Google and other major American Internet companies like Yahoo and eBay failed to gain significant traction in the Chinese market. And Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by the government.

Instead, the hottest companies in the world’s biggest Internet market have names like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba — fast-growing local firms that are making huge profits. Post-Google, China’s Internet market could increasingly resemble a lucrative, walled-off bazaar, experts say. Those homegrown successes, however, could have trouble becoming global brands.

“If the Chinese government continues to favor domestic companies, those companies that reach critical mass could become phenomenally profitable,” said Gary Rieschel, founder of Qiming Ventures, an American venture capital firm with investments in China. “But it may be hard for those companies to become world class without outside competition.” . . .

The story behind the success of these companies is a simple one, some analysts say. The young people who dominate Web use in China are not just searching for information; they’re searching for a lifestyle. They are passionate about downloading music, playing online games and engaging in social networking.

“Sixty percent of the Internet users here are under the age of 30,” said Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley. “In the U.S., it’s the other way around. And in the U.S. it’s about information. But in China, the No. 1 priority is entertainment.” . . .
One question, though, is whether Google’s departure will prevent Chinese companies from developing alongside the world’s technology powerhouses.

“When the Chinese companies go outside of China, they will find that they fail to understand their competitors as well as they did when they were competing in China,” said Mr. Rieschel, founder of Qiming Ventures.

Of course, Chinese companies may just be happy staying home. With 400 million Internet users and growing, their own market is a substantial prize.

Yowza! Okay, it’s not quite Ashton or MTV, but that’s kind of the point: if risk-averse diplomats (whose whole job is basically message and brand control) see value in Twitter, it would seem to suggest even the most conservative, publicity-shy brands can find a home on the burgeoning social communication site.

The Saudi Embassy’s first tweet appeared on March 8; since then, the Twitter account has been used for news updates, with links to articles about a speech by King Abdullah on the kingdom’s future prospects, business analysts’ views of current economic conditions there, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visiting Riyadh, and so on. Currently the Saudi Twitter feed has a relatively modest following of 47.

They’ve now topped 72 followers and I suspect they’ll be in the triple digits before long. MediaPost also notes that they are on YouTube, with various speeches by the Saudi Kongand Foreign Minister.

Interestingly, the Saudi Embassy is now also on YouTube, with a number of videos posted, featuring speeches by King Abdullah and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal. Although the embassy has disabled comments on its own videos, it is still exposed to negative PR from YouTube’s suggested “related videos” posted by other users, which cover many of the same events — press conferences, U.N. addresses, and so on. A quick look at these videos reveals that there are indeed some hostile comments, including Islamists criticizing the Saudi royal family, but also people expressing counter-views — in short, social media functioning like it’s supposed to.

The report, Digital Terrorism and Hate 2010, notes that there are about 11,500 hate-affiliated Web pages, a 20 percent jump from last year’s study.

According to the Wiesenthal Center, personal blogs as well as mainstream social-networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter are easily flooded with racist and terrorist-related content.

“The spike is not in traditional Web sites in the United States,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “It’s more global and almost all in the social-networking area.”

Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs for the Wiesenthal Center and a co-author of the report, said home-grown terrorism suspects have an active online presence. He cited the case of a Pennsylvania woman who officials say called herself “Jihad Jane.”

When it comes to Google Translate, those days are largely over, according to this New York Times article by Miguel Helft. According to Helft:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran the message through an automatic translation service that the company had licensed.

The message said Google was a favorite search engine, but the result read: “The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes. Google green onion thing!”

Mr. Brin said Google ought to be able to do better. Six years later, its free Google Translate service handles 52 languages, more than any similar system, and people use it hundreds of millions of times a week to translate Web pages and other text.

Today when I tried translating “Google is my favorite search engine” into Korean then back again, it spat back the exact same phrase. No allusions to sushi or green onions.

The field is still growing, and online translation is not expected to be a huge moneymaker for Google. But it will have plenty of real world applications:

Because Google’s ads are ubiquitous online, anything that makes it easier for people to use the Web benefits the company. And the system could lead to interesting new applications. Last week, the company said it would use speech recognition to generate captions for English-language YouTube videos, which could then be translated into 50 other languages.

“This technology can make the language barrier go away,” said Franz Och, a principal scientist at Google who leads the company’s machine translation team. “It would allow anyone to communicate with anyone else.”

Still, it’s not perfect. When I tried the more complex phrase, ” I love Google. It is very handy.” I got “Google에 사랑 해요. 아주 편리합니다.,” which translated back to “Google in love. Very convenient.”

We noted in our original review that ://URLFAN’s ranking list will inevitably be biased towards users of social media – and in particular bloggers. That’s a relatively small proportion of the world, however we think it’s still a useful index because social media users are highly influential. With that in mind, which websites are currently ranked the most influential on the Web?

://URLFAN is, as we write this, “currently ranking the popularity of 3,783,534 websites by parsing 302,023,552 blog posts from 5,948,937 blog feeds.”

The list below is ://URLFAN’s all-time top 10. The number in brackets to the right of each item is last year’s top 10 ranking (Nov ‘08).

#1. en.wikipedia.org (1)
#2. youtube.com (3)
#3. flickr.com (2)
#4. twitter.com (9)
#5. google.com (4)
#6. myspace.com (6)
#7. facebook.com (-)
#8. imdb.com (5)
#9. nytimes.com (7)
#10. apple.com (8)

There is one new entrant, Facebook at #7. washingtonpost.com moved out of the top 10, dropping from #10 last year to #12 this year.

Twitter is the biggest mover, up 5 places to #4.

….

://URLFAN isn’t a perfect measure of influence – you could easily argue that Google’s PageRank is far better. However we continue to like the concept and we believe it’s an accurate and up-to-date reflection of influential websites on the Web.

McManus references a previous post about super influencers, who tend to have outsized influence on others based on their numbers. That post discusses a 2008 report from Universal McCann, which came to its conclusions based on research among 17,000 active internet users in 29 countries.

Finally, super influencers are a worldwide phenonomen, according to McCann, but “there is a clear skew towards the emerging internet markets of Latin America and Asia Pacific.” Brazil has the highest rate of super influencers, with 24% of active internet users falling into the super influencer category. They are followed by India, Mexico and Pakistan, which McCann puts down to “how internet users have found their voice thanks to their massive use of social media in these markets.” . . .

There’s nothing really new in the report – we’ve known for a while now that social media is being used to create new forms of influence in the commercial and social worlds. But there’s good lessons here for brands and organizations that are still figuring out how to reach consumers in the Web age.

Obviously, effective public diplomacy takes into account the technology most available to the local populations – with cell phones winning out over PCs, in many cases. Still, the “good lessons” about how social media is creating new forms of influence are also applicable to governments and individual seeking to engage in diplomacy.

Director M. Night Shyamalan brought his wife, Bhavna Shyamalan, clad in a striking black and white sari.

And a number of individuals of non-Indian background wore ensembles with overt Indian touches, like Katie Couric and  EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, while Rebecca Olson Gupta (wife of Sanjay Gupta) went all the way with a bold fuschia sari.

Meanwhile, the red and gold sari worn by party crasher Michaele Salahi, aspiring reality TV star who may be on the forthcoming “The Real Housewives of Washington,” probably helped her and her husband gain admission to the dinner.

Saris have many benefits: they are visually arresting, comfortable and form flattering. But it’s rare for people who lack an Indian background to wear them. Probably the biggest obstacle is that, unlike a dress or pair of pants, putting on a sari is not self-evident. It involves tucking, folding and draping and if you’ve never done it before, it can be very intimidating.

But for those who lack an Indian friend to help them dress, there is a solution: YouTube.

YouTube is more than just a treasure trove of cat tricks, Lucky Charms commercials from the 1980’s and great sports moments, like the 1986 NBA slam dunk contest won by the 5’6” Spud Webb.

It also features videos that explain things that aren’t common knowledge unless you grew up in a particular society or culture. For example, there are a number of videos that tell you how to wear a sari – providing enough detail and explanation that it might be possible to replicate it yourself at home.

YouTube videos also offer explanations on hair care for African-Americans and how to wear a yukata (summer kimono). As I discussed in a previous post about the virtual world Second Life, geography, language barriers and a general hesitancy to ask a stranger a potentially sensitive question (such as “how do you take care of your hair?”) are real-world obstacles to the exchange of information. But there are people out there who are curious about, for example, how to wear hijab; and there are others who are eager to demonstrate. YouTube facilitates the easy sharing of such information.

iDiplomacy will be taking a break for Thanksgiving. Happy holidays!

Steve Hamm has an article in Business Week talking about the latest social networking site with global ambitions, XIHA Life:

Launched last year, the site was designed from the ground up by a young Finn living in China, Jani Penttinnen, to be multilingual and to bridge between languages and cultures. Users submit content or chat in their own languages and other people can translate the discrete chunks using Google’s translation technology, which is deeply embedded in the site. Today, the site has 600,000 registered users from 208 countries (No country accounts for more than 5% of the total traffic) and about 1 million unique visitors per month. Small, yes, but it’s only a year old. Penttinnen, a soft spoken guy with an elfin persona, has ambitious growth targets: 5 million in the next year and 30 million in the next five years.

This site has great potential in its globalocity. But it’s not for everyone. It’s a magnet for people who see themselves as global citizens or who want to reach across the national chasms. (A group that’s about 70% female.) For some, the site offers the possibility of developing online pen pals. For others, it’s mostly about reaching out to people in places where they’re planning to travel or where they’re temporarily working to get the skinny on what they should see and do. A smaller group is hooking up with people willing to help them learn a foreign language. “We try to get and keep the ‘right’ people—the people who are focused on our themes,” says Penttinen. To help steer things in the right direction, he’s rounding up a network of expats who will produce high-quality blogs about their experiences—in exchange for small fees….

By the way, xiha means “fun” or “happy” in Mandarin and “Hip-Hop” in Cantonese.

Speaking of Chinese, the State Department recently launched pages on two leading social networks portals in China, Kaixin Wang and QQ, to coincide with President Obama’s travel to China and other countries in Asia.

Here’s more about the effort from the State Department blog, Dipnote:

Our collaboration with these sites uses local platforms in Chinese to communicate directly with the Chinese people. We hope that this outreach will facilitate our ability to share information and promote a dialogue at the grassroots level. The launch is part of our comprehensive new media effort to support President Obama’s first visit to the region.

Our blog page on QQ will provide details about the President’s events during his visit. In addition, we will share ground-level perspectives from embassy personnel as events unfold.

Our Kaixin page (similar to Facebook) will strike a more informal tone, catering to a core demographic of educated white collar workers. Our goal is to keep content fresh to meet the demands of a young Chinese audience accustomed to accessing meaningful information online. Following the visit, the embassy will continue to use these new outreach tools to connect with the Chinese online community and share both formal and informal sides of our Mission in China.

The QQ page includes a video greeting from Jon Huntsman Jr., U.S. Ambassador to China. Huntsman, a Mormon who served his LDS mission in Taiwan, speaks in Mandarin and English. This is what he says in the English portion:

On social networking sites there are no geographic or physical barriers. It’s a great way to communicate and to better understand each other. Mutual understanding between our people is critically important. It provides the basis for cooperation on the many global challenges we face. We hope to keep our web page content fresh and interesting including some behind-the-scenes insights and we hope you will write in and let us know what you think. We will listen to your ideas and respect and consider your suggestions. We will have our differences to be sure, but I’m confident there will be more areas of agreement and cooperation.

I don’t think the average person typically connects policy or legislation to their daily lives.  They probably don’t know that Section 2704 of the recent 2,074 page health care bill prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage due to a pre-existing condition.  But they can relate to the story of the family who lost their house because the pre-existing condition wasn’t covered by insurance.  People can relate to such stories on an emotional and human level.   And I think that emotional connection is what often inspires civic participation and activism.

Technology and social media are changing the game because people now have the opportunity to tell their own story and don’t need to rely upon traditional media to do it for them.

The means of production are cheap and widely accessible, and distribution is available to anyone with an internet connection.  The shocking video of Neda Agha-Soltan, captured on a cell phone camera and uploaded to YouTube, helped to amplify the plight of hundreds of thousands of Iranians who fought for their right to vote and speak freely.  Technology is helping to democratize culture and give a voice to people whose stories might otherwise not be heard.

* Official State Department social media sites — 130 Facebook pages, 50 Twitter sites, and 15 blogs. They’re also on YouTube and Flickr.

* Co.Nx, an online chat that makes American citizens available to chat to an online global community. Some of the upcoming chats include one with a college student on”campus life in America” and another with Ambassador David M. Satterfield, senior advisor to the secretary of State and coordinator for Iraq on “U.S. policy and the Middle East.”

* For President Obama’s Cairo speech they had related SMS messages you could sign up to receive (opt-in only).

* They used a variety of methods to drum up enthusiasm for President Obama’s speech in Ghana, a country where only three percent of the people has internet access. They sent flyers to regular media so they could spread the word that Obama would be taking questions and comments and answering some of them.

They also took a podcast and sent it to the embassies in Africa. The general tone and tenor of the comments they received back was “This is really cool, Obama wants to know what we have to say, and he’s actually going to respond to it.”

An embassy in Pretoria partnered with a popular texting site, MXit, which drew 50,000 additional comments and questions. The contact was very youth-oriented but the texts they got back were more adult-oriented.

They facilitated international architectural collaboration in Second Life. (We wrote about the talk they hosted earlier in a Studio Wikitecture post.)

The name “Matt Harding” probably doesn’t ring any bells but there’s a good chance that you’ve seen him dancing. He’s not one of the professionals on “Dancing with the Stars” nor has he been on “So You Think You Can Dance.” Implicit in the title of the latter television show is that the contestants think that they can dance well. Matt makes no such claim.

In fact, he has managed to make a living dancing badly in what I would describe as a hybrid aerobic-Irish step-chicken dance, except that might offend my Irish stepdance friends.

Matt is the unassuming star behind the phenomenally popular YouTube videos that show him dancing all around the world from places like the beach in Santa Monica, Calif., to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, to a rock suspended 1000 meters in the air in Kjeragbolten, Norway, to Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the world’s largest salt flat.

What does he do besides dance badly? According to his bio, he is a “32-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life was make and play videogames. Matt achieved this goal pretty early and enjoyed it for a while, but eventually realized there might be other stuff he was missing out on. . . . Matt’s Xbox Live screen name is BadDancer. He plays a lot of Rock Band.”

The genesis for his first video came when he was traveling around Asia and a friend suggested he do his unique dance with the motorbikes of Hanoi whizzing by in the background.

Matt’s bad dancing attracted a corporate sponsor, Stride Gum, and he made a second video, traveling to yet more places, and a third one, this time with many other people dancing with him.

Matt created a website, wherethehellismatt.com to keep his friend and family updated on where he was in his travels. “Where the Hell is Matt” has become such a well known moniker that he doesn’t even use his last name on his site.

His unique dancing style has attracted millions of viewers – with over 40 million YouTube views – as well as thousands of people who want to join him in dancing badly. He explained the logistics of getting people to dance with him in this video; he put a sign up page on his Web site and got 25,000 interested parties, who he e-mailed when he visited their city. That led to 40 events around the world with sometimes only five people showing up and sometimes 180.

But for more rural areas that are not heavily e-mail dependent, like Africa, Matt had to rely on guerrilla style filmmaking; he would just start dancing, and the kids would generally join him (the adults tended to be more skeptical). It was his visit to Rwanda in the making of his second video where young kids joined him in dancing that persuaded him that a video with him dancing with others would be even better than his previous ones where the primary draw was the cool locales.

Matt has achieved fame but not wealth through his videos, though he has managed to avoid a nine to five work schedule since embarking on his second video. As he noted a few years ago:

“The most valuable thing in the world right now in my opinion is attention. And that if you can get people’s attention and hold it even for just a few minutes – a lot of people, we’re talking a couple million people for a few minutes – you can make a living off of that if you can reliably do that. Attention is a very valuable thing because there’s so much stuff to distract us now.”

Matt did a piece in March for the NPR segment, “This I Believe.” He used to dance to annoy his co-workers but through his travels and dancing he has managed to break down some barriers that previously existed by focusing less on the differences with others.

You can listen and view the full piece here:

“People want to feel connected to each other. They want to be heard and seen, and they’re curious to hear and see others from places far away. I share that impulse. It’s part of what drives me to travel. But it’s constantly at odds with another impulse, which is to reduce and contain my exposure to a world that’s way too big for me to comprehend….

“My tribe has grown into a single, impossibly vast social network, whether I like it or not. The problem, I believe, isn’t that the world has changed, it’s that my primitive caveman brain hasn’t.

“I am fantastic at seeing differences. Everybody is. I can quickly pick out those who look or behave differently, and unless I actively override the tendency, I will perceive them as a threat. That instinct may have once been useful for my tribe but when I travel, it’s a liability.

“When I dance with people, I see them smile and laugh and act ridiculous. It makes those differences seem smaller. The world seems simpler, and my caveman brain finds that comforting.

“I believe my children will have brains ever so slightly better suited to the vast complexity that surrounds us. They will be more curious, more eager to absorb and to connect.

“And I believe when they look into eyes of strangers, what they will see before the differences are the things that are the same.”

Here are some other videos:

First Video

Second Video