Jianjun's Blog

Tudou¹ to shut down rumor has been circulating on the Internet for quite a while. According to some sources, it was all started from two articles published on two Chinese portals Netease and Sohu.

It was reported that Netease removed the article soon but sohu still has it in Chinese, whose title clearly indicates the information was neither independent nor confirmed（传土豆网… Source says Tudou…）.

Later this information was translated into English and appeared on some influential blogs. China Herald said its source came from a Twitter update! Danwei.org quoted China Herald, while China Herald quoted Danwei.org.

Then the rumor was everywhere, even long after the overnight denial of the shut down from Tudou on March 7 (news report appeared on March 6). China Herald’s article was published exactly on March 7 but clearly it never followed up on that denial even with two updates!

Furthermore, it says, “Tudou.com is the world’s largest video hosting firm, claiming three times the traffic volume of number two, YouTube.”, which can not be independently verified but rather doubtful. Here are the statistics I got for Tudou and YouTube on Alexa, Compete and Quancast:

So where and how did this Tudou to Shut Down Rumor get started?

The ‘media source’ mentioned by Sohu article on March 6 was probably just the deleted Netease report. But after the March 7 report from Beijing Business Today that Tudou denied such a report, the whole thing would have died down if without the ‘help’ from some of the outdated/slanted reports from some bloggers.

And who benefits most from this rumor? Definitely Tudou. I’d never visited Tudou before the rumor appeared, but have been there a dozen times since then. That’s probably why our ancestor said: 塞翁失马，安知非福 (Misfortune might be a blessing in disguise.)

The lesson learned from Tudou to shut down rumor: NEVER trust online journalism.

¹ Tudou means potato（土豆）in colloquial Chinese.

Here are some of the popular Chinese words used among Internet users in China. I sort them according to my preference and their likelihood to become part of the everyday vocabulary

1. 河蟹 – literally means a ‘river crab’. A pun of the Chinese word 和谐 (harmony), which came from the call to ‘build a socialist harmonious society’ by political leaders.

In the beginning, 和谐 (harmony) was used, but later people opted to use ‘river-crab’ instead. The word is used as a verb to mean block, shut down or crack down, etc. depending on the object. For example, when a web site is blocked or shut down, we can say the web site is 被河蟹了 (river-crabbed/harmonized). Yeah, to make things harmonious, we have to get rid of those bad things indeed.

2. 粉丝 – literally means ‘starch noodle’, which came from the Chinese transliteration of ‘fans’. Used as a noun, it means an admirer or fan of somebody, famous or not. For example, X is Zhang Ziyi’s 粉丝.

3. 基民 – 基 is short for 基金 (mutual fund), 民 means people. This new word came into use when the bull market in 2006 and 2007 caused a sensation among the Chinese people and so many families put all their savings into the stock market or mutual funds. They have created a special kind of people – mutual fund people or 基民.

4. 脱女 – 脱 is short for 脱衣 (to undress), while 女 means a woman. During 2007, movie Lust, Caution entered the Chinese market and people began talking about those actresses who became famous overnight for taking off their clothes. Every such an actress is of course a 脱女. The word has a derogatory meaning.

New words appear every year. Most of them have a very short life. But I believe these words will stay in our vocabulary for a long time. If you know more popular Chinese words as such, please contact me or leave a message. I’d be glad to add them to this list. Thanks for today’s reading.

Recently I found Google behaves strangely. It seems that there have been some inside changes going on.

First there were strange statistics in Analytics – I had three or four days’ visitor count fixed at 40!! That’s impossible. Later I realized that they’d changed the tracking code. Although you could still use the legacy one, you are advised to adopt the new code to experience some new features (if any).

I found Google started dropping my pages from its index. What a cool thing for a new blog! That explains the sharp drop of new visitors coming to my blog. Of course I’m not punished. If they punish me out of no reason, I’ll sue them in the Federal Court! Haha. A guy copied at least 4 web sites’ content and created dozens of satellite sites (on those free blog sites) linking to his main site got high rankings in every Chinese translation-related search. But such a spammer is not punished by Google.

Google webmaster tools tells me both my sites are not verified. That’s odd. They were verified a long time ago. So I uploaded again the verification files and added mega tags as Google required, but the webmaster tools returned:

Verification status: NOT VERIFIED
We were unable to verify your file due to a server timeout.

Er… This is not true. My site is running fine. I searched on the Internet and found similar problems by other guys during March. Considering all of the above strange things, I guess it’s Google’s problem, some technical glitch.

Thanks to Google, I wrote one more entry for my blog.