So there I was, perusing my Slimstat stats early in the AM when I notice … hey — who is that website that is linking to me?  Buzzcn.com it turns out.  Its a Chinese Social Bookmarking site — sort of like Digg but in Chinese characters! 

Turns out one of their “Diggers” is a Chinese fellow named “Vincent” who was good enough to submit my article on Social Networks Killing the Internet Star, and this, in turn piqued my interest.

Now it turns out that Buzzcn isn’t a huge site … but according to Alexa, although its 3mo. average is around 800,000 (less is better), over the past month its shot up to 27, 000 … not bad.  In terms of comparison though, Reddit.com, a North American social bookmarking site, is about 1,411.  A ways to go.

So Buzzcn.com’s not exactly a heavy weight.  Are there others?

Of course!
A quick punch up in Google (I’m not sure if there’s a Chinese TechCrunch where they’d all be listed … ) brought up

• How about CnDig.com [Alexarank: 100,000], which features a similar voting scheme, and may have recently won a round of funding through Softbank.
• Or, LiveDigg.com [Alexa: 380,000], whose design similarities (logo included) are so shocking they border on larceny.
• Or, HaoHao [Alexarank: 900,000], a social bookmarking site *about* China, but *in* English (tip of the hat to Filination where I picked this one up).

There are of course, many, many, others who prove that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery — if Kevin Rose is indeed flattered by so many enthused admirers.

(In fact, there are tons of English language Digg-imitators.)

Now, I’ve got to admit, I don’t read Chinese, and in terms of speaking, well, Cantonese is miserable at best.  I really have no authority over judging any of these sites since I can’t really read any of them at all.

The best I can do, honestly, is to run them through Babelfish, but then you get something that goes like this. (The Buzzcn.com news permalink filtered through babelfish produces the headline that reads “You also send email? Then you“, followed by the description: “US’S freshman class university student majority uses Facebook to take mainly relates the method, but is not email. Future email mainly will use in with stranger’s exchange.”)

But I think the bottom line is this:
Hitting up these sites made me realize that the number of Chinese ‘netizens’ is they’re watching what we’re doing (I use the royal “we”, because I’m not counting on any one watching what I’m writing) pretty closely.

India clearly has IT powers to flex, but these Chinese Digg-like clones just didn’t pop up over night; there are geeks in China right now probably all learning Ajax, javscript, Ruby on Rails and all the kinds of things that we’re blogging, ranting, and bookmarking already.

What’s fascinating is the blindspot that the web2.0 community has gotten to the Billion-other community at the other side of the globe.  And, I think this is partially driven by the language barrier. 

From a purely practical point of view, who is going to Digg a site they don’t understand?  Put more literally, how can you Digg a Chinese, Indian, or for that matter, Eastern European or Russian site if you can’t read it?

The blogosphere as we know it is rapidly expanding (like a bubble?) — and it makes me wonder what’s going to happen when what *we* consider the Web2.0 actively starts interacting with the “other” Web2.0 that is growing on the other side of the world.

Will it get bigger and better?  Here’s a vote for hoping that it does.