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About The New Hanoian

Welcome to The New Hanoian

Welcome to the New Hanoian website. While the project that has become the website you see before you began in the spring of 2005, it has undergone many changes. What began as a fairly basic listings and local living guide soon morphed into an interactive, user-contributed database of all that is and isn't worth checking out in Hanoi. The change was part necessity, part inspiration. Like many, we thought it'd be great to hit the streets and uncover the subtle nuances that make Hanoi such a compelling place to live and bring those discoveries back to the people via the web, but this city has a way of humbling such youthful enthusiasm. To put it frankly, Hanoi in the 21st century is one beautiful mess of change and misdirection. Just when you think you've got a grip on it, it slips away and reappears in a new form. Clearly, we could not do this alone. No one could. At the same time, in the course of our looping trips around the city, we met so many wonderful people with a take on Hanoi all their own. It seemed everyone we met lived a different city altogether, and each deserved its spot on the record. The only thing to do was to develop a site that allowed everyone a chance to tell it how they saw it. There could be no single, authoitarian voice telling this story without Hanoi quietly mocking it in the background. This is how the New Hanoian came to be, a site of use to anyone new to Hanoi, but also one reflecting a Hanoi that is new to all of us...however long we've been here.

After getting settled in that unpredictable way people always do, our thoughts returned to the web and information in Hanoi. We couldn't help but feel that our experiences were often repeated ones, and that if those overlapping experiences were collected and displayed side-by-side, they'd reveal more about Hanoi than any one person or site could currently offer. This thought got us started.

The New Hanoian and the Xemzi Project

Those years of intense development led to the realization that we were on to something that had ramifications well beyond Hanoi. Due to the flexibility that modeling Hanoi demanded, the web engine we put together could be applied anywhere. The New Hanoian family is a well-traveled lot, and given the web resources we frequently encountered on our jaunts around the region, we felt that what we were doing needed to be applied more broadly. With this in mind, the New Hanoian became part of a wider project known as Xemzi. Xemzi Limited of Hong Kong is an information technology company dedicated to bringing a hyper-local touch to the web resources of cities throughout East Asia. While the application of this model outside of Hanoi is just getting underway, you will already find it up and running in Hanoi, Saigon, and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Look for us popping up elsewhere throughout the coming year as well. The Year of the Rat sees us on the move.

Just because the approach that brought you The New Hanoian is finding homes elsewhere around East Asia, don't for a second think that the experience you've come to expect from us will be any less locally grounded. All Xemzi supported sites are locally managed and operated under the premise that nobody has a better grasp of what goes into making a city great like the people who live there. There's simply no substitute to waking up everyday to the same environs as the community you serve.

The Tools to Make Hanoi Home

On the www.newhanoian.com pages, you will find all the tools you need to settle in Hanoi and pass on your valuable insights to those who might benefit from those experiences. This information will take a variety of forms. User Reviews are one of the backbones of our site. We go to great lengths to bring you a vast directory of Hanoi businesses and organizations that you can in turn tell people about your experiences with. Of course, we don't for a second think that we've found anything close to everything in Hanoi that you might find interesting. You too will have the opportunity to enter any New Spot that you feel the community would find of interest. Upon entering it, we'll visit and verify the basic contact information and location that you have posted. From there, it's up to the community to decide just where that place will fit into the Hanoi scene. We stay out of the recommendations business. That will be entirely up to you. As the reviews accumulate, you'll find the collected wisdom of the city summarized in the rankings on our Top Spots page. To better understand what goes into a valuable user contribution in this format, please visit the User Guide..

The members of our community will also be able to give each other the inside scoop on all that happens through the Ask A New Hanoian (Ask A.N.H.) pages. This is an open question and answer forum where the collective wisdom of your trial and error can find a concrete home. When you've got a question about the who, how, when, where, or why of life in Hanoi, check here first. If somebody hasn't addressed the issue yet, ask the community and watch the insights come flooding out.

Finally, as informative as The New Hanoian has proven to be, its most exciting potential is in how it can bring people together who might not have otherwise met. In the course of writing reviews and answering or asking questions, the unique perspective of each community member will reveal itself. When it becomes clear to you that some of the site users have a take on Hanoi that you value, you can take the next steps to make these people a greater part of your online and (possibly) your offline life in Hanoi. If you see someone who has a great take on this city, you can join their "following". What this will do is allow the site to update you on all future posts they make. If you're interested in further contact with them, our built-in private messaging system allow system you to make direct contact with them within the functionality of the site. If a group of users clearly have shared interests that they would like to pursue offline, any site member can create a "Group" that will be publicly listed. These groups can be used to draw attention to events and activities throughout the city. Any group member can post notices to the group page, send messages to the entire group, or post events that are being organized to the event calendar. Keep on the pulse of the city and show the world what Hanoi is all about.

Add to all this our free Classifieds, Housing, and Jobs sections that any community member can post to, and you've got the single most powerful web tool for anyone who calls Hanoi home. Watching The New Hanoian develop has been a treat for all of us. As a web experience in its own right, it has been a blast. However, there's much more happening here. In a city of such constant change as Hanoi, we all have an opportunity to be a part of the very cultural mapping of this emerging international city.

Where Does the Money Come From?

Of course, at this point, you're probably wondering, "How does The New Hanoian make money?" It's an important question. We started this whole project out of a sincere interest in understanding the city we had come to call home and in how modern web resources could be used to further that understanding. However, if we are fully to devote ourselves to the project, it has to support everyone who makes this possible. Accordingly, we have devised a business model that will make this happen without undermining our dedication to provide accurate information uncompromised by commercial interests. As interest in The New Hanoian increases, we will provide businesses small and large with a sophisticated method of informing the consuming public about their products and services that reflects the expressed values of our community members. Businesses will never have to pay to appear on the site. Provided that they are responsible in their use, all are welcome. What we will never do, is reveal your personal information or allow businesses to censor, edit, or distort the perspectives that you have added to this site. Some traditional banner style ads may appear on the site, but only for non-logged in visitors to www.newhanoian.com. If you are a registered community member who is logged into the site, they will not appear on the site for you. To be frank, banner ads play a very, very small part of what we have in mind. Rather, businesses will be community members much the same as you. While they may have some additional commercial features they can make use of, it will be up to them to be responsible contributors to this platform. Any abuse of that will only gain them your ire, and possibly get them banned from the site.

We look forward to your participation on The New Hanoian in these exciting times. If you have any questions or feedback for us, please don't hesitate to send us a message.

Cheers,

The Staff of The New Hanoian