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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.

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: David also had excellent coverage about this momentous Beijing Twitter Meetup on TechBlog86. Go there for even more pictures! -Elliott

So how do you name this thing — Tweetup, Twittermeet, Twitter Meetup, TweetMeet or whatever you think is best? We had a difficult start: there were people roaming about with different names for same event. Once the naming was unified (or appeared to be unified), however, the Twitter meetup went ahead just after 7:30 PM.

I co-hosted the event with Siok Siok Tan, and everyone came had a blast. Before long, we had about 6 or 7 computers on the desk. There were 8 of us (there was an iPod touch, by the way, for those who came unprepared), so there was enough tweeting going around.

For those of you who came to a meeting of the Beijing Macintosh User Group, a Tweetup is a very different thing altogether. Instead of being bored to death by yours truly (mic in hand no less at big parties), everyone gets to type away like mad at the keyboard. Through this mysterious-yet-much-admired thing called the Internet (running with Twitter), the 8 Twitter-ers, assembled in Twitter congress, linked up to Twitter “bigs” around the nation such as Isaac Mao, web-styled The Chairman Mao of the 21st Century, as well as Carol Lin over there in Taiwan. And, of course, our very own Elliott tuned in as well, as did fellow BeiMac guy niu-bi from New York.Tweets and Twitter lists of all fellow Twitter-ers exploded like mad: yours truly grew by about 15 fellow Twitter-ers, and tweeted about 100 tweets or so (although the stats report otherwise). Before everyone was lost in tweeting, though, the two hosts ordered food and drinks so that we all could survive to another day with food. Hey, we need to keep on twittering!

The Tweetup wrapped up at around 10:00 PM with a dead David Feng MacBook (battery-wise) and a David Feng iPod touch tottering on its last legs. The next Tweetup will most likely either feature an expanded scope (embracing fellow Fanfou people — as in people who tweet using mainland services), be a KTweetV (a KTV fest), or both.

Stay tuned!

By the way, thanks for coming! We had a great night!

I’ve been debating whether to really share my Google Shared items feed or just use it to share with a few friends and my intrepid fellow bloggers here at CN Reviews. Should I share my Google Shared items out or just reserve it for a few friends? Here’s what I found interesting this week. (BTW, writing this post took way too long so not sure I’ll do this on a regular basis)

TechBlog86 - techblog86 Mind the Gap Saturday: Microblogging Revisited, China and the West
China Microblogging has been an area of interest here at CNReviews (starting with our CNbloggerCon Microblogging roundup). Our own David Feng highlights some interesting differences between China microbloggingm, where you are bei guanzhu (被关注) and the West, where you are “followed” or “following”.

The Chinese word for being part of the “attention span” is bei guanzhu (被关注), which equates to something along the lines of “being focused upon”, “being followed”, or - as I said it a moment ago - “part of the attention span” (ie “someone is paying attention to everything you do”).

The way these very words are used reflect pretty much on how things work in different parts of the planet. In the West, where individualism is the order of the day, you’re pretty much all-out after attention; you love it when folks follow you around. In China, though, the feeling that “someone is paying attention to everything you do” gives you a warm feeling that sometimes care about you.

RConversation - Hong Kong 2.0
I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Hong Kong and Hong Kongers, partly because my family is from Hong Kong and partly because I experienced the summer of 1989 in Hong Kong. Rebecca posts about her preface to Charles Mok’s new book Hong Kong 2.0 where she admits that many Beijingers disrespect my Hong Kong homeboys but she has come to know and love the people of Hong Kong. This brought a warm feeling to my heart, Rebecca. Thanks for rooting for my peeps.

China Web 2.0 Review - What do Chinese Internet users do online?

49 mm bloggers, or 23.5% of the total 210 mm internet users at the end of 2007. While 34% access the internet through an internet cafe, 74.8% of them have a high-school education or below.

Thomas Crampton (via Danwei) - Exclusive: Matt Roberts on About.com’s launch in China as Abang.com and related post on 14 China Internet insights About.com learned launching Abang.com -

1. Chinese don’t trust professional-looking sites (vs. US users who like a more polished look)
2. Chinese like titles to be the same length (vs. US users who don’t care.
3. Chinese love images (vs. US who care less)
4. Chinese love nutritional information on recipes (vs. US About.com readers)
5. Chinese like to comment after each article (vs. US About.com readers…this seems wrong to this blog writer who thinks About.com is a bit antiquated in user experience)

Marketing Pilgrim - How to Make a Blog Post go Viral with Social Media. Some interesting ideas include creating your own Facebook Application for your blog (BlogFuse, $5 per month), create a profile page for your blog on MySpace (not sure that’s my audience though).

Read Write Web (via TechCrunch)- Humans Interupting Algorithms: Wales v. Calacanis on Human Powered Search
Marissa Meyer was pretty negative on the whole idea of human edited search. You cannot do the “fat tail” solely with human intervention…the value is in the long tail, and that requires an algorithmic solution. Calacanis: “I will go kill myself now. My dream just got slashed by one of my idols. No, but I think fat tail equals humans. Long tail equals advertising.” I’m watching Mahalo pretty closely to see what I can learn from them.

Mad about Shanghai - link to Artzine China. I’m interested in learning more about Contemporary Chinese art and wish I had found this resource before my last trip to China (where my goal of setting aside a whole day to tour galleries with a knowledgeable independent curator turned into a one-hour walk through of Beijing’s 798 District…never enough time…

Scobleizer - what to do if you’re laid off in the 2008 recession. All great tips even if you are happily employed. And wired like the Scobleizer!

Plus8Star (via China Vortex) - Inside QQ report is out!
I learned that Tencent (QQ) is largest in the world at 270 mm accounts vs MSN 250 mm. It’s roughly a 400 mm USD company in 2007. Here’s what I gleaned from the report:

Why do global giants fail in China? (23/184)

1. Expats and execs from HK and Taiwan have limited field of vision, ensconced in nice high rises with well-paid office workers
2. Lack attention to and understanding of the masses
3. Risk adverse because they are earning 8-10X salary than local competitors. More willing to do nothing than to risk failure and loss of their fat salary
4. Focus on Long term strategy rather than reacting fast…long decision making loops with foreign HQ

Examples of current Internet pop culture (34/184)

1. Mice Love Rice
2. Backdorm Boys
3. Furong Jiejie
4. Mu Zimei
5. SuperGirls

Kaiser Kuo’s framing of key differences of the China’s internet industry (94/184)

1. Entertainment-focused to the point of distraction
2. Ferociously competitive
3. Plagued with very bad and unreliable metrics
4. Less obsessed with privacy issues