Asia, Microblogging | featured news

U.S. universities have responded to China's exploding demand for American higher education with branch campuses and aggressive recruiting. Now, some are trying to boost their brands by casting photos and other snippets of campus life out into the confounding sea of Chinese social media.

China's Twitter was raucous Thursday with horn-tooting over Beijing's gold rush at the London Olympics, a digital reflection of the nation's exuberant mood - embellished with flashing emoticons. Earlier passions have been ignited on the site by a deadly high speed rail crash and outrage over factory pollution....

Everyone's made a joke they thought was funny only to see it fall flat, but Park Jung-geun's attempt at humor could see him jailed for up to seven years in South Korea. Park, a photographer by profession, re-tweeted some messages from North Korea's official twitter feed, such as reports on the late leader Kim Jong Il's travels across the country and negative tweets about South Korea.

Looking to boost the number of followers you have on your microblog? In China, a country where face often trumphs all in social matters, there’s a quick though dubious solution.

China blocks access to the term "Shanghai Composite Index" on some of the country's most popular microblogging sites.

Sina’s Weibo has nearly 8 times more users than Twitter. In 2010, Twitter had approximately 17 million users in the US, according to an Edison Research report called Twitter Usage in America 2010. Even if Twitter doubled in size this year, which is unlikely, its Twitter account numbers would be dwarfed by Sina accounts alone.