Sina Weibo is the much-talked about Chinese microblogging platform which now has about 250 million users. But language barriers can make it tricky for many people around the world to get a window onto what’s happening on Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) service. And that’s why the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC) has cooked-up a useful website that’ll allow anyone to do a visual search for what’s hot right now on Weibo, in pretty much any language.
The JMSC folks call it WeiboScope, and it features two kinds of search: a gallery of the most reposted tweets that have images in the past 24 hours (pictured below), or a more specific keyword search (pictured above) that makes use of Google Translate so that you don’t need to be able to search in Chinese.
Either a lot of people are talking about winter boots, or that's a lot of Weibo spam!
On JMSC’s Rice Cooker blog, Cedric Sam explains how this can help anyone – ie: non-users – peek into what Chinese netizens are chattering about right now on Weibo. Plus, it can help fellow academics get a better handle on issues that are being discussed than by using the native Weibo.com search feature. That’s because it eliminates Sina’s algorithms for a fresher perspective. Cedric explains:
Rather than let Sina Weibo dictate the way the data produced by users should be displayed, we borrow a bit from the open data movement and repackage posts in ways that may be a bit more useful to users. This is how a WeiboScope search by image came to be.
[It] demonstrates that when you are allowed to mash and mix, and remix data, it may lead to some discoveries and realizations that may not have been made possible otherwise.
Or, if you’re like me, you can use it to find funny GIFs (here’s one), and perhaps pick up a story idea about tech issues that are trending on Weibo.
Right now, the ‘most reposted images’ are very diverse, suggesting there’s no major news story that everyone is focusing on. But a few days ago, the JMSC team points out that the wall of images was dominated by Kim Jong-un, the successor to the North Korean leadership.
Give WeiboScope a try.
[Source: HKU’s JMSC Rice Cooker blog]