Earthquake Relief Efforts on China’s Web

Written by Tangos on May 16, 2008
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Regarding tsunami of late 2004, Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web has summarized three ways that people used the Web in response to the disaster:

1) as a constantly updated source of news about the disaster;
2) as a way for ordinary people to respond emotionally;
3) and probably most importantly, to organize aid efforts.

In this post, we try to collect the ways how Chinese Internet users take the web to provide news updates and offer relief efforts.

Source of news. At the beginning of the earthquake, we can only rely on main stream media and web portals to get news about the quake. But when more and more rescuers and volunteers reached the epicenter to offer help, much more user generated content can be found online, which enable us to know more about the aftermath.

You can easily find many photos and text reports by users in Sichuan Province in various BBS, such as Tianya, Xici.net and Baidu Tieba. Especially, since Baidu Tieba is a keyword-based BBS, that’s Baidu Tieba has a board for each keyword, so you can use the name of the county in epicenter to enter a dedicated discuss board on that county, such as Wenchuan and Beichuan, to get information.

Besides general BBS, people also discuss and exchange info in SNS, such as Douban, and in IM groups, both QQ and Baidu Hi has dedicated groups for earthquake; they use blogs, and microblogging tools, such as Twitter, Fanfou to share information; and they upload videos. Besides video uploaded by users, PPLive, a p2p video streaming site, partners with various TV channel to bring live TV reports about earthquake online.

Pray and bless. People in China express their prayers and blessings to victims of earthquake in BBS, widgets and IM. Almost all main web portals have message board for users to express their prayers and blessings; Feedsky has a blessing widget ready to be add to blogs.

MSN China initiated an MSN Messenger campaign called Rainbow, you can add “(R)” before your MSN Messenger screen-name, which will display a rainbow icon, to express your blessings. (via Danwei). Actually, it is not only a blessing, for each signature, MSN China and Guangzhou Toyota will donate 0.1 yuan separately to a fund for rebuilding the school destroyed by the quake.

In additional to news source and blessing, it is more important to use web to provide aid and relief efforts.

People Finder: Though Baidu Tieba and QQ both have a message board dedicated for users to find people and seek help, it is more convenient to use people finder tool of Sina and Netease. Google China just launched a useful tool which enables users to search people information in various BBS, so you need not to check each main BBS to find people.

Online donation: Almost all sites call for donations. Users of Taobao.com and QQ can use Alipay and Tenpay to donate online. When I write this post, QQ users have donated over 10 million yuan. Some other third-party online payment solution providers also support online donations, such as 99Bill and Yeepay.

Taobao launch a campaign, call for sellers of Taobao to join and sell goods, then donate at least 50% of their proceeds.

Alimama encourage its users, most are webmaster of their website, to replace ads on their websites into an images ad to call for donation. By May 15, over 500k donation ads have been online on Alimama’s affiliated website.

If you want to donate, check this post to find the best way for you.

Organize aids: Web is also effective in spreading information and organizing aids efforts among users. Alibaba encourages its users, almost all of them are manufacturers or service providers, to donate not only cash, but also various goods needed in disaster zone. Blogbus let users to register their information for blood donation when needed. On many BBS, you can also easily find posts which people are planning various kinds of aid initiatives.

NGO is a very important force for disaster aid. NGO Aid blog keeps updating latest news of aids efforts by NGO across China. 1kg, a grassroot NPO in China which is dedicated to build a volunteer network to help kids in remote area to have better education, (CNReviews.com has a good profile about 1kg), has set up a special site to offer relief and aids efforts, including collecting information about schools in epicenter, organizing relief activities, and helping to provide necessary resource to rebuild schools.

Collaborative translation: Immediately after the earthquake, users of Yeeyan.com, the collaborative translation community, started to translate related earthquake guides from FEMA, they’ve finished Earthquake Search Strategy and Tactics, and Earthquake Safety Checklist, and are working on Epidemics After Natural Disasters. After the translation, many users distributed the guide through various BBS and website.

If there is anything you think I should include, please leave a comment and I will keep updating the post.

(photo from New York Times)

Donate for Earthquake in Sichuan China

Written by Tangos on May 14, 2008
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Yesterday afternoon, a strong earthquake measured at 7.8 on the Richter scale happened in Sichuan province, China. It is so strong that many people in other provinces, including me in Beijing, over 1500 km away from epicenter, felt the earthquake.

Death toll in Sichuan Province alone has exceeded 12,000 by 4 pm Tuesday, more than 9,400 people were buried in debris, and at least 60,000 people are still unaccounted for in epicenter Wenchuan County. More than 3.46 million houses were wracked.

YellowRibbonFor those who want to contribute to the relief effort, here are some donation information.

(Update: Elliott Ng has a very comprehensive post about relief and donation guide.)

If you are outside China:

1. You can make donation via Paypal to Jet Li One Foundation, a charity foundation by Kung Fu movie star Jet Li. The donations will goes to Red Cross Society of China. The page is all in Chinese, but I think you can find the Paypal button on the right. But it seems you cannot specify the donation is special for earthquake when paying through Paypal, by remittance you can.

2. For Canadian, you can also donate through Canadian Red Cross, which has set up a separated fund for China earthquake.

If you are in China:

1. If you have Alipay or Tenpay account, you can also make donation on Taobao and QQ, also donate to One Foundation.

2. You can donate directly to the Red Cross Society of China, but it is almost impossible to access the website of Red Cross now, possibly due to heavy traffic, you need to remit to their bank account (from Shanghaiist):

Account name: Red Cross Society of China
开户单位：中国红十字会总会

For those who want to donate in RMB: you can send money to the RMB account at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China branch below:
人民币开户行: 中国工商银行 北京分行东四南支行
人民币账号: 0200001009014413252

For those who want to donate in foreign currency, you can send money to the foreign currency account at the CITIC Bank branch below:
外币开户行：中信银行酒仙桥支行
外币账号: 7112111482600000209

Hotline: (8610) 65139999

CNNIC: Over 100 Million China’s Youth Seek Fun Online

Written by Tangos on May 11, 2008
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On April 25th, 2008, China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released the Research Report of China Youth Internet Behaviors. The report studies the online behaviors of 107 million China’s netizens under the age of 25. (Download the report in PDF format here)

According to the report, China’s youth netizens are more inclined to entertainment demand. The most used online serves for youth are IM(91.3%), online music(91.1%), online movie/video(82.9%), search engine(73.4%), online games(68.2%), online news(63.4%) and email(58%).

If compared with the average usage level of all Internet users, the usage rate of online games, online music and online movie/video among youth are much higher than average rate. For example, 68.2% China’s youth play online games, compared with that of 59.3% for all netizens. However, only 63.4% youth visit online news sites, 10.2 percentage lower than the average level of 73.6%.

Young Internet users also have stronger desire to make friends and communicate with friends online, 55.9% of them have the experience of making friends through the Internet, and over 90% of them use IM tool, most likely QQ, to chat with friends online. One third of China’s youth have updated their blogs/spaces in last six months, higher than the average level of less than one fourth. For university students, even over half of them have updated blogs/spaces in last six months.

The report said, rural young users have some different online behaviors, they mainly use Internet for online chatting and online music, which have similar penetration rates as that of urban users. The usage of search engine, email and online news among rural young users are much lower than those of urban youth, ranging from 11 percentage to 19 percentage.

The report also proposed some suggestions to regulator, such as to strengthen the regulation on Internet cafe and to deal with the online game addiction problems among youth.

UCenter Home: Comsenz Helps You to Build Your Own Facebook

Written by Tangos on May 11, 2008
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ComsenzIn my post about Softbank’s huge investment on Oak Pacific Interactive, or say Xiaonei.com, I believed that the investment will inspire more people in China to try to build another similar Facebook-wannabe. Actually, Comsenz, the leading developer social software in China, has rolled out a software called “UCenter Home” in late April, which can enable you to build your own Facebook.

You can download UCenter Home and install it on your own server, which requires php and mysql. Now on UCenter Home, you can add friends, write blogs and miniblogs, share photos and create and join group discussions, and post your sharings. Since it is just the first version, it is no doubt that more features will be added later. But we have no idea whether UCenter Home will support a open developer platform.

Comsenz has six main software products now, including UCenter Home, Discuz!, leading BBS software in China; SuperV, a software for you to build your own video sharing website; ECshop, a software to build online shopping site; SuperSite, a CMS software; UCenter, a platform to manage data exchange across softwares above. Based on UCenter, UCenter Home can be integrated with other software offerings by Comsenz. If you installed these software in your server and connect them with UCenter, your activities on Discuz!, SuperV, ECShop will be displayed on your minifeed in UCenter Home.

Just less than one month after its release, if you try to search “powered by UCenter Home” in Baidu, you can get 159,000 search results already. With such a convenient tool, we will see a lot of small social networking sites from China.

But will UCenter Home become a Ning.com in China? I think the key is whether Comsenz will be able to launch a universal ID and data portability policy for all site powered by UCenter Home. Such policies can highly reduce the cost to attract new users for SNS sites, and make users to manage their various niche social networks better and more efficiently. We noticed that Comsenz provides hosted service for BBS and online shops, so maybe it will also launch a hosted SNS platform as what Ning.com does.

Virtual World Roundup: Hipihi, Novoking, uWorld and Yaolan

Written by Tangos on May 8, 2008
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BusinessWeek published a special report on virtual world on Monday, with one article on virtual World in China which featured Hipihi, Novoking and UOneNet (a.k.a. uWorld).

On April 21st, Hipihi announced the beginning of its public beta testing phase, after over a year private test. The private test was much longer than they previously expected. By today, Hipihi’s homepage shows it has just over 50k registered users.

uWorld, another virtual world on BusinessWeek’s article which we first profiled in October 2007, finally started its close test in March. As Hipihi, uWorld also partnered with IBM on virtual world development. But we haven’t got its invitation to test it.

Though Hipihi has a lot of buzz on the media, it is still struggling in attracting more users to reside. Kaiser is more optimistic on it, he thought “deep-rooted MMORPG culture” in China and “willingness of Chinese to strike up online friendships with strangers” will help them in the long run. But virtual world and MMORPG have quite different culture, I doubt that MMOPRG culture among Chinese youth will let them migrate into virtual world. To exploit the culture of online networking with strangers, you need to create more value which only virtual world can offer. Novoking might be a good example. Its strategy of focusing on entertainment, esp. music and dancing, may help them to target more females, and attract users of online games as Audition.

YaolanEven though virtual world in China did not see high growth, there is more company see its potential. Yaolan.com, a community targeting parents with kids under 6 or parents-to-be, plan to launch its virtual world soon. My friend Wang Ruibin watched the demo and said on his blog, Yaolan world will target mommy and mommy-to-be as well. Each user will have a kid for them to experience what will happen when bringing up a kid, sounds like a 3D life simulation game.

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