There’s an an incredible market emerging in China. It’s going to be huge. I happened to stumble upon an interesting article that touches the subject “chinese internet behaviour” from a western perspective. Here I summarized four very interesting facts about internet usage in China compared to the west:

• China is the second largest internet market in the world.
• China has about 150 million internet users and the US has about 154 million. That’s about 68% market penetration in the US but only 10% in China (so far).
• The biggest search enine in China, Baidu, has a market share of 62% compared to Google’s 20%.
• The average time on a search results page in North America before a click is less than 10 seconds. In China it’s about 30 seconds on Google and almost a full minute on Baidu.

The next 10 years will be very interesting.

Google just merged two of their existing services that reveals general search habits: Zeitgeist and Trends into a new service called Google Hot Trends.

The art of trend-spotting is set to take a more scientific turn as Google Inc., the world’s top Web search company, on Tuesday unveils a service to track the fastest-rising search queries.

Google Hot Trends combines elements of Zeitgeist and Trends — two existing Google products that give a glimpse into Web search habits, but only in retrospect based on weeks-old data.

Hot Trends, a list of the current top-100 fastest-rising search trends, will be refreshed several times daily, using data from millions of Google Web searches conducted up to an hour before each update, the company said.

Links:

• Reuters news
• Google Hot Trends
• Webmaster World discussion

Missing the old-school google search without advertisements and extra features? Typing http://www.google.com/search?output=googleabout will direct you to a simpler google search page without ads.

Link: Google without ads

Like a Google News/Digg hybrid, Myspace News launches to compete on the grand user-driven news market.

Myspace being myspace, it will probably bring a less techy perspective, but are myspace users capable of voting out intersting news? It doesn’t look good so far…

A List Apart invites us all to participate in a huge web design survey for developers. Random participants will win glamorous prizes such as iPods, tickets and t-shirts. Read more at ALA.

My biggest concern here is that 80% of the participants will probably be residents in North America, since most of ALA’s readers are from that region. The 1st prize (a ticket to an Event Apart in the U.S) also confirms this. It will be exciting to see the results, but I would really like to see ALA push the target audience to involve the entire planet, perhaps using translations and a more open approach in it’s questionaries.

500 responses an hour doesn’t really say much - the ALA team should be looking for a representative cross-section of their target group, and that group should be as international as possible.

From ALA:

Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?