XiDan Girl (西单女孩), probably is the first Net Star in 2009 in China. Three months before, she is an unknown subway singer in Beijing. Now, she is a well-known online grassroots celeb. On March 26, Youku held a launching ceremony for its Niu Ren (aka master hand) Campaign, a program to encourage netizen to discovery the most impressive folk grassroots experts in any field. During the ceremony, Youku organized a small concert for XiDan Girl. Different from previous net stars in Chinese Internet history (e.g. Fu Rong Jie Jie, Tian Xian Mei Mei, Ding Bei Li, Xiao Pang), XiDan Girl is not famous overnight due to hyping or spoofing, but to her great singing performance and netizens’ recognition……

Kaixin001 is a Chinese social networking website launched in April 2008. After one year success operation, it is the top1 Chinese SNS now. According to Alexa Traffic Rankings, it is the 16th most popular website in China by March 2009. Different from Xiaonei, Hainei, and other Chinese SNS, Kaixin001 is not a localized copy of Facebook. It has limited amount of applications which mostly developed by Kaixin001 itself. All those 30+ apps are quite unique and fully fit Chinese young people’s culture and user experience. Currently, the most popular app is the “House & Garden”. Garden is a newly-added function on the original House app, which makes the whole app become very popular now……

Youku (优酷网), one of the top video sharing sites in China, recently commissioned Nielsen to do a user survey. Kaiser Kuo shared some data on Youku Buzz. Here is a quick highlight……

In my daily work, I am being involved pretty much in clients’ social media marketing (SMM) strategy planning. SMM sounds like a latest and trendy marketing approach run by high-profile marketers and prime brands. During the time companies and agencies are still struggling how to deal with the SMM, Chinese young people are already skillfully (although not systematically enough) using social media for everything in their life and even business……

Yesterday, the New York Times reported the story and phenomenon of “Grass Mud Horse”, a very popular dirty pun on China Internet since it first appearance in January. The word “grass mud horse” sounds similar to “mother fucker” in Chinese pronunciation……