Digu; The Return of Microblogs in China.

We received an email this morning stating that Digu.com, a popular microblog (though not as popular as Fanfou or Twitter) has been reinstated. That’s great news, mainly because #1 We had a lot of followers on Digu, and this allows us to re-access them for our social media campaigns, and #2 the obvious possibility that this may lead to other microblogs being reopened.

On a selfish note, this will greatly help our agency to seed content, and boost our social media campaign efforts – till now, we frankly had to seed forums guerrilla style; now we can aggressively build our follower counts across the soon-to-be-reopened China microblogs for that additional boost of value-add traffic, and general “welcome back to the party” feel.

On a greater political scope, this hints toward China loosening up its strict censorship policies. This was widely speculated on the web; ie: after the 60th birthday of Chinese communism past, government would loosen its death grip on Internet censorship. Well sister, seems that day has come, the slow relax has first released digu back online.

This blast of color vs. the previous design's black, white and orange shows Digu's excitement at being reinstated.

Digu's welcome back message.

Related articles from around the web.

• China Strangles Tor Ahead of National Day (yro.slashdot.org)
• China Strikes at Internet Freedom Tool (technologyreview.com)
• China accuses Google of ‘malicious’ censorship (theregister.co.uk)
• The So-So Firewall of China (snarkmarket.com)
• Twitter Seen As Tool For Social Change In China (npr.org)
• Social Networking Watch: Belgian Tax Watchdogs Using Facebook (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• Social Networking Watch: Belgian Tax Watchdogs Using Facebook (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• China tries to stop HK publishing history book (guardian.co.uk)
• Twitter – Top 100 Most Influential in Real Estate (retechworld.wordpress.com)

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Tagged as: Censorship, China, Communist Party of China, government, Human Rights and Liberties, Politics, social media, twitter