Yahoo! wants to make you the next big thing

Stirred by the unprecedented success of Super Voice Girls for Hunan TV, Zhejiang TV and Yahoo are jumping on the bandwagon. Yahoo -- or should we say, Yahoo! -- is duking it out with Baidu and Google, and their latest ploy is this contest, which involves three famous directors: Feng Xiaogang, Chen Kaige and Zhang Jizhong. The contest is called Sou Xing ("searching for stars"), and it's subtitled 让你红的发紫, which literally means that you'll be so red (i.e. popular) that you'll turn purple. Sounds better in Chinese. Anyhow, there's internet voting, all kinds of lists, PK speculations, and, like any good Chinese site, has countless pictures of soulless good-looking-in-that-cookie-cutter-pop-star-way people. The first part was conducted online during March, and the final parts will be shown on Zhejiang TV later this month, when the final 12 contestants for each director will square off against each other. The final prize is an acting contract and the chance to use those "acting" skills for the directors when they make their commercials for Yahoo!.

Shanghaiist doesn't really know who's who, and we suspect everyone will hit this part of the learning curve together when the show hits TV, but we did find Shanghai's own Song Xiaobo interesting because he is supposedly deaf. But he's got a lot of fans behind him, because we all know that being deaf is more forgivable than being tone-deaf.

As with the Super Voice Girls, the fans have their own nicknames. Song's fans are known as "bo cai" ... spinach.