Most social networks and web businesses generate their revenues from online advertising - but it looks like some do it much better than others. more ›

Today is the second and final day of the Shanghai leg of the inaugural China 2.0 Tour organised by our good friends from the China Business Network, Web2Asia and CNReviews. The week-long tour aims to give participants an overview of what's happening in the Chinese internet landscape and to provide opportunities for face-to-face interaction and networking. The list of China 2.0 participants coming in from overseas reads like a who's who of the internet sector, and we're talking about people like Mike Butcher (TechCrunch UK), Robert Scoble (Fast Company), Shel Israel (author of Naked Conversations) and Ernst-Jan Pfauth (The Next Web). Shanghaiist had the opportunity to meet some of these amazing guys last night at a dinner sponsored by Alibaba, and our night ended with a big party at the new M1NT Club. (Pity the party ended a bit too early but that didn't stop us from getting ourselves shit-faced.) more ›

Shanghaiist has just returned home from the power-packed Open Web Asia conference in Seoul, Korea which bills itself — and is — the "first truly pan-Asia web technology event". We rubbed shoulders with some movers and shakers in the industry and came away from their presentations impressed with the amount of innovation originating out of Asia. While some international heavyweights like Jason Calacanis of Mahalo and Loic Le Meur of Seesmic fame spoke at the conference, it was really the lesser-known Asia-based folks that blew our minds away with their insight. more ›

Urban webzine SmartShanghai has closed down its online forum. more ›

Yes, that was our reaction when we saw these pictures, but sorry to disappoint all you Facebook whores (that includes ourselves!) out there, the image on the right is just a Facebook clone, Xiaonei.com (校内网). It looks like the portal was started around 2005 (less than two years after Facebook was born), and since then, it has grown exponentially to cover around 2,000 university campuses in Greater China. They have just recently started to pan out their services to cover high schools and companies (though one wonders how they would do it with a name like that because "校内“ literally means "in school"). more ›

Time to take advantage of the start of the new academic year to learn something new at several upcoming events taking place here in Shanghai. more ›

Our round-up of some of last week's highlights from China's English-language blogosphere: more ›

The novel tells the story of a teenage boy who receives a special notebook. Whenever he writes the name of an enemy in the book, along with a description of how and when that person dies, the enemy dies exactly as described.

This weekend Shanghai will be host to its first ever barCamp, the ad hoc tech lifestyle “un-conference” where every attendee is encouraged to participate either as a speaker, organizer, or active listener. The action kicks off at 6 pm on Saturday night with a pre-un-conference social at T-Sens, and continues Sunday with the main event at the Toodou offices along the Suzhou Creek. If you bring a prepared talk, arrive promptly at 8:30 am for breakfast and the planning of the day’s schedule. If you arrive late, be prepared for the possibility of speaking to an empty room in the middle of the night: barCamp is touted as a 24 hour event. So far, topics mentioned have included web programming, open source business, urban photography and navigating the Shanghai bus system. more ›

After various sources pointed out that Chinese actress/director/blogger/celeb extraordinaire Xu Jinglei's mega-popular blog flew completely underneath the radar of blog search engines and ranking sites such as Technorati, the folks over at Technorati made some changes, and now Xu's blog has displaced Boing Boing as its top ranking blog. Keso, a tech blogger quoted in the Danwei post on this subject, had this to say: more ›

Tipped by Fons at China Herald, we found this interview with the founder of what Fons calls "China's Gawker." Edwyn Chan runs BlogKu Media, a network of five blogs in China. They are: DianZiRen (gadgets and electronics), Shuanga ("funny stuff"), Starpapa (celebrity gossip), Jiaexp (gaming) and Movblog (film). Another blog, Postshow -- which Chan says is "Boing Boing-like" -- is "affiliated" with BlogKu. more ›

So it seems that Shanghaiist is not the only weblogger in Shanghai. more ›