Live from Beijing!

After I posted about how the BBS is central to the Chinese internet, the CEO of a company called CICdata commented that they have been analyzing the Chinese BBS-sphere and blog-sphere for 3 years already. 

After checking out his site and the related blogs, I think it belongs on this growing list of “unique to China” websites.  To be honest, I was planning to only highlight Chinese websites, meaning “local” ones.  CICData is a “foreign” website (though it looks as if the team is mostly “local” people).  [I don't like the constant distinction in China between "foreign" and "local", but it persists.  Maybe I'll write about that elsewhere...]

In any case, I’m highlighting CICData here because I think it is something unique to China.  Other markets, of course, have blogs and message boards.  And I’m sure there are other companies that track them for you (would love to know who those companies are, by the way).  What’s unique about CICData is the fact that it is addressing what I think is the essence of why the Chinese internet is unique — it’s fast-moving BBS-based culture. 

This culture is what all China-watchers should be studying, since it truly is a remarkably-transparent zeitgeist of a generation.  In the US, I get the impression that bloggers are a very vocal minority, with outsize influence on the traditional media. In China, BBS-posters are not the minority; they are the majority.  And the traditional media is told to ignore them.  Think about that.

It looks as if CICData is a frontline “eyes and ears” into this zietgeist.  Kind of reminds me of how the NSA translated every Chinese TV and radio broadcast into English, back in the 70s and 80s.  If you wanted to know what was going on in China then, and your Chinese wasn’t good enough, those reports were invaluable.

I’m interested to learn more about how they do it, and what they are learning.  Stay tuned!