Shanghai Daily website wins city award

The Xinmin Evening Post announced today the winners of the third annual City of Shanghai Outstanding Website Awards. This year a committee of specialists chose 58 winners in 13 categories to receive awards, categories including Best Portals, E-Commerce Sites, Sites serving Women and Children, Higher Education Websites, and Sites for the "New Countryside".

The website that the Evening Post chose to highlight was the near-to-our-hearts Shanghai Daily, the only English-language site out of nine to win the Awards' top honor, a "Civilized Internet" Forward-Thinking Institution prize. They were cited for their website's innovative and unique features, like 24-hour news updates, the Live in Shanghai lifestyle guide, and the "Insight" financial magazine.

Congrats to the Shanghai Daily for winning this award. It's not hard to run across new features on each visit to their site: our current favorite is the "Elegant Rhythms of the East" mini-site, where you have the chance to win CDs and tickets to recitals by submitting questions about Chinese folk music. We particularly enjoy crossing swords with their editorial opinions (puh-leaze, Peking Opera is a tool of cultural oppression), but wish they would leave their old articles up on the free part of the site for a little longer.

And speaking of newspapers, ABBao is a site that archives the front pages of over 100 national newspapers in image form, browsable on the internet. Sounds like a great site to while away a muggy summer morning without having to walk to the newspaper stand. Hopefully they'll add the Shanghai Daily soon. (Thanks John!)