I'm currently launching a, Dalian focused site, (not only me, but also Rick, Chris and Kerrilee) the site itself is a mix of 'open source journalism', revenue reciprocation, well, lots of things.

One of our aims is to make adding content as easily as possible, so RSS aggregation is a natural choice, and if you see our Dalian photos it's mainly RSS aggregation from web savvy photographers tagging their photos 'daliandalian', the RSS feed of this tag which we pick up.

The recent GFW block of Flickr was a pain, and while some people may be able to install the Flickr Unblockr plugin, many may be unable to do it. I ran across a solution thanks to this post. Basically, the URL is blocked by the GFW, but the IP address is not. This is an interesting strategy of the GFW in itself, as often IP addresses are barred rather than URLs.

If using Wordpress there's a pluggin here, if using Drupal install this module and edit the redirection according to the pic below.

It's nice if users are savvy, but many are not, so it's the webmaster's responsibility to make stuff work. The recent GFW Flickr block almost seems engineered to allow those informed enough to be able to avoid it, odd.

A part of a series measuring search behaviour in China, Searchengineland.com have released the findings of a study on Eye-Patterns of Chinee Internet users.

The results are interesting:

1. North American Internet Users focus on the top-right of an ordered list (in this case, a Google web search), while Chinese Internet users are less biased towards the top-left, and survey a greater number of results. [Of Yahoo, MSN and Google in North America, I understand Google users show the most concentration in the top-left of the screen.]

2. Chinese Internet users find what they want in around 30 seconds using Google, compared to 8-10 seconds for North Americans. Familiarity with processing Chinese writing is postulated as a possible reason for this (identifying keywords is slower).

3. With Google, Chinese Internet users took around 30 seconds to find a result. With Baidu that time was extended to 55 seconds. With Google most users didn't scan below the fourth listing, with Baidu they went to the bottom of the page. Baidu's paid listings, and time spent sorting-out the sponsored results, may be a cause of this.

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Cheers,

Alex

Looks like some more research into search engines in China, that's a good thing (commentary from a recent Search Engine Strategies meeting in China). In summary:

1. Eye tracking. Used in UI design a lot, it's a useful technique. Chinese text formats differently from Western languages. Chinese websites look different from Western websites (if there aren't more than 4 flash movies and Javascript pigs flying around the screen, that's unusual), Baidu is an exception - it has looked more and more like Google since it's launch. Details are unclear, but there should be some interesting results (released in June).

2. User perceptions and time spent doing things: News, surfing the Internet, music and games are the most popular activities in China, compared to the West where search, email, health and weather are the most popular, though popular does not equal most time doing something. Email, news and search were the most time intensive activities. Chinese Internet users are also self-assure - the majority state they can usually or often find what they're looking for (this is similar to Western Internet users).

Do you display Chinese on your website? If so you need to read an understand this.

Are Your Users Able To Read Chinese? Fonts?

Google is innovating big-time with it's Chinese site, featuring functionality which isn't even available in the US. One such feature is a business directory.