friday 5 | how chinese netizens share online ::
Thursday, April 30th, 2009:: sharing information on the Chinese Internet is no more complicated than simple cut-and-paste. Netizens who come across something that appeals to them often full-scale copy-and-paste it into a blog or BBS forum post (most of the time without attribution) and share it directly. And of course, friends / colleagues frequently just resort to sharing links / content via instant messaging or email. Yet more sophisticated and useful tools do exist to help Chinese netizens organize and share articles, Web pages, and all sorts of other online content on a larger / public scale. Known by the names “bookmarking” (书签) or “social bookmarking” (网摘, literally “web digest”), these systems provide netizens with a handy link or button that will submit the current page / piece of content to a personal or public index, and allow users to add tags to classify information in what’s known as a “folksonomy” (分众分类法). Although still occasionally standalone Web sites (like the well-known Delicious.com), these services are more commonly folded into other social networking Web sites, or have additional community-oriented functionality, as the list below demonstrates.
Digg clones ::
The Chinese Internet has given birth to a slew of Digg clones: Web sites whose users submit short descriptions of interesting Web content and then collectively vote the submissions up (”dig”) or down (”bury”). These have found varying degrees of success — it takes a critical mass of users to make the voting process interesting / valuable for the community, and many sites die off after failing to build up a viable community. A number of special-interest Digg clones have survived. Leitie (雷贴网) and Zkaoo are geared toward wacky, funny videos, and links. Netizens’ constant thirst for new ways to be amused have generated votes and comments on both these sites. Another problem faced by sites with user-generated content is spam: unscrupulous marketers can exploit the system to swamp genuinely interesting content with their crass advertising. Some sites are better at self-moderating than others. Digg-style voting has been put to more successful use in news sites, where votes determine how stories are ranked / placed on the page. Tech site CNBeta, for example, offers a “Dig view” on its front page that ranks and displays stories by popularity, and user comments are promoted to featured status through a similar voting process.
365key ::
365key was one of the earliest bookmarking and tagging systems in mainland China. The site is associated with the tech Web site Donews, and at the bottom of every Donews article (and on other sites that use the 365key system) users can click a link that says “Save this page on 365key” (收藏此页到365Key) to bookmark the page. For pages that aren’t 365key-enabled, users have the option of using a browser plug-in or a Javascript bookmarklet, or they can manually add the link. The site also provides a Digg-like system for voting up articles; the most “dug” links are featured on the front page of the site. 365key’s navigation bar has special categories for major online communities such as IT168, Mop, VeryCD, and CSDN Tech, which feature the latest and most popular links from those sites that have been bookmarked on 365key. A lot of other independent bookmarkers, such as Leshou, Quzhai (formerly at http://www.quzhai.com), and Shouker followed in 365key’s wake, but few made much of a long-term impression on the Chinese internet.
RSS oriented systems ::
Just as how Google Reader offers a “shared items” feature, many Chinese RSS readers allow their users to summarize, tag, share, and vote on items in their feeds. Zhuaxia, a popular feed reader, supports both bookmarking and recommending, and provides a variety of views for checking out what other users are interested in. The “popular articles” view (热文) lists the highest-ranked recent posts (there’s also a separate chart for popular videos), and users can also look at the most popular articles from the past month or year (note: this is all done through Javascript, so it’s impossible to provide direct links). Xianguo, another web-based RSS reader, emphasizes the voting even more: its front page is dominated by a ranking of the current most popular articles, with a sidebar that features posts shared by popular users. Additional functions of these and other RSS applications were shared in an earlier 56minus1 post. Top-rated articles on both Zhuaxia and Xianguo have far more votes than standalone Digg-like sites, probably because their RSS functionality attracts more users than voting on its own.
social network sharing ::
One of the most popular applications on Chinese SNS Web sites is a function that allows users to syndicate jokes, photos, popular posts, videos, and other Web content to their friends. This functionality is known by various names. Xiaonei calls it “sharing.” A chain of shares from friend to friend will often give an interesting topic a huge amount of attention within a short period of time and spur conversation other places on the Internet. Some Xiaonei users have gained minor celebrity status by finding and distributing interesting content that captures the attention of tens of thousands of other Xiaonei users. Huluwa is an example: this user has 847 friends on Xiaonei itself, plus a group of fans on Douban. Kaixin001 provides a similar functionality through its “repost” function (转帖), which allows friends to share links and content within the Kaixin001 domain. Douban, an SNS based around culture and the arts, uses the term “recommend” for this functionality, and provides a handy bookmarklet allowing site members to add links to their personal Douban feed for sharing with friends.
in-house systems ::
Portals and search engines have their own bookmarking tools. QQ’s bookmark service (QQ书签) integrates the standard link+description+tags format with its social network, including its wildly-popular instant message platform. Bookmarks can be collected through the QQ browser toolbar, other browser plugins and scripts, or through code users insert into the HTML of their own Web sites, and then they can be uploaded into the QQ IM application for use outside the Web browser. The front page of QQ’s bookmarks Web site lists popular links, many of which have been bookmarked by thousands of people. Baidu’s “search saver” tool (搜藏) allows users to build up their own index of bookmarked, tagged pages. Bookmarks can be either public or private; public bookmarks are aggregated into a tagged archive and shared among other Baidu users. Links to Sina’s Vivi still shows up on lots of pages, but that bookmarking system appears to have given up the ghost in 2006 or so — tags no longer work and groups have long since gone dormant. In its place is a system integrated with Sina’s blog service; Sina bloggers can click on a “save” (收藏) link at the bottom of a blog post to put them into a “favorites” list that is viewable to any visitor to their own blog.
// 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.]
