Nanjingnow, HelloNanjing & Nanjingexpat
About one-fifth of the world's population or over one billion people speaking Chinese and lack of ability of most of the Chinese people to understand English, all most all of the Chinese domestic website are in Chinese. Keeping this in mind, to assist expats living in Nanjing and to help them understand more about this historical city, three English based websites are formed i.e. Nanjingnow,hellonanjing and nanjingexpat.
Nanjingnow is the eldest brother among these three English language websites. “Started as a blog to share useful information with people in the city in late 2005”. Along with the arrival of Nanjingnow there came a lot of hope and responses from expat and local people living all around the city.
It remain as one and only English language website dominating Nanjing through 2006-2008. But people expectation and hope all went to vain when web-sites one and only focus was jobs&classifieds. And failing to keep his promise of providing other useful information,member of Nanjingnow started to look for another options.
Today it is almost as good as closed. Administrator might have forgot his password or growing popularity of his little brothers or whatever might be the reason, most of the post from 2007-2008 can be found on their homepage. And no update has been made to the websites since long time ago.
No further information could be found for Nanjingnow despite the several attempts to reach the administrator. News is he has sold the web-site and left the town.
In April 2009 raise another English Based website owned and operated by Canadian media producer Anil Ramsey which was called Hellonanjing . According to their website it is “ Nanjing's first active social community that used online tools to promote offline collaboration.”
With 848 total member Hellonanjing is the second largest website especially based for expat community in Nanjing. It is very well-designed and user friendly website where you can find most of the information that you need or might need while staying and living in Nanjing.
“Hellonanjing is not my job at all. It is a free service for the benefit of the community because before this web-site, there wasn't one. We are the only english web-sites in Nanjing that produces original content. If you are looking for news that is reprinted from other web-sites,that's not what we do.”
“The frontpage of this website is reserved for articles – typically news and multimedia pieces that preview or review Nanjing events, or else feature articles that are relevant to Nanjing.” and don't be surprised if you find the same news for more than a week or two. With very few writer and maybe lack of resource or budget, don't expect to find update on 'original' local news either. Despite being second largest website and user friendly, it still doesn't have much fun activities to offer to its user.
To find further information visit Hellonanjing
“Sponsored by British School of Nanjing and administered by 4 people Nanjingexpat was revamped in march 2010 with 250 members and reached 1150 members within six-months which makes us the biggest website” says General Manager Keith Maguire of Nanjingexpat who is also responsible for all of their activities including their English magazine but he denied to provide the name of administrator.
According to GM of nanjingexpat “The main mission of Nanjing Expat is to become the hub of activities, news and events for NJ across print and online media. The website is a portal which will support our print activities. We welcome all visitors to Nanjing Expat but target the educated global worker. We try to appeal to all sectors, singles & families across all age groups.”
A lot of members mean lot of activities in the site and they have clearly failed to manage that. With lot of post on their frontpage and complexity to navigate their web-sites can make you little annoyed at first. But you will find almost every information and other local news with variation in writing style unlike Hellonanjing. But it might take you a while to find the information you are looking forward to.
If you are fan of reading books then this might be the perfect place for you. On their book club you can find the book you are looking forward to read, you can borrow or rent it from other members, But you need to be member first to use this facility and it might take you a while. Though registering to this website is free and easy.
To find further information visit Nanjingexpat
Hellonanjing and Nanjingexpat are similar in more than one way. They both are developed using same joomla software to produce more or less the same thing. And there was a time when they were going to submerge as a single site but deal broke at the last minute. You can find the same members on both of the web-sites,similar forum post,same events. But what if you want to stick to one web-sites. Then eventually it depends upon you,what kind of internet user are you and what do you expect from these web-sites.
Hellonanjing mainly focuses on promoting clubs,foods and beverages with occasional other outstanding news and article. All these can be found in Nanjingexpat t too and there are lot of other activities you can enjoy with. It might get a little while to get used to this website whereas Hellonanjing is way simpler.
Story of these two websites are like Facebook and Hi5. Facebook is simple and has lot more applications,Hellonanjing is like Facebook except it has fewer subject matter. Nanjingexpat is like Hi5,it's complex to understand but it has more subjects you might have fun with.
Nanjing is a small town with around 10,000 foreigners and with failure of Nanjingnow. It is very hard to predict the future of English language community web-sites but maybe we can see result in very near future than we expect too.
This article was originally posted here.
