One area where Chinese tech companies seem to find success is adapting Web services successful in the English speaking world to a culture that primarily reads Chinese. It was not surprising to see QuDing.com present something that is sort of a cross between social booking marking sites like del.icio.us, Digg, and even a hint of online news reader Bloglines. China already has its fair share of Digg clones. Dingr and diglog are both very similar to Digg in the way they function. A couple of others have been shut down for names and appears that looked too much like Digg itself. China Web2.0 recently pointed to the new Linkist foray into the land of Digging based on open source voting engine Pligg. Of course Linkist is itself a social networking clone of LinkedIn

QuDing users create a profile and then have access to submit stories, tag stories, make comments and vote on favorites. Profiles are customizable with details like email address and a 48×48 icon. Users have a number of ways to interact with information on QuDing. You can simply vote for a story just like Digg. Readers submit stories, complete with tags and supporting descriptive information. Stories submitted by other QuDing users may be bookmarked in your own personal collection of information. You can add a story or site to a list of watched information. Commenting on stories is supported. One thing I find most useful is the ability to make modifications to information submitted to QuDing, allowing for correction of mistakes, which is something other sites in this category generally don’t handle well.
Another feature lets you add headlines to your own Web page. Options include most recently added sites to all of QuDing. Recent posts from sites submitted to QuDing. Your most recent sites added to QuDing or posts from sites you added to QuDing.

It’s too early to tell whether QuDing (which loosely translates to “take a look”) will find success with their formula for news discovery. Voting currently seems to be flawed, allowing me to give multiple thumbs up or thumbs down to the same story. I hit a SQL database error when putting the wrong type of information in a form field. It’s likely something that could earn a small team enough money to live on, but scaling to the popularity of an international success like Digg is a much bigger hurdle. At the moment, QuDing needs to scale beyond the less than 10 users currently in the system. I appear to be #8 in all the people to sign up and the first to add an image to my profile.