Searching for the second billion
■"Hear the Big Pop? A Chinese Search Engine Went Public: Baidu is backed by Google, which is also a potential buyer," by David Barboza, New York Times, 8 August 2005, p. C3.
Ethan Zuckerman at the Harvard Berkman Center that studies the Internet pointed out to me when we met last December at a Highlands Forum that the first billion people to log onto the Internet were mostly Old Core (Europe, Japan, North America, Australia) and that the second billion were mostly New Core (especially China, India and Brazil). So what was the Internet bubble in the Old Core long ago (the before time) is resurrecting itself to a certain extent now in the New Core.
Nowhere is this seen more than in China, and no IPO has "popped" in its first day of trading since the Internet bubble burst in the Old Core than China's version of Google (also backed by Google and perhaps soon bought by Google) called Baidu.
China's rocketed past 100 million users, gaining most in just the last few years, and somebody's going to get rich searching on their behalf in Chinese, which BTW becomes the most used language on the Net any day now.
Do I worry about the Chinese government trying to keep 100 million users under "mouse arrest" through sophisticated blocking and tracking technologies?
Not for long.