China and the United States competed for the top medal contender, and now they're competing for which country's residents visited the official Beijing2008.cn website more. Between Aug. 8 and Aug. 17, 2008, the website attracted 16.5 million visitors, with China taking the lead at 4.3 million visitors, the United States coming in second with 4.1 million visitors, and Canada coming in third with 937,000. Overall, China accounted for 25.7 percent of visitors who went to the site.
One interesting point to note is the fact that the main site is in Mandarin, and I'm assuming the 95 percent of people who have Internet ADD (like me) probably didn't notice the English, French, Spanish, and Arabic language options at the top right of the page. Did you guys check it out, or did you go elsewhere for Olympics news?
Skechers
Azzaro
Homebase
Technically, the main site is in Chinese. Mandarin refers to the official dialect of the spoken Chinese language, but there are many regional dialects as well as local dialects. However, the written Chinese language is the same across the country regardless of dialect. So you can write or generally speak Chinese, but if you say you speak Chinese you might be prompted "Which dialect?"
If I remember my history right, the first emperor of China used the Chinese written language to unite all of China so that even though people from different regions might not understand what the other is saying, they'll always be able to communicate through the written word.
And yeah, I checked out the official site to view all the amazing venues! But it was nbcolympics.com for pretty much everything else. So many hours of coverage to go through!
1ESPN baby.
2Didn't even know it existed. I kept up with the Olympics by watching the news, reading about it on msnbc.com, etc.
3I went to msnbc, too.
Also, it's probably important to note that China only had 0.2 million more readers, but they have about a billion more people. So per capita, we're actually WAAAY ahead of them in readership.
4That's such a ridiculous comparison. How can you possibly expect the US to beat China when they've a population of over 1 BILLION people. Considering we had .2 million less still means that a larger percentage of our individual population went on it. ALSO, with China blocking their freakin' internet right and left, it's no wonder that the official sight would be the first flocked to. I really loathe when people twist stats like that. Major pet peeve.
5I'm with starlett, that's an apples to oranges comparison.
I also didn't bother with the official site, because I have the luxury of a TV nearby. If an event was on that was really important to me, I watched.
6I went there to check stats and stuff. But I'm Chinese. Haha.
Seriously, this is such "water is wet" news. Of course more Chinese people would visit the site. For one the Olympics this year was made into a huge frickin' deal you can't possible ignore all around China, and secondly, China has the biggest population in the world. I don't know if the blocking of some of the internet has anything to do with this, but it's possible.
7I watched on nbcolympics.com too... there's a really great musical montage on there that I watched about 10 times already.
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