Chinese netizens care about the open source or community-driven project much less than the western people, which is one of the reasons that Firefox is still far behind the IE and Maxthon in Chinese browser market. But this can be changed. One news is from my friends of Mozilla Asia which has recently had a gathering in Beijing. They have not released any details of their plan yet but one thing is for sure that Firefox will be heating Asia very soon. About the second buzz, I think it is a very good one.
Elong.com (NASDAQ: LONG), the 2nd largest Chinese e-commerce Travel site launched its new face on 1st, Feb. The most exciting part of this upgrade for me is its Wiki service, named Tourist-Guide Channel. The Wiki system is based on HoodongWiKi, a Chinese open-source Wiki platform. We cannot be too optimal to say that this could be a successful story in the end. Well, Blog starts getting popular in this massive market, but unfortunately most of netizens still dont really understand the essence of web2.0. Most of them do the blogging only because they find the blog is a good stage to show themselves (you can understand my point here if your ever watched the Audition of X-Factor or American Idol), but the web2.0 also means Contribution. Another interesting thing to see is how the HoodongWiki, a non-profit system can share the revenue with Elong.com.
Come on.. Western collobarative development just won’t attract many people here. In U.S. and europe programming sometimes is done for luxury/hobby. In other cases there are corporations supporting open source development. Do you really think this is the right time and place for this in China? Oh wait, Google China has nothing to do, perhaps we will see more of that stuff coming from them..
Sergey, thank you for your comments.
I understand your point here. My points of writing this post here are:
1. Wiki has been recognized in China after Blog;
2. The conventional e-commerce has realized the power of web2.0 concepts
3. China is a bit more friendly to Open-source and this is a sign.
Thanks.
Lu