The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming

The monthly release of the Netcraft survey is always good, since it generally shows the continuing dominance of Apache in the Web server field. But this month has something new and vaguely frightening:

In the February 2009 survey we received responses from 215,675,903 sites. This reflects a phenomenal monthly gain of more than 30 million sites, bringing the total up by more than 16%.

This majority of this month's growth is down to the appearance of 20 million Chinese sites served by QZHTTP. This web server is used by QQ to serve millions of Qzone sites beneath the qq.com domain.

QQ is already well known for providing the most widely used instant messenger client in China, but this month's inclusion of the Qzone blogging service instantly makes the company the largest blog site provider in the survey, surpassing the likes of Windows Live Spaces, Blogger and MySpace.

Got that? QQ's server QZHTTP just put on 20 million sites in the survey - enough seriously to dent both Apache and IIS (and making the latter look suddenly vulnerable to losing its second place).

Does this represent the dawn of a new (Web server) era?

What makes this all slightly troubling is that I don't know anything about QZHTTP: I presume it's not open souce, since I can't find any links to its code. But can anyone give me any more details, please? (Via @codfather.)

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Virtually a Real Currency

And so the line between what is a "real" and "virtual currency" blurs yet further:

Tencent, QQ.com's parent company, is being sued by an angry user for impersonating a friend and getting him to link through to a contest site. Damages sought: 40,000 Q coins, and 445 5-digit QQ numbers (see previous post on the value of QQ numbers). Is this the first time that a court of law has been asked to award virtual currency in a settlement? It all points to the way that Q coins are increasingly being used as an alternative to the [Chinese] RMB for online economic transactions. It makes sense, given that a) so few Chinese have credit cards with which to pay for online goods and services; b) the vast majority DO have QQ accounts and Q coins with which to purchase online goods and services; and c) You can accumulate Q coins by playing online QQ games.

The post also links to this useful introduction to the world of QQ coins.

China's Virtual Money Woes

It's spreading:

As if Chinese leaders did not have enough of a headache trying to manage the country's rising but still undervalued currency in the testy world of international trade, now the growing popularity of virtual money enters the already complex equation.

The so-called "QQ" coin - issued by Tencent, China's largest instant-messaging service provider - has become so popular that the country's central bank is worried that it could affect the value of the yuan. Li Chao, spokesman and director of the General Office of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), has expressed his concern in the Chinese media and announced that the central bank will draft regulations next year governing virtual transactions.

So tell me again the difference between real and virtual currencies....