"China Web2.0 Review is a blog dedicated to track and review web2.0 development in China. We will profile and review web2.0 applications, products, services and business in China, and track the buzz about web2.0 in Chinaís internet industry as well."

Graphic from keso

China Web2.0 Review has an interesting post about FeedSky, which is like China's answer to Feedburner (although more than that, according to the post).

Hat-tip Rex Chung for the link. It's great to see what's happening outside Silicon Valley and I hope to discover more international Web 2.0 blogs.

The China Web 2.0 Blog also notes some privacy implications: "the first time you use the service, it will give you a privacy alert that your IP information will be recorded for at least two months. And it will be available for authority on request."

Over the weekend, the country stepped up pressure on Google to comply, giving the company a July deadline to get the necessary license.

When we last looked at the situation in June, China had approved 18 domestic mapping companies. Google still has the same issue now as it had then - it houses all of its map servers outside of China. To get licensing, however, all map servers need to be located in mainland China.

Google told Computer World that it is "examining the regulations to understand their impact on [its] maps products in China."

While it's been made to look as though it's a technical problem on Google's end, the search engine giant says that the Chinese government is responsible. "There is no technical issue on our side. We have checked extensively," says a Google spokesperson. "This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail."

Whatever the motivation, it isn't the first time that Google and China have run into problems with each other. In January of last year, Google accused China of launching hacking attacks, an effort purportedly to gain access to the accounts of Chinese dissidents.

The issues with Gmail make it the latest Google product that cannot be fully accessed in China, joining YouTube, Blogger, and Google Maps as banned or restricted services. Google has refused to comply with the Chinese governments censorship demands, and as a result has seen its search engine market share continue to drop in China.

According to an article this morning in the Los Angeles Times, Google has added Twitter search results to its search engine there, "in effect, lifting a nine-month blackout of the microblogging service in China."

This latest move by Google is sure to further aggravate an already tense situation, but we have to wonder, as we have before, if it really matters or if we're looking at it from an ethnocentric point of view. Twitter may have been blocked, but China has several of its own Chinese Twitter clones. So now China can see tweets, which are predominantly not in Mandarin, in Google search results.

Then again, the Los Angeles Times points out that the search results are already bringing sensitive topics into view of Chinese citizens:

"The tweets do not show up for all searches, but only for terms that appear to be popular on Twitter. On Thursday morning, that included discussions on such taboo subjects as how to circumvent China's Internet firewall, why Google decided to exit China and a vaccine scandal unfolding in central China."

The move seems more like a principled slap in the face than anything else. But then again, so does much of this situation.

The People's Daily, an official Chinese newspaper, says Google; "should not become overly embroiled in international political struggle, playing the role of a tool for political contention," according to Reuters. Then came the warning: "For when the international winds shift direction, it may become sacrificed to politics and will be spurned by the marketplace."

Google accused China of a sophisticated hack against Gmail in March that Google said was designed to look like an internal issue with Google's Gmail servers. The attempts in March were thought to be a response by China to the "Jasmine Revolution" that was tied to Internet involvement in the uprisings in the Middle East.

The People's Daily said that Google is "deliberately pandering to negative Western perceptions of China, and strongly hinting that the hacking attacks were the work of the Chinese government," according to Reuters.

Pandering or not, Chinese media officials seem to think it is an inevitability that the "international winds" will shift, presumably in the favor of China. The allusion is that whatever companies anger China now will be brought to slaughter when/if China controls the international economy. Google has ceded search market share in the largest Internet market in the world to Baidu after Google censorship disagreement with China in 2010.

According to an article today in China Daily, 18 domestic firms have gotten the okay for providing maps of China to Chinese users, but the list of approved providers is not yet available.

"Among all the foreign vendors, Google may have some trouble getting a license because currently all its servers that provide map services are outside China," Ren Yanghui, an analyst of research firm Analysys International, told China Daily.

The regulations went into action this month and gives Chinese authorities the right to shut down mapping providers that fail to get a license by the end of the year.

Google told Reuters that it is looking into the new regulations and how it affects its efforts in the country.

"China recently implemented a wide-ranging set of rules relating to online mapping. We are examining the regulations to understand their impact on our maps products in China," a Google spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

As Chad Catacchio from The Next Web pointed out, crowdsourced mapping solutions such as OpenStreetMap could face the biggest problems in being shut out of the Chinese market entirely. The new regulations could also have a major impact on location-based service applications, such as Gowalla, FourSquare and Yelp, which often use Google Maps as a backbone to their service.

Hitwise is great about publishing timely tidbits about Web statistics and I look forward to seeing U.S., global and China stats contrasted. The first offering along those lines? Hitwise says that microblogging is more common in China than it is in the U.K., U.S., France, Canada, Australia or India. Sina Micro blog, the leading Chinese microblogging service, sees one out of every 158 website visits in China, Hitwise observed last month. That's more than 3.5 times as large a Web market share as Twitter has here in the US. That sounds like a good market to go monitor.

In the U.S., Facebook (which Hitwise does not count as microblogging) sees 64% of all social networking site visits. Why different social networks have found different levels of traction in different countries and cultures will be a fruitful field of study for the future. The investment of one of the most communicative of the Web analytics companies online into the large market of China could be a helpful step in our collective understanding of the changing international Web.

This is a pattern in China, where the two birds of repression and protectionism nest in the same bush. The combination of eliminating competition and controlling discourse made this act inevitable.

Leaked cables show deeper fear of bloggers than "activists" in Cuba. A number of U.S. diplomatic cables show how little the government of Cuba fear old-style dissidents and how concerned they are over bloggers, "a group that frustrates and scares the GOC like no other."

***

It almost seems like the tinhorns took a week off over the holidays and rested up their electrode-affixin' hands. Almost.

Thanks to Carl Levinson for the pointer to the Telegraph article.

According to stats compiled by vnunet.com, China will overtake the US next year to become the world's largest broadband internet market:

"The number of broadband subscribers in China is growing at a staggering 79 per cent annually, and will reach 79 million in 2007, consulting firm Ovum predicted in research released today.

Recent estimates from Leichtman Research suggest that the number of broadband connections in the US, currently the world's largest market, is around 51 million."

Like John Dowdell, I believe this will provide many opportunities to developers all over the world. The globalisation of web apps is a trend that I've been monitoring closely, particularly in my ongoing series on International Web Apps.

In my post Top Web Apps in China, I discussed how China's mobile sector currently has more innovation than the general Web sector - because of the high penetration rate of mobile handsets and highly developed short message, ringtone and ringback tone services. However the risks for non-Chinese people in this market include tough government regulations, plus the language and cultural barriers. I also noted in that post that China already has some very big Internet companies - Baidu, Sina, Sohu among them. Check out my China web app overview for more details.

The truth of the matter is probably not nearly so simple. As I understand it it's almost never as simple as "China is blocking X.Y.Z websites". It depends on which ISP you're using, there are technical obstacles to good service and there's a maze of face-to-face meetings that go on in order to plan and enact any such censorship, redirects, etc. It's highly unlikely that there is any nationwide policy suddenly put into place that effects internet users all across that huge nation. There are certainly a few big policies that are self-enforced by online service providers, but many of the comments being left on today's China coverage denying nation-wide censorship are probably the honest truth.

Today's news coverage itself deserves some serious scrutiny.

Some of the language of "economic attack" may be thinly veiled jingoism and calls to "boycott the Olympics" are pretty tasteless in light of the true Chinese crimes against humanity that long term human rights activists have been citing for withdrawal from the event. Darfur? Loud voices calling for economic sanctions in response to the alleged activities of the Western world's economic challengers sound like fair-weather friends of free speech to me.

Online freedom in China is important, but online accuracy is important everywhere.

Dealing with the statistical bureaus of the world's second-largest economy is even less pleasant than it sounds. So the Journal has created this well-organized, graphically effective and easy-to-use site. It organizes data by month-to-month and year-over-year presentations and users can switch from one to the other.

China Econtracker offers outlays of data based on gross domestic product, industrial value added, fixed asset investment, exports, imports, trade balance, foreign exchange reserves, consumer price index and bank credit.

It provides a source for each set of data and allows users to post the results to their Twitter account or Facebook page.

Whether your are among those likely to wind up "fighting it out with journalists at the State Council Information Office or getting lost for hours in the maze of Beijing's Internet" as Tom Orlik writes on China Real Time's post on the Econtracker, or just someone who wishes to be more informed about one of the most important economies on earth, the site looks to provide a real utility.

One commenter on the post, however, said:

"Chinese export statistics originate in individual customs declarations. These declarations include an ever expanding and now very likely statistically material amount of trade 'roundtripped' through Bonded Logistics Parks in China in order to realize export VAT refunds. One of the many reasons that this statistic, like any other in China, is simply not reliable."

Now, if you understand that enough to agree or disagree, you may not need this tool. For the rest of us, though, I still think it will prove useful, however reductive and unreliable statistical collections may be.

Government office photo by Daniel Gao | other sources: China Digital Times

It's not surprising that China's web site ecosystem is seeing such huge growth -- their Internet user population is as well. In February, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information reported that the country had 221 million Internet users, which means that it has effectively passed the United States as the world's largest net population. And there's still a lot of room to grow -- China only has about 16% of its population on the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, compared to 71.4% of Americans who are online.

In our 2008 web predictions, Richard MacManus predicted that this would be a break out year for China on the Internet. "The most interesting innovations on the Web in 2008 won't happen in Silicon Valley, but in Asia (China, Japan, Korea)," wrote MacManus. "At least one startup from China will break through in the US market with Twitter-like success in 2008 - and it will almost certainly be a Mobile Web app."

We haven't had a Twitter-like success come out of China year (it's still early in 2008, though), but China is definitely experiencing a web boom. Doing business in China, however, can be very tricky. Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo!, a company that has had a tough go in China, said that doing business in other countries was difficult because of legal "gray areas." Google has also taken heat for cooperating with Chinese censors.

According to StatCounter, Google held just 28% of China's search market back in August and since has climbed to nearly 43%. That's a 15-percentage-point gain in just four or five months. Yahoo and Bing account for just over 1% of China's search engine market.

While estimates put Google's projected 2010 income from business in China at around 2% of the company's entire revenue, the long-term implications of pulling out of the country are much larger.

If any company should just give up the ghost and get out of China before making any more PR (and human rights) gaffes, maybe it's Yahoo.