The start of public trading of Chinese social media Weibo is making world financial news headlines today, with US media such as CNN Money urging investors in the US to exercise caution and the BBC (oddly, in an article dated 18 April 2014) wondering how it will fare, with a certain amount of fuzziness about what exactly Weibo is and what it does.

It’s frequently compared to Twitter, but it’s more than Twitter and less than Facebook.

I’m one of its 130 million active monthly users, posting mainly photos of Switzerland and photos with short posts about Swiss wine. That makes me one of the 5% who post original content, apparently. Fine by me. I personally love Weibo although since I don’t speak Chinese I have funny conversations with my followers who are interested, enthusiastic and friendly.

I thought it might be helpful to show you just what Weibo looks like with a screen shot of my page today. I posted that Lavigny, Vaud green tree with blue sky 30 minutes ago and so far it’s been viewed by a couple hundred people.