:: 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

:: this is an absolute must-read for anyone with an interest in the future (and now) of human behavior or anything digital, particularly marketing, communications, and media. I don’t want to spoil it with any commentary / analysis that is already captured (more brilliantly and more compellingly than I would do it) in the below presentation. Slide 13 perhaps says it all though: “…the next generation Internet strategy has got nothing to do with the Internet…”

Okay, one more great combo-quote from the deck, from slides 140 and 153-155: “…having a presence on social media is not social media – talking, discovering, and building relationships are. It’s the nature of your activity that is important, not your choice of technology. We are moving from channels where brands are law enforcers, to arenas where brands are participants. This means that every screen, interface, and object is an opportunity for dialogue, interaction, response, and collaboration. Explore these opportunities rather than just tell your story.”

Last one, I promise, from slide 93: “…our job is not getting people from A to B to C, (our job) is creating value…” Bravo, well done Helge Tennø.  // AjS

:: 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.]

:: I can’t help think this video is actually a Mentos viral. But I don’t mind. Notice the soft product placement in the background at the 0:55 mark, and the avoidance of other product logos / names throughout the video, namely the “wall mounted flat screen TV,” “DJ turntables,” etc. Either way, I think it’s a great clip. Very creative and a lot of fun. Does anyone know more about it? Bravo, well done.  // AjS

:: my friend and ex-Edelman Digital (Japan) colleague Yajima Satoshi is now working to launch the South Korean search engine Naver in Japan, which will live here. More news to come.  // AjS

:: born in early nineties on e-mailing lists and newsgroups frequented by overseas Chinese, online Chinese literature has been around for nearly two decades. But it was only in 1998, when Cai Zhiheng posted his breakout novel First Intimate Contact on the Web, that online literature really took off on the Chinese mainland. The field has exploded in the past decade, and online tastes are increasingly driving the print publishing marketplace. See Baidu Baike for the major events and players in the history of online literature.

Online literature is a huge topic on the Chinese Internet, and I am only able to capture a small fraction of the wealth of material that’s out there. However, the below categories is a fairly representative snapshot of a very interesting and evolving subculture that those who are interested in understanding local Chinese Web culture should be aware of.

From a online brand engagement point of view, there is a world of opportunity in this space if done correctly.

fantasy ::
Chinese Online gaming giant Shanda has a “net-lit” arm consisting of three distinct sites. Qidian (起点中文网) is primarily focused on fantasy and is one of the largest online literature Web sites in China. It was founded in 2003 out of the Chinese Magic Fantasy Union (玄幻文学协会), an earlier site formed in 2001 by fantasy enthusiasts, and was acquired by Shanda in 2004. The hit pulp adventure series Ghost Blows Out the Light (鬼吹灯) was serialized on Qidian in 2006. Qidian remains focused on original fantasy, martial arts, and military adventure fiction. Fantasy is the top-listed category on many general literature portals, including Sina’s original book channel (新浪读书:原创文学). The hit adventure series of 2008, The Tibet Code (藏地密码), was a Sina books serialization. Online games, which tend to be fantasy-themed, are extended by fans who write their own original stories using characters and settings from the same universe. There’s a large section devoted to game fiction online literature portal 17k (一起看), which has the backing of ebook company ChineseAll (中文在线). Sometimes things go in reverse: online fantasy writer Xiao Ding serialized his epic Exterminating the Immortals (诛仙) on the Fantasy Sword literary portal, since acquired by Tom.com. It was subsequently published in print, and then adapted by gaming company Perfect World into a popular fantasy game whose character classes and setting are based on Xiao Ding’s world.

time travel romance ::
A popular genre of online literature is the “time travel love story,” and many net-literature Web sites feature a category called “time travel” or “time travel romance” (Sina’s). These stories typically take the form of a modern person being thrown back in time to experience romance and intrigue in some grander, more exciting setting, usually somewhere in China’s dynastic history, like the the Tang Dynasty court, but often a fictional setting, such as the Grand View Garden as depicted in Dream of the Red Chamber. The BBS forum Across the Ocean of Stars (穿越星海), which receives several thousand posts a day, is devoted to time travel romances (motto: “I fell in love with you across time”). Love99 (爱久久) hosts romantic net-literature, and as of this writing the two featured stories are both time-travel pieces, “Pursuing you across time” (穿越时空追到你) and “Time Travel Bodyguard” (超时空保镖). International time travel is possible as well; see below.

women’s literature ::
Another large Shanda property is Jinjiang (晋江原创网), a site for original writing by women started in 2003 out of a BBS hosted in a small city in Fujian Province. Shanda bought into it in 2007, and the site currently has long-term contracts with around 2,000 original writers. Breakout hits from Jinjiang include A Dream Back to the Qing Empire (梦回大清) by Jinzi and The Pharaoh’s Favorite (法老的宠妃), by You Shi, both time-travel romances. You Shi also hosts her work on her popular blog, and runs her own literature BBS. Jinjiang is massive net-literature portal; at the other end of the spectrum are Web sites like 9jjz (九界网), which is devoted to women’s writing on a smaller, less-commercialized scale. It has an annual writing contest and entices writers to post work on the Web site by offering editing services.

pure literature ::
Non-genre fiction is a harder sell. The Chinese Internet is littered with abandoned Web sites set up by groups of writers whose output was too insular to sustain a community, or who moved on to other interests. Heilan, an online forum founded in 2002 for more serious-minded literature and criticism, grew out of an underground literary magazine of the same name shut down in the mid-90s, and has managed to stay afloat. It has even seen several of its books move to print. The site publishes a monthly e-magazine with a rotating editorship that collects recent works by site members. Youth-oriented Rongshuxia (榕树下) is still around after a complicated odyssey of acquisition and failed takeovers. The site was red-hot early in the decade and gave birth to best-selling young authors such as Murong Xuecun, Annie Baobei, and Lin Changzhi. It was acquired by Bertelsmann in 2002 for USD 10 million and sold off again in 2006 for USD 5 million, and just this year, founder Zhu Weilian announced that he had abandoned plans to re-acquire the company, in favor of building a competitor from the ground up. Rongshuxia may not have the same visibility it once had, but members continue to post original literature to the site.

other literary forms ::
Net-literature in China takes other forms in addition to novels and short stories, and two of the most popular are “short-shorts” and “relay fiction.” Short Short Authors (小小说作家网) is a Web site devoted to the form, which generally demands stories of around one-thousand characters that describe a single event during a single time in a single setting (the so-called “law of four ones”). Short Short Authors has sub-boards for original writing, critiquing, foreign translations, and even more limited “micro-fiction” (蚂蚁小说), known as “ant stories.” Relay fiction, in which multiple authors take turns writing successive chapters of a longer story, is a game often played on literary forums and Web sites. Endd.cn (嗯等等, meaning “Oh, wait a minute”) is a niche social networking site designed to facilitate this form of collaborative fiction writing. Members post original writing and, if they so choose, allow other members to take the reins and contribute a chapter or two. Any story with a “Let me take over” (我来接龙) button is fair game, and the Web site includes functions for discussion and private messaging as well.

// 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.]

:: the paper below was one of three “best poster award” winners at the 17th International World Wide Web Conference. It’s re-published on 56minus1 with permission of the original author (Louis Lei Yu). Link here to download a PDF version of the paper (with proper referencing, footnoting, citing, etc.). // AjS

Guanxi in the Chinese Web – a Study of Mutual Linking
by: Louis Lei Yu, Yan Zhuang, Valerie King

ABSTRACT
Guanxi is a type of dyadic social interaction based on feelings (“qing”) and trust (“xin”). Long studied by scholars of Chinese origin, it has recently drawn the attention of researchers outside of China. We define the concept of guanxi as applied to the interaction between web sites. We explore methods to identify guanxi in the Chinese web, show the unique characteristics of the Chinese web which result from it, and introduce a mechanism for simulating guanxi in a web graph model.

1. GUANXI
The Chinese web is notable for a large number of mutually linking web sites. We hypothesize that this is in part a manifestation of a social construct known as guanxi, which can be widely observed in Chinese culture. Guanxi has been described as “an informal … personal connection between two individuals who are bounded by an implicit psychological contract to [maintain] a long term relationship, mutual commitment, loyalty and obligation.” Dyadic relationships are the fundamental units of guanxi networks. To establish guanxi, two parties must first establish a guanxi base: a tie between two individuals, e.g., same birthplace, same workplace, same family, close friendship. Also, two individuals can claim to have guanxi by acquaintance through a third party with whom they both have guanxi. Once a guanxi base is formed, guanxi can be developed through the exchange of resources ranging from moral support and friendship to favors and material goods.

2. GUANXI APPLIED TO THE WEB
We regard a web site as representing a company, a person or a news source. Two web sites may exhibit guanxi by mutual linking. Their linking may reflect a prior existing guanxi relationship, or two web sites can establish a guanxi base through common interests or through a third web site. We consider link exchange schemes, where only a phone call or an email is all that is required to establish the guanxi base and linking is done for the sole purpose of promoting one’s own web site, a weaker form of guanxi which we call cheap guanxi. After establishing a guanxi base, two web sites will reach a mutual agreement to exchange resources; in this case, these resources take the form of links. Distinguishing between strong and cheap guanxi is one goal of our work.

High degree nodes: As establishing strong guanxi takes effort, mutual links incident to nodes with many mutual links are more likely to be weak guanxi. In some of our studies, we filter such edges out when considering strong guanxi.

Triangles: If two web sites A and B establish guanxi via a third web site C, mutual links may form between each pairs of the web sites. We identify two structures: a Type 1 triangle, composed of two mutual links and one uni-directional link and a Type 2 triangle in which all three sides are mutual links, to be good indications of two websites establishing guanxi via a third website. Over time, we expect some Type 1 triangles to turn into Type 2 triangles. We take the number of triangles involving a mutual link to be one indication of the strength of its guanxi.

Textual clues: Chinese web sites often have a specially titled section of links labeled “friendly links” or sometimes in the case of commercial web sites “partnership links.” These links are likely to indicate either the existence of guanxi or the desire to establish guanxi with the other web sites.

3. STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF GUANXI IN THE CHINESE WEB
We use a web graph data set which is representative of the Chinese web: CWT200G collected by Peking University in May 2006 and construct a digraph as follows: each web site is represented by a node. There is a single directed edge from node A to node B in the site graph iff there is at least one link from a web page at web site A to a web page at web site B. We refer to the resulting digraph as the Chinese site graph. It has 11,570 nodes and 475,880 edges. We randomly sampled 30,000 web sites from the data obtained from a general web crawl conducted by Microsoft in 2006 and constructed a general site graph of 30,000 nodes
and 654,240 edges.

Directly comparing these two site graphs can be misleading since they are of different sizes and densities. So, we use the hostgraph model (where links are created by copying links of a randomly chosen prototype node) to generate random graphs with properties similar to the Chinese web. That is, by tuning the parameters of the hostgraph model, we randomly generate graphs comparable in size, density, and in-degree distribution to that of the Chinese site graph. We found that the hostgraph model cannot explain the unusual number of mutual links in the Chinese site graph. A detailed comparison is illustrated in Figure 1.

4. A GUANXI MODEL OF THE WEB
We propose a mechanism to model the evolution of the guanxi structure on the web and we inject this mechanism into the hostgraph model to produce a new model for the Chinese web. The guanxi mechanism is defined as follows: in each time step, we add k guanxi edges to a node A. The destinations of the k guanxi edges are decided as follows: we first choose a prototype uniformly at random from the existing nodes.

1. With probability q, we add k edges with a method similar to the hostgraph model. Once each edge is established, there is a probability f that the destination will link back to A.

2. With probability 1 − q, the node A first links to the prototype and then copies the remaining k − 1 edges from the guanxi links of the prototype randomly. Once each link is established, there is a probability g that the destination will link back to A.

The copying process in (1) simulates web site A’s attempt to form cheap guanxi links with popular web sites in order to promote his/her own web site. We set the probability f to be proportional to the relative popularity (as determined by in-degree) of A and inversely proportional to the popularity of destination B. In (2), we simulate the creation of guanxi links through a third party. Here g may be a fixed constant if owner of both sites have established guanxi outside the web. Overall, the guanxi model can be described as follows: at each time step, depending on the density of the graph, either a new node with k edges is added or k edges are added to an existing node chosen uniformly at random. The k edges are added as follows: (1) With probability α, we add k edges to destinations using the hostgraph model; (2) With probability 1 −α, we add k guanxi edges to destinations using the guanxi mechanism.

We use this new model to generate a random graph with similar properties of the Chinese site graph extracted from CWT200G. The results are summarized in Figure 2. By changing the parameters, we can control the percentage of nodes and links involved in mutual links, Type 1 and Type 2 triangles respectively.

5. ONGOING WORK AND APPLICATIONS
Currently, we are conducting experiments to refine our ability to distinguish between strong and cheap guanxi, by analyzing textual indications of guanxi in the Chinese web and studying mutual links and related graph structures as they evolve over time. We are examining our findings in light of studies of social networks and the economics of link exchange schemes. To understand guanxi on the web as a cultural phenomon, we intend to examine site graphs of other nationalities. We believe this work may have applications to tasks such as producing personally tailored recommendations, filtering out web spam, and understanding social networks.

:: Chinese netizens enjoy playing with language online. They make up new words, insert alphabetic and numerical abbreviations between Chinese characters in their posts, write backwards and upside down to trip-up the censors, and trade catchphrases with wild abandon.

To outsiders, however, conversations full of acronyms, ancient characters, and allusions (sometimes quite obscure) to Chinese culture / history is quite difficult to understand.

To help with the “decoding,” below are some basic explanations of frequently-used vocabulary by Chinese netizens:

visual pun: “囧” [pronounced “jiong,” in this case; other times pronounced "jing"] ::
After becoming widely used online in China, the past couple of months have seen this character explode into mainstream media / culture. It’s been splashed onto the cover of books and magazines, in advertisements, and on clothing. The obscure Chinese character 囧, which originally meant “bright,” looks like someone gaping in astonishment, so Chinese netizens reinterpreted it as a general response of helplessness or gloom. Sam Flemming of CIC talks a bit more about it here. Also, a number of well-known Web sites have sprung up around 囧 culture: 阿囧 | 囧客官方 | 囧人王国 | 囧的官方网站. Some other online visual examples of 囧: .

catch-phrase: “economize: drink maotai” ["节约点，喝茅台" pronounced "jie yue dian, he mao tai"] ::
[Warning, this is very funny] The latest online catch-phrase was inspired by a report about a government official in Sichuan who beat up a liquor seller for overcharging on a bottle of Maotai alcohol. The explanation given: “Director Cao wanted to economize, because money is tight at the personnel bureau and he still owes money for house repairs.” Chinese netizens are always quick to pick up on hypocrisy, particularly on the part of local governments – the irony of a bureau director claiming to want to save money by buying China’s most famous brand of alcohol (and beating someone up over it) was too good to pass up. [link]

visual Pun: “槑” [pronounced “mei”] ::
An obscure alternate form of 梅, plum, the character 槑 is formed from two characters, which means “dull / stupid / foolish.” Chinese netizens use it to refer to anyone who is especially slow-witted. Because it kind of looks like two people standing next to each other, it shows up quite a bit in cartoons and image macros alongside 囧. Another adapted character, 雷 (“thunder”), is used to mean “shock.” For something especially shocking, the character is tripled to produce this character: 靐 (pronounced “bing”). [link] [link]

describing the opposition: FQ, JY, BS ::
When Chinese netizens aren’t having fun playing with catch-phrases and characters, they’re likely arguing with each other, employing shorthand / acronyms to refer to their opponents (and themselves too). FQ means 愤青 (pronounced “fen qing”), “angry youth,” and is used dismissively to refer to ultra-nationalist netizens (of which there are plenty). Some FQ have tried to reclaim the term as a badge of pride. On the other side are JY, 精英 (pronounced “jing ying”), “elite”: intellectuals who tend to be liberal and supportive of universal values. A third abbreviation, BS for 鄙视 (pronounced “XX”), “despise or disdain,” is tossed around by netizens on both sides of the aisle.

modifier: “山寨“ [pronounced “shan zhai”] ::
The word 山寨 literally means “mountain fort” or “village,” but is also used as a modifier meaning “knock-off,” to describe off-brand / fake products manufactured in small, tucked-away shops in Chinese villages. Some of these no-name brands have begun to advertise using celebrity-lookalikes as spokespersons. Knock-off F4, knock-off Emil Chou, and knock-off Jay Chou have all turned up in advertisements, drawing mockery from Chinese netizens. The term is even being applied to Chinese remakes of foreign TV and movies.

// 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.]