ), a Shanghai-based review website with a brand-based concept, features IT as the top category on the front page, and at the moment most of the featured products are IT-related. Members can rate brands and their products on a 1-10 scale, and leave more detailed ratings in comments, which themselves can be rated by other members. What’s most interesting about the Holaba site is its “Brand War” feature (http://www.holaba.com.cn/brandwar ), which right now is pitting Motorola, Nokia, and Apple-branded mobile phones against each other (as of this writing, more than 3,000 ratings have been entered for each brand and Apple is in the lead with 9.7, versus Nokia’s 9.4 and Motorola’s 9.2. Members who vote get a chance to win a prizes: in the first stage, 600 10-yuan phone cards, in the second stage (currently in progress), 150 100-yuan phone cards, and in the third stage, an actual mobile phone (the model depends on which brand wins the Brand War). Members can choose to recommended (and not-recommended) products, which are then featured on their member page (here’s one from leading commenter “apang” http://bit.ly/1qHbyS ). The site’s contact page (http://bit.ly/WbBzC ) has a “business cooperation” category, but it’s not clear on the rest of the site if any brands featured are a result of a partnership. 92DP (http://www.92dp.com/ ), whose digit-name translates as “I just love reviewing” (就爱点评), has a mix of cosmetics and IT on the front page. Its unique offering is video-based reviews: members upload clips of their impressions of products they own. In this clip (http://bit.ly/18oscq ), user “shuyuting843″ reviews the Sony T700 digital camera using a typical post-90s overhead camera angle. To foster community participation, the website encourages new users to post their “mug shot” in an introductory thread (http://bit.ly/10nqMw ), and other special activities are frequently updated on the features page (http://www.92dp.com/zhuanti/ ). Brand participation is mostly limited to web ads (tech has a presence in the form of ads for the iPod Nano), but there are also a number of brand landing pages, such as Canon (http://www.92dp.com/brand/canon ) and Shiseido (资生堂 http://www.92dp.com/brand/ ), which is linked directly off the front page. There’s virtually no limit to how specialized review sites can be, so long as there’s a ready audience. The Wow8 (http://wow8.org/ ) website is a source of maps for Warcraft and other RPGs. It has a fairly standard BBS discussion forum, but it also has one subsite devoted to map ratings (http://dp.wow8.org/ ), where netizens can rate and leave comments on the maps featured on the site.

education ::
Rate Teachers (评师 http://www.pinglaoshi.com/ ) claims to cover a million instructors at over 3,000 institutes of higher learning. Smack on the front page are links to pages rating teachers at China’s most prestigious universities, such as Peking and Tsinghua, and rankings of professors by quantitative merit (http://bit.ly/vVSem ), charm (http://bit.ly/H6TJJ ), and a more qualitative aggregation of user comments (http://bit.ly/zfkDS ). Site members grade professors according to course difficulty (易), helpfulness (助), clarity (晰), and course interest (趣), as well as personal charm (魅力). Here’s a page for a professor at the Central Academy of Drama (http://bit.ly/GABsS ) who is generally liked by students (one even has a crush on him), although a few think he’s a little abnormal. Teachers can respond to reviews left on their page once they have verified their identity, but that function doesn’t seem to be used much. As befits an education-related site, sponsorship is from book-related sites such as Amazon.cn. The Rate Teachers caused a bit of controversy back in 2007 (http://bit.ly/r7vOd ) when the mainland media reported that some teachers were upset about negative reviews they received, and other observers suggested that the site could be subject to libel claims. However, those concerns seem to have been in the minority, and the website takes pains to focus on the best teachers rather than the worst. RVedu (http://www.rvedu.com/ ), a website run by e-learning provider Ambow (http://www.ambow.com.cn/ ), is a general education portal with a focus on ratings (the subtitle of the site is “Education Ratings Net” 教育点评网). At RVedu, schools rather than teachers are the focus of ratings (http://www.rvedu.com/daxue ), and the website covers state-run, private (http://www.rvedu.com/minban ), art school (http://www.rvedu.com/art ), exchange programs (http://www.rvedu.com/liuxue ), and individual majors (http://www.rvedu.com/zhuanye ). Would you believe that city planning (城市规划) is currently the hottest major on the site?

[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.]

:: in light of the role Web 2.0 and online communications played in the recent unrest in Xinjiang, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at where and how China’s ethnic minorities congregate via online community in China. A bit of context for unknowing readers: China has 56 officially recognized ethic groups. 55 of them are minorities, with the majority ethnic group, Han, accounting for 90+% of China’s population.

The scale and diversity of the Chinese Internet means that members of China’s 55 ethnic minorities looking for online communities that reflect their offline culture have a wide variety of options available to them. Although there are occasional problems, as in the case of Uyghur discussion forums suspended after the Urumqi riots, or when community websites of groups in China’s more “restive” regions sometimes have to deal with the firm hand of government authorities, the Chinese Internet still has a wealth of resources for people who want to meet others like themselves online, or who want to converse in their own language.

Below is a snapshot of some online communities for five different minority groups in China: Uyghur, Tibetan, Mongolian, Hakka, and Manchu. Non-Chinese languages might require installing special fonts or viewing pages in a particular web browser, but discussion on many of the linked sites is conducted in standard Chinese script.

Uyghur ::
The most visible forum for Uyghurs in Xinjiang was the Uighur Online BBS discussion forum (维吾尔在线), run by economist Ilham Tohti. After the recent Urumqi riots, the website was blocked because of its use as a communication tool for rioters, and Ilham was detained by police. It’s still available through a proxy, though. It has active sub-forums for Uyghur issues, ethnic thought, and Han society, and even one for Hui people in predominantly Uyghur areas. On the newsy side of things, sub-boards range from current events to Uyghur issues in the foreign media. Translation between traditional ethnic languages, Mandarin Chinese, and English is a featured activity, with assignments handed out to interested members in exchange for system credits. A companion Uyghur-language BBS has a wide range of posts written in Latin script. My Uyghur is a Xinjiang-registered portal written in Uyghur Arabic script, and hosts BBS discussion forums in both Uyghur Arabic and in Chinese. Interestingly, many of the discussion threads on the Chinese forum are written in a mix of Chinese characters and Latin-script Uyghur. The My Uyghur website has an associated blog group on Netease with around one thousand members who post about Uyghur culture, faith, and customs, mostly in Chinese.

Tibetan ::
Tibet Culture, a Gansu-registered blog host and discussion forum, is an active community for Chinese-language discussion about Tibet and Tibetans. The BBS discussion forum has a range of sub-forums including Tibetan culture, literature, and Buddhist texts, but the blog section is far more interesting. pulls down several dozen blog posts a day ranging from art to t-shirts to current events like the Urumqi riots to Tibetan Buddhism. Most of the blog posts are in Chinese; occasionally Tibetan-language posts will be put up as image files. The government-run Tibet Information Center also hosts a blog service that covers many of the same topics; judging from the tag cloud, education is a major focus, as is the Dalai Lama, who takes a major drubbing from the site’s bloggers. Displaying Tibetan script is still an issue for many web browsers today, so Tibetan-language websites are doubly impenetrable to outsiders (you may have to try some of the links listed here in a number of different browsers to get them to render properly). ChodMe is a Tibetan-language blog host associated with the news portal TibetCM. Discussion-forum-wise, the Tibetan Youth BBS gets a fair amount of traffic.

Mongolian ::
The Mongolian Youth forum is a bilingual BBS that hosts discussion in both Chinese and Mongolian. On the Chinese side, the sub-board for international Mongol issues is quite popular and focuses largely on the country of Mongolia, with threads like this look at the army. The Mongolian-language side has less traffic, and the most popular sub-board seems to be about the environment and customs. The Mongolian Teacher Forum describes its mission to be “saving ethnic education” (拯救民族教育). The forum is mostly dedicated to pedagogical topics, with discussions over ethnicity-related issues quite common. In one re-posted article, the author questions why Inner Mongolia has no real Mongolian university: “Why can’t the Mongolians, who once founded the mightiest empire of the world, even build a Mongolian university in their own autonomous region?” Many of the active posters are teachers. For example, “Chasna”, a female Mongolian elementary school teacher has 541 posts. In one post, she talks about her experiences teaching ethics to young students. “Taliinhan” (塔林汗), which means “friend of the prairie” in Mongolian, is a forum about environmental protection issues in Inner Mongolia. A large proportion of discussion is dedicated to laws and regulations. The “Taliinhan environmental protection association,” an NGO founded in 2004, is the force behind the forum. Taliinhan seeks to “protect the prairie and the interest of the farmers within the boundary of law,” and one of their offline activities is the distribution of law texts to Mongolian farmers. QQ (57162485) and MSN () groups are available to further facilitate group communication. Sites in Mongolian occasionally give users a choice between a Cyrillic version (used more in outer Mongolia) and vertical Mongolian script (which has only become practical since the introduction of Windows Vista, and which still generally requires the use of the Internet Explorer browser). This BBS discussion forum, affiliated with the Mongolian News Portal of China, uses software from Inner Mongolian IT company Menksoft. Other solutions exist: The MGLBlog host uses Flash to display Mongol script.

Hakka ::
Although it arguably should be, Hakka (客家) is not officially recognized as one of China’s 56 ethnic Groups. Hakka speakers are classified as Han Chinese, and they live mainly in Guangdong, Jiangxi, and Fujian. The lack of official recognition rankles some young people, who discuss various propositions for a “Hakka Province” or a “Hakka Municipality” (or even, tongue-in-cheek, a “Hakka Kingdom”). A thread on the Hakka Online BBS discussion forum argues in favor of a Hakka homeland, which one commenter suggests establishing around Meizhou, Guangdong. Earlier this year, Hakka Online launched its first annual pop music competition, which solicited original videos for Hakka-language songs (most of them from Taiwan). Another website, Hakka Forum, receives a couple dozen posts a day and has message boards for topics ranging from Hakka folk music and films to famous Hakka people, including an analysis of the family tree of Sun Yat-sen, who was born into a Hakka family. Hakka identity is a factor here, too: the discussion forum carries the tag-line, “The 56 ethnicities are like 56 flowers. One flower is the Han, and it has eight petals. One of these petals is the Hakka.” Hakka musicians and political figures are also featured on China Hakka Hall. The Hakka Sky BBS is a relatively active forum with about a thousand comments a day, most of them in the Hakka News and Cultural Encyclopedia boards. As Hakka people are spread across a large part of China, there are numerous smaller, local forums like Guangzhou Hakka, and Meizhou Hakka, which launched just this past April. Recent posts of interest include a student’s account of a trip to Yongding in Fujian, where he enjoyed ancient streets and earthen buildings that have been granted World Cultural Heritage status. Another post is about the “brewing” (酿) of food in Hakka culture, in this case, how to make brewed bitter melon. Interestingly, despite the unique language that defines part of Hakka identity, most of the conversation on all of these Hakka forums is conducted in Mandarin, except in cases where the finer points of Hakka itself are under discussion.

Manchu ::
Although a sizable group of people identify themselves as Manchu in China, the language and culture has practically vanished. Consequently, online Manchu communities feature discussions of traditional Manchu culture and introductory language materials from a learner’s perspective. Solonju, for example, has an online Manchu textbook and a BBS forum for discussion in both Chinese and Romanized Manchu. The Manchus website and BBS discussion forum, registered in Beijing, is written almost entirely in Chinese (except for a title written in Manchu and Jurchen script). One of the popular sub-boards is “Root finding,” where netizens can trace their genealogy based on their family name and the area they once lived. Other active boards include discussion of Manchu history and “Modern Manchu,” which consists of notifications for current Manchu cultural activities. Similarly, in the iManchu discussion forums, the hottest sub-board is devoted to the discussion of ethnic history. A Manchu blog group on Sohu has moderately active discussions of topics like Manchu script and traditional culture in a modern setting. The Internet also provides a number of Manchu language tools. A Manchu script creator converts Romanized Manchu into vertical Manchu script, and Enenggi hosts a Manchu word of the day and an online Manchu dictionary. Although the Manchu people of the northeast may have lost their language, the Xibe people of Xinjiang, who are related to the Manchu but are classified as an entirely separate ethnic group, retain a language that is quite close to classical Manchu. Xibe Web has a low-traffic BBS discussion forum where posts are made in Romanized Xibe. The website Xibe Culture has a similar Xibe-language BBS discussion forum.

// 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.]

:: microblogging platforms like Twitter, Fanfou, and Jiwai (see this previous Friday 5) are used by Chinese netizens to pass around links, memes, short tidbits of breaking news, and other kinds of information that can fit into 140 characters. In other markets, particularly the US market, companies and brands have long been taking advantage of this platform as a communications / marketing tool, and while the tactic still seems to be in its embryonic stage in China, a number of commercial entities have found success with their interactions with audiences on microblogging platforms. The below five-point brief outlines a several examples of this, and provides a reasonably comprehensive overview of what companies and brands are using microblogging in China and how they are using it.

[Note that because micrblogging platforms are often used by netizens to share "sensitive information" and Coordinate related offline political activities, etc. (see recent events in Iran and Xinjiang), the Chinese government occasionally interferes with their operation. This week is unfortunately one of those occasions. Twitter is currently blocked on the Chinese mainland and Fanfou has been inoperable since Tuesday night (following a brief "maintenance hiatus" over the June 4 Tiananmen Square anniversary). As a result, some of the links below may not work properly if you are accessing the web from mainland China without a proxy or VPN. All links will be fine once accessibility to Twitter and Fanfou is returned, hopefully soon.]

cars ::
GM has a Fanfou account launched with little fanfare in February. It now has 14,469 followers, placing it fourth out of all organizations on Fanfou (the rest of the top five are media outlets and Fanfou itself, although the rankings are a little suspect: see HP below). A Global Entrepreneur article on microblogging in March featured the GM Fanfou experiment, and it has since become a standard case study example of a major brand taking advantage of a microblogging platform in China. GM updates its Fanfou page every few days with links to videos and photo collections of offline promotional activities, most recently the Transformer 2-related Camaro push. The individual maintaining GM’s Fanfou account interacts with followers fairly regularly: about a third of the recent updates are replies to other Fanfou users, which have included topics such as 4S shops, fuel economy, the official status of the account,  and its 10,000th follower on June 26. By comparison, check out Ford China’s official Fanfou page, which is far more recent and has just a couple dozen followers. A fan-maintained account for Ford Racing is more popular and provides links to race information, results, outside blog posts, and to the Ford Racing website.

computers ::
Hewlett Packard leverages its Fanfou account basically as an interactive customer service hotline. Fanfou users following HP ask the company questions about its product specifications and service issues. Fanfou users accustomed to inauthentic company / brand accounts frequently inquire about the account itself: is the account HP-authorized or just run by a fan? Replies generally include a customer service number and a link to the HP homepage. HP has recently had to deal with other Fanfou users asking about the controversial Green Dam filter software. The account also makes use of Fanfou’s photo sharing capabilities to post images of cool HP and Compaq-branded gadgets. Dell’s home sales service has a popular English-language Twitter account, , which posts product announcements and cool online deals. It has tens of thousands of followers. By contrast, the Chinese versions on Fanfou, and Jiwai, had only a couple dozen followers and mostly stopped updating in April. However, run by , who maintains the company’s Chinese-language corporate blog, continues to update with product announcements and links to articles, so it appears that Dell’s success with microblogging in Chinese has been mixed. Lenovo has two accounts on Fanfou, one for the company itself and a second for its ThinkPad brand. The Lenovo account mostly reposts updates from the ThinkPad account, which mostly posts links to the Yamato Lab blog on Sina, which is kept by Arimasa Naitoh, head of Lenovo R&D in Japan, and which, thanks to its promotion on Sina’s tech channel, has a far greater audience than either of the Fanfou accounts.

software ::
Opera, the Norwegian web browser developer, keeps a popular Fanfou account that has several thousand followers. The company has been actively targeting the Chinese market for several years and has cultivated a dedicated user group for its desktop and mobile editions. It uses its Fanfou account to interact with other users, which has recently included information on how to post from the Opera China BBS to Fanfou, font issues in Opera Mini and China recruitment. By contrast, its less-trafficked Jiwai account is mostly devoted to reposting news from its official China site. Applications software developer Kingsoft has microblogs set up for many of its utilities, such as Defender (金山密保) and Shield (金山网盾), along with its Labs (金山互联网安全实验室). These Jiwai accounts mostly carry notices of and links to incremental software updates, virus definition updates, and bug reports. Kingsoft has customized the right-hand sidebar of its Jiwai pages to include a button that allows netizens to download the software directly from the page itself rather than having to click through to the Kingsoft website. Kingsoft’s Fanfou page for Antivirus (毒霸) is mostly devoted to feeds from its official blog, but the company has personalized the page: “Antivirus Safety Bulletin” enjoys the music of Aerosmith, Radiohead, Coldplay, and Jonathan Lee, and likes the films Fight Club and Amelie. Perhaps because of the sheer number of Kingsoft accounts, none is followed by more than a couple hundred people at the moment. Not to be outdone, Rising, another anti-virus company, has its own Fanfou account that lists the latest additions to its list of websites that contain trojans or viruses. This information is normally sent automatically to users through virus definition updates, which may escape the notice of ordinary users, so its presence on a daily Fanfou update gives followers an image of a company that’s committed to its software.

media ::
Microblogging would seem to be a perfect fit for online media outlets: as more and more people are using Twitter and Fanfou feeds to locate interesting links, media entities can post teasers to their microblog and direct their followers to their website. The Southern Media Group, known for its investigative journalism and incisive commentary, is using microblogging in a big way. and over 20,000 on Fanfou. Another publication, , which it gratefully acquired from a fan just a couple weeks ago. Malicious username squatting and hoax Twittering usually makes the headlines, but once in a while a brand can obtain an easy-to-remember account from a benevolent microblogger who registered it first. Southern Weekly has several thousand more followers on Fanfou. The Beijing News, which is affiliated with the Southern Media Group, has a popular Fanfou account as well with upward of 15,000 followers. Muckracking business magazine Caijing has a Fanfou account with 1300+ followers. None of these accounts is interactive: they all make use of the easy link sharing functionality of microblogging, but do nothing else in the way of brand building or engaging readers / audiences in conversation or dialogue about news, events, etc. General exposure and traffic back to the main publication website is their aim – a missed opportunity indeed.

local brands ::
Smaller local brands can use microblogs as an efficient way to interact with increasingly wired audiences. A boutique chain like Sculpting in Time Cafe (雕刻时光), cafes that cater to a young, hip clientele, is a perfect fit for the sort of netizen that follows microblogs. Its Fanfou account, run by one of its Nanjing staff, interacts with other users and posts news tagged with its locations in Beijing, Xi’an, and Nanjing. The account was recently upgraded by Fanfou to become an “official” microblog. Recent updates include a link to a blog post about romance writers visiting a Beijing location, and a number of exchanges with followers about the identity of the person behind the account. Guangzhou’s Tophour bar is fairly Web2.0 enabled, with a Douban group that lists QQ, MSN, and Google groups, as well as a Fanfou account. Tophour is a venue for salons on literature and current events, so many of its updates involve spreading the word about upcoming items of interest. It’s also fairly interactive with its roughly four hundred followers, including a recent exchange about how it conducts promotion for concert events. Yilin Publishing House, which issues translations of foreign literature, launched a Fanfou account in June that currently has more than 800 followers. It interacts with other Fanfou users and posts links to new titles, cover photos, and reviews on Douban. Recent interactions include a user asking about how illustrators are recruited, and a joking personal response to another Fanfou user that came with a prominent disclaimer, “This does not represent the official position of Yilin Publishing House.”

// 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.]