I've been lazy about cross-posting the updates, so here are the last few, going clear back to the emergence of the Nail House story. On a related note, I will be retiring from the CNET gig at the end of May for a variety of reasons, most of which are related to me not having any time and thus not the level of inspiration that I'd like. China geeks with a writing jones who are interested in carrying the torch should get in touch. I will connect any good candidates with the editors. Pay is negligible, but the people are nice and the exposure is good.

Turns out its really more "Sohu-y". Oops.

My good friend Sumner Lemon, who used to cover China technology for IDG News Service out of Beijing but is now leading the tropical life down in Singapore, has been covering a developing scandal concerning Google's new Chinese input method editor (IME). It turns out that the word database may have been lifted from Sohu's Sogou pinyin IME without --how shall we put it?-- their express written consent.

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A short but interesting article from the Xinhua news service reported on the amount of the money being generated by Chinese "new media" businesses. Citing a report by the China Media Research Center, an analysis house, the articles say that new media generated 118 billion yuan (about US$15 billion) in 2006. The article is a little vague about what that figure represents exactly, but I'm going to take a stab and say top-line revenue. It's also a touch vague about what constitutes a "new media" business.

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Anyone who works on a computer in Chinese knows that what tool you use to handle Chinese input can make a huge difference. A good one makes entering Chinese characters fast and relatively painless. A bad one makes it a roaring headache. Windows and Apple's OS X both have built-in language tools for Chinese input, but there are plenty of third-party tools available as well. Here in China, Google has just launched its own Chinese input tool. Predictably, it's made this a bit "Googly".

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Say you create an enormous community of Internet users who communicate with each other in an extensive virtual world. Then let's say you want to introduce a system by which those users, more than 200 million of them by some reports, could purchase things online from your marketing partners. This virtual currency could be used for purchases, promotions and transactions between users. Still good.

Then let's say that virtual currency broke the boundaries of your virtual world and became tradeable and exchangeable on other sites and real-world businesses. And, what if, if as a result of that, what if your virtual currency assumed an actual exchange rate compared with real currency?

Well that is what has happened to Tencent, operators of the hugely popular QQ network. And now the Government is taking an interest.

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Apologies to regular readers for the scarce posts recently. I suppose considering my lack of updates, you're all irregular readers by definition now. My schedule crunch looks like continuing for the next few days, but there has been one interesting issue unfolding on the Chinese Internet over the past few days that is worth mentioning: The Nail House.

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