And we've got the statistics to prove it. A recent BCG report on China's Internet usage has found the PRC's users spend more hours a day online than their US counterparts and BRICI buddies. Thomas Crampton reposted some of the figures below: more ›

Journalist-turned-digital-media-man Thomas Crampton speaks to Ai Weiwei, one of the most outspoken critics of the Chinese government in the art world, about social media and the impact that it's having on contemporary China. Ai Weiwei is the son of Chinese poet Ai Qing (艾青) who was denounced during the Cultural Revolution and sent to a Xinjiang labour camp. He is known most recently for the investigation of the Sichuan earthquake student casualities.
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Thanks to Twitter’s perpetual failures, Lu’s Fail Whale now features on t-shirts and coffee mugs while other artists create kinetic Fail Whale sculptures. more ›

Thomas Crampton, on a recent trip to Shanghai, catches up with Paul French of Access Asia. French says that so much of what Doctoroff, CEO, Greater China of J. Walter Thompson, and others claim as pioneering was done 80 years ago by adman Carl Crow (of whom he wrote a biography). We're still not quite sure what to think of French's views yet, but we know Doctoroff's Twelve Facts about the Confucian Consumer left us all but confused. more ›

About.com has entered the Chinese market as Abang.com (阿邦网), and the website, like so many other Chinese portals, is looking very 热闹 ("busy"). The range of topics on Abang.com doesn't look like its very extensive yet but that's because they've only just started. Thomas Crampton catches up with Matt Roberts of About.com and finds out why they have chosen the name 阿邦 for their China presence. We thought the name was a great idea — one that fit what About.com is all about and one that should go down well with Chinese netizens. more ›

So both Myspace and Friendster have their own China versions. Now Kaiser Kuo of Ogilvy Digital China Watch points us to a report on China Business News (第一财经日报) which cites an “industry insider” who says that Facebook plans to release additional language interfaces and intends to enter the China market as early as December this year. The paper also claims that "Facebook has given up its initial plan to set up its own China-based site like MySpace has done with MySpace.cn, but will instead acquire an existing SNS in China." more ›

Even weirder stuff than the Youtube block seems to have been happening, though. Apparently, for a short while on the 17th, before the Youtube block occurred, blogsearch.google.com and live.com were both redirected to Baidu! Blogsearch.google.cn was totally inaccessible. This has been confirmed by Ken Wong (see screencaps on his blog) and other Chinese netizens. Google Blogoscoped reported that yet more exotic pages like search.ibm.com.cn were also being hijacked to Baidu. more ›

Right: GoogleTechTalks presents Professor Teng-Kee Tan, a technology entrepreneurship expert with the Singapore-based Nanyang Technological University who talks about Competing and Collaborating in China with Bi-Cultural Competence. Pretty interesting stuff if you operate on a strategic level at work. And if you have 66 minutes to spare! more ›