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Christine Lu (of China Business Network) compiled a great list of the (primarily English-language) China Twitterati on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter and am interested in China, go follow the Twitterati on the ChinaList!

Over the weekend, Louis Gray posted on the Twitter Noise Ratio — defined as the ratio of Updates to Followers — to contrast the “Listeners” (low Noise Ratio) from the “Megaphones” (high Noise Ratio). Naturally there was a bit of controversy about this measure! But it inspired me to measure up the ChinaList and see what I could find.

So what about the China Twitterati? Is this Twitter With Chinese Characteristics?

Here’s what I found about the ChinaList.

• The Super Twitterati. As measured by either Updates, Followers, or both, there are a few Super Twitter users: @thecarol, @isaac, @christinelu, @flypig, @webleon, @bbluesman! Wow. I am not worthy.
• In General, there is a wide variation of usage of Twitter among the ChinaList. Clearly there is no one best way to use Twitter. It is entirely between you, yourself, and your Followers!
• The Top Updaters. Some but not all of these Super Twitterati are among the prolific Top Updaters among the China Twitterati. The top 10 are @flypig, @webleon, @bbluesman, @christinelu, @DavidFeng, @isaac, @marcvanderchijs, @dimi3, @ericgonzalez, and @shanghaiist.
• The Top “Megaphones” among us (to use Louis’ controversial measure of Updates per Followers) are: @kevinkoo, @dimi3, @DavidFeng, @flypig, @siumuimui, @webleon, @bbluesman, @shanghaiist, @expatacular, and @Guerel. This group has a ratio of 15.6 Updates per Follower, vs. the median of 3.2 Updates per Follower! This is nearly five times the median! As my co-blogger DavidFeng says to his new Followers, “Get ready for your arrival!”
• The “Listeners” among us are: @kriadam, @ionchina, @djsircharles, @ThomasCrampton, @nicolasz, @ChinaTechToday, @chinapolarbear @JakeNewby, @anguslau, @Agraylin, @Neocha
• The “Moderates”, who have a Noise Ratio of near the median of 3.2 Updates/Follower include: @thehumanaught, @dedlam, @papajohn, @ajschokora, @jputman. @pandapassport, @msittig, @samflemming, @PhilipJohnson8, @ChinaMatt

The rest of this post has 2 cool charts and 4 leaderboards, including the entire ChinaList ranked by Followers at the end.

Chart 1: Updates vs. Followers - The Super China Twitterati of the ChinaList

This chart plots each member of the ChinaList with total Updates on the Y axis and total Followers on the X axis. All data is of 4/27/2008. This chart shows the emergence of Six Super Twitter users: @thecarol, @isaac, @christinelu, @flypig, @webleon, @bbluesman.

What’s the yellow shaded area? The majority of the 92 ChinaList Twitterati are in the shaded yellow area and I’ve created a separate chart for that area.

This data that produced this graph can be critiqued as not considering the length of time that people have been on Twitter. So for example, @thecarol may have joined 2 months ago and may be tweeting more rapidly than @flypig but he may have been on Twitter for a much longer time. What would be more interesting would be to graph Updates/Month vs. Follower Growth/Month. But the data are not available to do this.

Chart 2: Updates vs. Followers - The Rest of Us China Twitterati (the shaded yellow section in the above chart).

Because the Super Twitterati are such outliers, I expanded the chart to include only the mainstream China Twitterati.

Some of the more prolific Twitterati include @DavidFeng, @Marcvanderchijs, @shanghaiist, @dimi3, @ericgonzalez, @sioksiok, @zjjtrans, @kevinkoo, @shanghaiist, and @FonsTuinstra.

Leaderboard 1: Top 10 with Most Followers

He who ends up with the most followers does not win!

Most people might think “most followers” is the goal of Twitter, but Robert Scoble convincingly argues that its not about how many followers you have, but how many people you follow. That’s why he is following 21,000 people and tweets roll about 1 tweet/second on his GTalk screen! In fact, some of us (here, here, and here) wonder if he is a Cylon. If you worried about not having enough followers, please read his post and focus on following the right people, not about trying to win a popularity contest. Especially if you’re a Cylon.

In my own experience, I feel Followers is a function of the time that you have been on Twitter and how much you interact with other people who happen to have lots of Followers. I’m sure @ChristineLu retweeting my tweets and posts have resulted in a ton of new Followers for me, for example. Thanks Christine!

Leaderboard 2: Top 10 with Most Updates

Is there Life outside of Twitter? Ask these prolific Tweeters. Again, this metric is not entirely meaningful because it doesn’t capture the rate of increase of tweets. Either these folks have been on Twitter for a long time, OR they are prolific updaters, so be forewarned if you follow them! My dirty non-harmonious secret: I have actually unfollowed 1 of these people because they are too “noisy” for me, because they use TwitterFeed to feed all of their blog posts on Twitter! (But I follow the rest!)

Leaderboard 3: Top 10 Updates/Follower (aka Twitter Noise! according to LouisGray)

There is a lot of criticism of the Twitter Noise Ratio measure on FriendFeed and at Louis Gray’s post. Updates include the @ messages that you might send to a specific Follower or Twitterer. So as you get into more conversations, Louis’ measure would condemn you as “noisy!” Stowe Boyd has a different measure called Conversation Index that may be better but is not possible to measure easily. This Conversational Index is expressed like this:

Boyd’s Twitterized Conversational Index = (number of replies made by followers / number of tweets)

This is similar to measuring the number comments a blogger gets on a post. The more comments, the more reader engagement. Boyd is suggesting that the more @replies, the more your Followers are engaged and interested by your Tweets.

Also, I suggested that “Total Updates/Month” or “General Updates/Month” might be a better measure, but there are no historical Twitter stats to my knowledge.

What Twitter Metrics Matter? What’s interesting about how you or your fellow China Twitterati use Twitter? What might you change about how you use Twitter?

Karl Marx, in his famous Theses on Feuerbach, said, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.” I hope that this interpretation of the world will allow you to change it in your small way. On Twitter.

Finally, here is the entire list ordered by Followers:

Leaderboard 4: Entire China Twitterati List on ChinaList, sorted by Followers

Here is the Source Spreadsheet for ChinaList Twitterati 20080427 with all this data in case you are interested in it. Use it under Creative Commons license, by-sa-nc 3.0 with attribution to Elliott Ng, CNReviews.com.

UPDATE 4/28:  From the bully pulpit of Ogilvy Digital Watch, Kaiser Kuo wrote an excellent post discussing the trend of blogging about Twitter as dangerous self-referential narcissism and the risks of “excitable dorkitude,”:

Each to his own, of course. But am I wrong in thinking that there’s something not quite healthy and weirdly solipsistic about this? Mind you, I do find Twitter useful, as I made clear in a post of mine last week - a post which, as if to prove the point it made, rode a wave of Twitter-distribution to become one of my most widely-read posts to date. But if we all start looking like a bunch of excitable dorks (which many clearly are) we’ll scare away people who actually might make truly useful contributions - links to great stories, life hacks, great recommendations on apps or software or books or eats, real insights into the things that matter: things predicated on actually having a life.

Guilty as charged.  Kaiser earlier post about the myriad uses of Twitter notwithstanding, I concur with his latest view that indeed there is life outside of Twitter.

1kg More (多背一公斤）was four years old on April 18, 2008.

Happy Birthday, 1kg More! And congratulations on the great progress in the past year, Andrew!

I chatted with 1kg More founder/blogger/travel enthusiast Andrew Yu (my previous interview with Andrew is here) a few days ago and got the latest updates on 1kg More:

1. 1kg More is in Shanghai taxis: If you are taking any taxi that is running Touch Media, who recently announced to receive RBM 1000 million VC funding on Mar. 28, 2008, advertising, you will see 1kg on the screen. As I know, Touch Media is currently running in Qiang Sheng Taxi (强生出租车, the brown/deep yellow color cab).

2. 1kg More has a new website: With this new version, a user now can:

• Search schools that need help by typing in the destination name .(I gave a try and found 10 schools in Guilin (桂林) area, and 26 schools in Lijiang Yuman (云南丽江) area, very nice!)
• Upload the school information online. 1kg volunteers will then contact the school to make sure the information are accurate.
• Share photos with other members.
• Join any other 1kg activities.

Volunteer Suave Su is using various open-sourced technologies to build the website, and the 1kg.org site is open to any volunteers to contribute. You can email Suave (suave.su at gmail.com) if you want to help. It is not a rocket-science project, but I am very impressed by what Suave has done by himself.

3. 1kg More has more schools: In the past 3 months in 2008, there are 120+ added into the search-able database (the number for the year 2007 is 98).

4. 1kg More is now a registered entity: As a grassroots NGO in China, Andrew told me it is impossible for 1kg More to get a non-profit organization registration. And the only way to have a legitimated identity is to register 1kg as a commercial entity. Andrew and I have chatted about this before, and the reality is that there is hardly a way for a grassroots NGO to get an official recognition from the government at present due to a serial complicated concerns. I am looking forward to 1kg More’s Chinese characterized NGO model.

Read 1kg More annual summary from Andrew Yu in Chinese here.

UPDATE 5/5:  CNBloggerCon 2008 Location and date has been decided!

Fellow CN Reviews blogger Min Guo (@grigo) tweeted me the poll for 2008’s CNBloggerCon location via @webleon (webleon.org) and @shizhao (talk.blogbus.com).

The tinyurl just goes to a Google Docs form:

What you see after you press the Submit button:

As you many know, I would love to attend part of the CNBloggerCon 2008. That’s why I blogged about CNBlogger 2007 here, here, and here.

The form also asks “Whom do you want to see on 4th CNBloggerCon?” I felt I needed to put something down so I wouldn’t be dismissed as a ‘bot. So I listed:

• Aether
• Isaac Mao
• Keso
• Carol: @thecarol
• Tangos and Luyi Chen
• Awflasher (covered in our post about the new generation of tech bloggers)
• Bruce Wang
• Wangjianshuo (the first commenter on this blog!)
• Rebecca MacKinnon
• Oiwen Lam
• Jeremy Goldkorn
• David Feng
• Christine Lu
• Livid (CN reviews Livid interview, and about the V23X shutdown)
• Xu Jinglei (why not?)
• Acosta
• Andrew, founder of 1kg.
• Feng37 (and his incredible liveblogging translation which I will rely on)

After all, Min had blogged about the top China bloggers (probably) and also who’s who in the CNBloggerCon-connected blogosphere. And Robert Scoble had also expressed interest in China. So I am already prepared with my list of who I want to see.

I know the intent is to rotate around all the major cities in China. That’s probably the right thing to do. But Shanghai and Beijing are always the most convenient for foreigners like me, even though I have a nice, available family apartment in Guangzhou should the CNBloggerCon be in GZ.

I went ahead and voted even though I’m not really part of the CNBloggerCon club! But its a pretty grassroots even so I hope they will be laid back about a foreigner crashing the party!

Who wants to go to CNBloggerCon? Who would you want to meet and talk with? Where should the conference be?

Here’s an inspiring slide show to get you excited:

| View | Upload your own

Excited and a bit humbled to be on the same page with all these China A-listers!

I was excited to hear that CN Reviews was featured on the new China.Alltop.com, a new blog aggregator created by Guy Kawasaki. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki, Christine Lu, and the Alltop editors.

So now we are on the same page as many of our blogosphere idols. This will force the humble CN Reviews blogging crew to continue to raise our game!

Six other China blogs that we recommend for your personal Alltop

It was hard to find blogs in my Google reader not already on Alltop. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, we wanted to share the love by mentioning six diverse blogs for you to consider on your own version of Alltop:

China Financial Markets

I’ve been increasing on edge about the global economy since the Bear Stearns meltdown, and Michael Pettis’ excellent blog has helped me make sense of it from China’s perspective. Michael is a professor at Peking University’s Guanghua school of Management. If you like Seeking Alpha, where Michael often posts, you’ll like China Financial Markets.

IfGoGo

IfGoGo was started by Aw Guo (郭启睿 Guo Qirui) who mainly blogs in Chinese at Awflasher. We first posted on Aw Guo and the new generation of Chinese blogosphere in December 2007. IfGoGo is a group blog by Chinese who choose to blog in English. Some of my favorite writers include Cat Chen, Lisa, Aw Guo himself, Gijo, and Chris Ding. The blog frequency is too low for my tastes, but I love connecting with “real” Chinese blogging in English. If you like Wangjianshuo, you’ll love IfGoGo.

Sinosplice

Sinosplice is written by John Pasden, who works at ChinesePod. It is lifestyle blog that covers interesting topics around language learning, linguistic and cultural differences, and travel. Having looked at other people’s blogrolls, it is no exaggeration to say that All Roads Lead to Sinosplice where the China expat blogosphere is concerned. If you like China but have “This is China moments”, you’ll love Sinosplice.

Thomas Crampton

Thomas covers technology, politics, media, and startups. He often has great video interviews of executives and entrepreneurs. His posts are more journalistic than personal. Based in Hong Kong, Thomas was a journalist for International Herald Tribune and New York Times. If you like Ogilvy Digital Watch, RConversation, and China Business Network shaken, not stirred, then help yourself to Thomas Crampton.

TechBlog86

Our own David Feng has his own technology centric blog, that takes over where CN.Blognation.com left off. David is a consummate blogger and journalist, who covers news fast and furious on both his Twitter stream and his various blogging projects. If you like China Web 2.0 Reviewand Pacific Epochbut at Twitterlike speed and brevity, you’ll like TechBlog86.

Violet Eclipse

Finally, one of my favorite expat bloggers is Meg Stivison, who also is a guest blogger here at CN Reviews. She first started blogging when she was at Yantai as a student, and now resides in Beijing with her boyfriend Stick. She writes about Beijing life, her work, and has a keen eye for cultural differences as a foreigner in China. In addition to our common interest in China, we also share a common interest in Azeroth! If you like Sinosplice, you’ll like Violet Eclipse.

There you have it. Elliott’s picks for his own china.alltop.com. What are some of your favorite undiscovered China bloggers?

Updated 4/11:  Dan Harris at China Law Blog offered the following four suggestions:

1. Absurdity, Allegory and China
2. China Bystander
3. Mutant Palm
4. The China Game

Thanks Dan!

UPDATE: Part 2 of 2 posts on China Proxy Server Tips. Part 1 by Min Guo is here.

I hate to make a second post for this but given that I cannot simply edit my additions into Min’s post, I decided I’d have to throw up another post for the benefit of readers like Sue who are having trouble with the Great FireWall (GFW).

Note: In order for Min’s Option II to work, you’d have to be able to get the RSS feed link, which can be hard if you can’t get to the blog in the first place. Of course, you can have a friend get it for you, but that requires you discovering the blog first. Moreover, certain feeds burned through Feedburner have difficulty getting into China, which is why you’ll see some blogs using Feedsky, a Chinese equivalent to Feedburner.

Option III: Anonymouse.org

Probably one of the more famous casual proxies, Anonymouse has the added benefit of being available in German and English. Well, that’s actually pretty unimportant, but I guess the Germans never know when Germany is going to block popular Chinese portal sites like sina.com. Using Anonymouse is about as simple as inputing the URL address for the website you wish to visit. In return for their service, they’ll pop up a window and overlay an ad on the targeted webpage (both of which you can close easily). Anonymouse isn’t hardcore enough to get through everything, but it works most of the time.

Option IV: T0r Pr0j3ct (note: l33t used to mask sensitive keywords)

I’ll quote Black and White Cat for Option IV and V:

Since the block is a strong one and Youtube has also been harmonized, now is perhaps the time to mention two of the serious proxies that get through to everything, including BBC news video, can handle Youtube and enable you to watch Google videos.

1) The first is maddeningly slow (though one enthusiast assures me it works quickly on his computer) but you need it if you want to download the faster second option. Tor works in Firefox. Once you’ve installed the program on your computer, you will see a red notice at the bottom right of your brower saying “Tor Disabled.” To turn the proxy on, click once on that notice and it will turn into a green “Tor Enabled.” You can now read or watch anything you want, but slowly. Tor also offers high-quality anonymity and privacy, but only if you read, understand and act on the instructions. For most of us that is not necessary since we simply want to get past the blocks.

Option V: Ult——h (sensitive keyword)

2) The second, faster option only works in Internet Explorer. I’m not going to name it in full because it is blocked at the keyword level in China. I’ll refer to it here as U. If you want it, it’s the first result for this search (look for the word Download on the U page). Don’t even bother Googling it on the mainland unless you are using a powerful proxy like T0r. Unlike T0r, U is an executable file that you save onto your computer, but do not have to install. If you decide you do not want it anymore, delete the file. As with option #1, you can read anything or watch anything, though it often messes up Youtube - if that happens, close down IE and U and try again.

If you choose Option V, you should be aware that it is a creation of FLG and financed by the US government. Bear that in mind when deciding whether you want it on any particular computer. Both these proxies function only in one browser. So if you use Tor in Firefox, you can carry on browsing in Internet Explorer while you are waiting for the page/file to download.

There you have it.

Anyone have any opinions about all these methods? BTW, please be discreet about using sensitive keywords in comments so CNReviews doesn’t get harmonized! It is already slow enough as it is in China. — Elliott

UPDATE: Part 1 of 2 posts on China Proxy Server Tips.  Part 2 by Kai Pan is here. 

I received an email from one of CN Reviews‘ readers yesterday. Here is the abstract of Sue’s kind message:

I just stumbled onto your blog and find it enormously helpful. I wonder if you already have a post on proxy servers and if not, may consider doing one.

I’m incredibly frustrated about not being able to find certain sites. I’ve just arrived in China and am still figuring out how to find the right proxy server, esp if I’m trying to blog.

I am not a technical person and really don’t know much about proxy servers, but I do find my way to read 99.5% of the blogs I like including those are not directly accessible in Shanghai, such as gigaom.com.

Option I: Gladder - Great Ladder

This is a firefox add-on called “Great Ladder”- ladder to the great wall. You can find it here.

• Step 1. Click on the green button says “Add to Firefox”.
• Step 2: You will see the pop up window asks you to install it. Follow the instruction and you will get an icon on the right bottom corner of your browser like this:

Now you are armed with the ladder to climb over the wall!

When you are on a web page, right click on the ladder icon and you will see the menu like above image. We are lucky that we don’t need it for CN Reviews. We are not afraid of being harmonized but would prefer not to be!

To enable the gladder, simply click on the URL on the menu. When the gladder is enabled, you will see a “check” mark in front of the URL See above image. Joe Duck’s blog is not as lucky as CN Review and it looks like his when the gladder is not enabled.

A recent Gladder review by Jianjun can be found here.

Option II: RSS feed readers such as Google Reader.

I don’t have a problem reading Joe Duck’s blog after I subscribed to it on Google Reader. But, of course, I can’t see the blog visual design, can’t browse by its categories, tags or menus. I think RSS feed reader is a good option for the blogs that you are familiar with and want to subscribe to it.

That’s all my secrets. I think they are good enough for people don’t like the technical hassle. Good news is that you don’t need it for English Wikpedia since a few days’ ago. Good luck!

It was my great honor to meet Robert Scoble on BIL conference in Monterey California early Mar. 2008. We remembered that Robert blogged that he wished he was in the Chinese Blogger Conference last year, so we took the opportunity to bring up CnbloggerCon 2008 to him in Monterey. Later I contacted Isaac Mao and learned the timing might not be good for Robert to synch up with his plans to go to the World Economic Forum in China. What a pity!

But if you are interested in coming to the China blogger conference this year in China, who would you want to meet up with?

This is a graph I got from Aether’s (in the middle) Facebook album. I met Aether in Hangzhou in 2006 where he was an very active volunteer. It is a great start point to know who you should meet and talk to:

• Isaac Mao: Co-founder and organizer of CnBloggerCon.
• Keso: A pioneer of Chinese bloggers, an IT reviewer with sharp insights.
• Carol: The Twitter Queen of Taiwan, she has 1,306 followers on Mar. 26, 2008.
• Tangos and Luyi : Key contributors of China Web 2.0 Review.
• Awflasher: Guo is running a blog network called IfGoGo - an English blog written by Chinese.
• Bruce Wang (a.k.a Number5 or #5): Bruce is passionated about SNS and now is developing a SNS product for Linkist.com.
• Herock: Herock is an typical example of great blogger who then became an entrepreneur. He has been mentioned in many “top 10 bloggers” list, now in Feedsky, an RSS feed syndication service.
• Vista: One of the first few Taiwanese bloggers to CnbloggerCon. IT blogger.
• Zola: Independent news/media blogger reporter; he first reported the famous “Dingzi Hu”(nail household, 钉子户) news. (Note: “dingzi hu” refers to the residents who defy the local government’s order of moving out of their homes for settlement. These households are usually dislocated by some commercial projects and are compensated by the developers (or government) but in many cases the compensation is hardly enough to start a new home. Therefore they refuse to move, even when construction is proceeding around (literally) their homes.)

Of course, there are many more great bloggers to meet, in art, music, education or even NGO areas, such as as Jianshuo Wang (Wangjianshuo) and Jeremy Goldkorn from Danwei.

BTW, don’t forget to eat some authentic Chinese food when you are in China!