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At 2:28 p.m. on May 12, a rare 8-magnitude earthquake jolted Sichuan Province in southwest China. Half an hour later a video of the quake shot by mobile phone was posted to one of China's biggest video-sharing websites, Tudou.com, by a university student in Chengdu, capital of the disaster-hit province. The video came minutes before the first TV news about the earthquake, which was run by CCTV News Channel, the first 24-hour national news channel in China.

"At first I felt my chair shaking and I thought it was my roommate who was kicking it. But later we realized it was an earthquake as the building was trembling and things on my desk began falling," said Zhao Zidong, a college student in Sichuan University. He was surfing the Internet in his dorm on the sixth floor of the building when the quake hit.

The two-minute earthquake video showed chaotic scenes as the quake hit the dorm, including a student hiding under a desk from which books, papers and plastic cups fell.

"It is 2:29 p.m. on May 12, 2008. We are having an earthquake here in the Sichuan University in Chengdu. Our building is still trembling," an excited voice said as the camera moved to a window from which dozens of students could be seen running away from the building.

As the earthquake calmed down Zhao began to upload the video to Tudou.com. That evening he found that his video had been played for some 600,000 times and was the most viewed that day.

Express themselves

In the Internet world, Zhao's homemade video was what is known as a podcast, a word that basically means blogging audio content but has been expanded in its connotation to include videos.

Topics covered by podcasts range from music and cultural programs, mainstream entertainment, business, politics, and science to travel programs. Podcasts are typically either person-centered or dedicated to specific topics.

In China, podcasting, which is hailed as a new medium, is dominated by video programs. China's various video-sharing websites have become the main stages for podcasters to express themselves.

"Thanks to the development of the Internet, more and more people have begun to use Internet or wireless tools to express themselves," said Ping Ke, who runs one of China's most renowned podcast websites, antiwave.net.

Chinese netizens' enthusiasm for expressing themselves was given fuel in 2005 when the country's first video-sharing website Tudou.com came into being. It has since grown into one of the world's largest content delivery networks, serving over 100 million videos each day with more than 40,000 new videos published daily, including amateur content such as videoblogging and user-generated videos, and professional content such as movie clips, TV clips and music videos. Tudou's motto is "Everyone is his own director."

"It is our faith as we believe that everyone's value comes from his creativity," said Gary Wang, founder and CEO of the website. "Podcasting differs from blogging in the way that it is more about showing oneself while blogging is focused on communication."