Social Web exploding in China

Watch out, YouTube, here come KU6.com. Well, YouTube probably doesn’t have to worry too much, but baby video-sharing site, based in Beijing, is the 46th most popular site in China, one of the world’s most populous countries, and says it broke even in three months, “attracted 2 million unique users a day in the last week of May … and unique users have been growing by 200,000 a day on average per week,” CNET reports (not sure is that growth is per day or per week, but…). KU6 also just struck a 2-year partnership with Baidu, which controls 70% of China’s search market, CNET adds. All this is in a story about how Web 2.0 – the very social, media-sharing, youth-driven Web – has totally taken off in China. And I’m telling you this because if any parent thought this is just another passing phase of the Net, that there are only a handful of sites or technologies kids use for online socializing, or that this is something a single government can regulate, here’s yet more evidence that none of the above is true.