The Internet is local and Chinese do not link abroad
8 Comments Published by tobias.escher October 17th, 2007 in *OIINEWS, Internet Usage, local Internet patternsOne of the main reasons to go to a conference is obviously that you can meet interesting people there that do research that is quite relevant to yours and of which you haven’t been aware of at all. In Michigan (see previous post) I met Professor Jonathan Zhu from City University of Hong Kong. They have been researching the hyperlinking behaviour of Chinese, mainly whether they tend to link to other websites within the same provinces, country or abroad. Unfortunately most of the results so far are only available in Chinese so I share the information he sent me.
Based on a sample of 5 million webpages from 15.000 websites in China with a total of 40 million external hyperlinks (i.e. pointing outside their website), they could built the following model:
Only a tiny minority of 6% of links does leave the Chinese web space. While this figure is more or less robust he tells me that the distinction between Home vs. Other provinces is still preliminary as it is based on geo-IP location. This might tell you where the server sits but not necessarily much about the “location” of the websites its been hosting. Therefore they are now trying to explore new methods including content mining. (The results have been presented in 2005 by Jonathan J.H. Zhu and Xiaoming Li at the Annual conference of Chinese Computer-Mediated Communication)
This research is exciting to me because it links back to my research topic that is also about the extent to which Internet use (in my case for creating and maintaining friendships) is locally focused. As a matter of fact, when coming to the Oxford Internet Institute my original plan was to do something along the lines of Professor Zhu and to use hyperlinks to assess the role of national identities online (you can have a look here). I eventually abandoned the idea amongst other reasons because it requires a considerable effort in terms of hardware etc. The more I am looking forward to hear more results from these ongoing efforts.
To compare some of the findings there is a useful review article by Han Wo Park and Mike Thelwall (2002) in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and a more recent study by Barnett and Sung (2005): Culture and the structure of the international hyperlink network. All point to the fact that hyperlinking behaviour seems to differ for different nations. Other notable research projects in this area have been undertaken by Robert Ackland who used to be a fellow here at the OII. He has been analysing the linking behaviour of political parties as well as environmental activist groups.
8 Responses to “The Internet is local and Chinese do not link abroad”
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About
Since October 2006 I am both a DPhil student as well as a research assistant at the Oxford Internet Institute and here I share with the accidental reader my musings on different aspects of the Internet and society. Feel free to comment or simply ignore :-)
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Tobias Escher
Oxford Internet Institute
1 St. Giles
Oxford OX1 3JS
firstname.lastname@oii.ox.ac.uk
+44 (0)1865 287210
There’s an interesting post by Tomas Crampton, former writer for the New York Times and IHT on why it is difficult to get web stats from China:
http://www.thomascrampton.com/2007/10/16/why-are-chinas-web-stats-so-bad
I think it’s probably because of the language restriction rather than the social networking issues.
Here is a website about Chinese Internet research, hope it interests you. http://english.iresearch.com.cn/html/Default.html
And thank you for knocking that door for me! Really appreciate it. Sorry for cann’t thank you in person this afternoon.
I guess in that research, Taiwan is left out again, right? Although Chinese government claims that Taiwan is just a province of China, when it comes to Internet, it might not be true.
Hence I am very curious about comparisons. First, of course, we can do comparisons with Taiwan and China since Taiwanese Internet data are much more open to research. If someone intends to interpret this as Chinese use of Internet are relatively local, then Taiwan serves a nice reference since we Taiwanese do use Chinese language (although traditional one) which is also a language barrier there.
Second, could similar research being done in a mid-west state in US? Can we compare?
According to my limited experience in China (5 month of backpacking), I guess such province-centered characteristic shown in websites linking is very straight-forward. Chinese people do not usually build their websites according to their provinces, but Chinese government does. If the local government and its agencies have majority of presence on the web, and if people especially those in net cafe tend to use the nation-wide services (even world-wide ones) instead of local ones, then it might tell a different story. What if for practical reasons (easier to use or self-censorship) when Chinese people do hyperlink abroad, they do it from websites abroad? The Internet savvy Falungon and liberal Chinese are the major examples.
In Taiwan we have our own local websites such as Hemidemi ( http://www.hemidemi.com ) for social bookmarking, hence I guess we have huge links abroad (especially in US and Japan) since it is part of the popular culture diffussion pattern now. The recent Cannes-award winning film “Lust Caution” and constant flow of Youtube links happening in such social bookmarking websites could make a huge difference in this kind of hyperlink-based research.
Thank you.These findings are useful for me,a player in China.