If you search for the posts with the keyword ‘China’ on TechCrunch, there are eight posts which are China web related in the past month. The latest one is HiPiHi Seeks To Standardize 3D Worlds And Develop Interoperability which I also covered here. It is quite unusual, I would say. If you ever read a post titled Google and China and Evilness from Michael Arrington and some other posts on his CrunchNotes, you will understand my feeling here. I even know a few Chinese websites (one of them is now regarded as one of the most innovative Chinese Web2.0 site) were trying to catch TC to profile them but never got response. Well, Need to mention that Michael finally noticed that there are loads of TC fans in China.
So, is TechCrunch Learning Chinese Web? It should be a really good news for the China web if the answer is a Yes. But I still doubt it. Is TechCrunch learning Chinese because Google is spending more efforts on Chinese market. Check the screenshot below for the search result of ‘China’, half of them are about Google China, only one of them is written directly by Michael and some are not first-hand news (through other medias such as Metaversed, Reuters) at all.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not here to criticize TechCrunch which is absolutely great resource to learn the Internet market. My real question is, when will people seriously think the Chinese web is worthy of being learned?
Nice posting, Gang. TC is definitely more US-centric, especially comparing with RW. Glad that see the TC seems to be making some changes on this.
Seems to me that Michael is now simply playing the hype game and puts forward whatever will get better results from google search – i.e. mainstream. Hence the vast # of posts on facebook, youtube, google… China is simply the latest hype (as can be seen from daily news on nytimes, forbes, businessweek), so he is doing nothing more but following after the mainstream.
p.s. Any chance you know who is behind Chinamemes.com?