Xiao Qiang is adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of China Digital Times, a bilingual collaborative China news website. Here he discusses the Chinese Government’s approaches to the internet and the phenomenon of the “50 cent blogger”.

Autodesk announced recently the AutoCAD Exchange, an online destination for AutoCAD users to connect and learn from experts, provide feedback to the product developers, and access professional tools that can help them do their jobs better. The online community is rich with original multimedia content, including an entertaining video series about “working for the man”, eLearning tools and aggregated CAD information from Web-based resources. Visitors can also create profiles to personalize their experience and share their own tips, scripts and applications, projects and experiences with the global community of AutoCAD users [...]

Paula Scher looks back at a life in design (she’s done album covers, books, the Citibank logo …) and pinpoints the moment when she started really having fun. Look for gorgeous designs and images from her legendary career [...]

We all live in a digital world, although it means different things to different people. In her inaugural public lecture as Adelaide’s Thinker in Residence, Intel’s Genevieve Bell will explore how digital technology is shaping our lives, our culture, and our future. Dr Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist and ethnographer with both an academic and industry background. Her research has provided considerable insight to the importance of culture in the adoption and adaptation of technology. She is currently the Director of User Experience in Intel Corporation’s Digital Home Group in the United States…

China-based blogs total 107 million, with more than 42 percent of netizens running a blog, a senior information official said here on recently. Cai Mingzhao, deputy director of the Chinese State Council Information Office, made the comment at the 2nd U.S.-China Internet Industry Forum. The number of blogs was about 40 million just a year ago [...]

The Chinese love affair with the internet will see digital ad spend increase 40% to $5.2bn (£3.07bn) next year, making the booming Asian online economy roughly the same size as the current UK market, according to a report. The study by KPMG, to be unveiled today at the MediaGuardian Create in China conference in central London, estimates that the total ad spend on all media in the Chinese market will grow by 22% this year and 19.5% next year. By the end of next year, the Chinese ad market will be worth $37.85bn, a year-on-year increase of more than $6bn on 2007 [...]

On April 25th, 2008, China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released the Research Report of China Youth Internet Behaviors. The report studies the online behaviors of 107 million China’s netizens under the age of 25. According to the report, China’s youth netizens are more inclined to entertainment demand. The most used online serves for youth are IM(91.3%), online music(91.1%), online movie/video(82.9%), search engine(73.4%), online games(68.2%), online news(63.4%) and email(58%). If compared with the average usage level of all Internet users, the usage rate of online games, online music and online movie/video among youth are much higher than average rate [...]

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) just released its latest semi-year report on development of Internet in China. According to the report, by the end of 2007, the number of Chinese Internet users has reached 210 million, an increase of 48 million compared to the first semester, or 73 million in last year. Among these 73 million new Internet users, 29.17 million, or about 40%, come from rural area. About 50.4 million users use mobile handsets to access Internet, just adding 6 million new mobile Internet users in last six months [...]

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) published the ‘2007 China Blog Survey report‘ recently. The report showed that, by the end of November 2007, China blog spaces have totaled 72.82 million, and the number of bloggers reached 47 million. China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) surveyed 1,862 Internet users in late November. Extrapolating from this group, CNNIC calculated that 47 million Chinese have blogged, more than one fourth of the 180 million people who have surfed the net in China. But many blogs have gone blank: only a persistent 36 percent kept their sites updated [...]

China’s online advertising market is likely to exceed ten billion yuan (1.3 billion U.S. dollars) this year, a research report said. The figure represents a 114.6 percent increase from the 4.66 billion yuan of last year. In October, the nation’s online advertising revenues hit 870 million yuan, lifting the market size to 7.5 billion yuan in the first ten months, according to the report from Nielsen, a leading global information and media company. The growth rate of China’s online advertising, one of the most successful business models for Internet firms, was higher than that of broadcasting advertising and magazine advertising…