Connected China: The first week | Fathom Information Design

Katy

March 06, 2013

Connected China: The first week

We are almost one week into the launch of Connected China! One notable discovery has been the early audience indicators: much of the site's traffic has come from within mainland China, and a majority of visitors worldwide are using browsers that have the zh-cn character encoding (suggesting Chinese language computers). This response is surprising given that the site seems to be at least partially blocked in China, with reports of blocked tweets and weibos (Weibo is a Chinese micro-blogging site) cropping up even earlier.

Amidst the flurry of activity this week, our friends at Thomson Reuters wrote about the project from their perspective, outlining the goals and scope of Connected China:

Irene Liu, our primary point of contact and the leader of the team of journalists collecting data at Thomson Reuters, posted Welcome to Connected China and launched an official Connected China blog.
The project was first envisioned by Reg Chua (Editor, Data and Innovation at Thomson Reuters), who wrote a Connecting the Dots post on his (Re)Structuring Journalism blog.

We'll be following up this week with more in-depth looks at the process of building Connected China. But in the meantime, Thomson Reuters has produced a series of introductory videos. This introduction to the Social View is a great place to start:

Check out the whole series on YouTube!

We’d love to hear what you’re working on, what you’re intrigued by, and what messy data problems we can help you solve. Find us on the web, drop us a line at hello@fathom.info, or subscribe to our newsletter.