Catshanghai

I spend many hours every week listening to and watching various technology podcasts from Twit, ZD, Revision 3 and CNET. They are all written and presented by former TechTV employees so it little wonder that they are almost exclusively focused on Silicon Valley and North American issues? Occasionally, Europe will get a brief mention and the stingy coverage from China always seems to be about censorship, piracy and the recent explosion of mobile phone and Internet use.

It would be good to find out about Chinese technology trends from a local point of view and I am not talking about the platitudinal state sponsored media or general English language news blogs. I would like to read a well informed local English language technology blog that is on par with the best coverage from Techcrunch. It seems I may have found something good to put into my RSS reader. This morning, I came across a Chinese column in The Register by David Feng, which mentioned that Chinese net users have recently embraced their own version of Twitter called Jiwai.de. Here is an extract:

Meet the local Twitter, Jiwai.de. Hosted fully inside mainland China, fast, and all in Chinese, it’s Twitter for 172 million. It’s probably no wonder that it’s been all the rage. It’s both local (remember China’s really a huge intranet at that) and it’s in the local lingo.

And then there’s the interface. Does Jiwai.de look like Twitter? It doesn’t, actually. Much of Twitter is in sky-blue. Jiwai.de is more orange-y. And it has tabs - the stuff you don’t see on Twitter.

Jiwai.de or Twitter? | Reg Developer

It turns out that David has been syndicating some posts from the Chinese Blognation site, which seems to be just what I was looking for. Blognation has sites covering technology and Web 2.0 stories in thirteen countries, although recent internal strife means that the future of the blognation network is uncertain if not unlikely. ( See this announcement by Blognation’s boss, Sam Sethi). I hope that David Feng can continue to blog full time about Chinese technology issues even if Blognation does not survive.

While we are in this space, there is another worthy English language technology blog that deserves to be added to your blog feed. It is called The China Web2.0 Review. Both sites are in Technorati’s Top 100,000 and the Chinese Blognation site has content that has been picked up by the Register so it gives me some confidence that the sites have some authority. Beyond spotting obvious mistakes and checking the response to stories, it is pretty difficult for a non Chinese speaker to audit these sites for errors. I like Techcrunch for keeping me informed about all sorts of new services from Ning to Flock, but their track record on China is pretty shaky. I lost confidence in Techcrunch’s Chinese coverage when they falsely informed their readers that Google had been blocked by the GFW. (See this post) China Blognation and China Web2.0 Review are both written by native Chinese speakers who are based in this country so they should be in a better position to avoid such basic errors.

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Tags: China, Internet, blogs, media, technology