China, as any internet user knows, is about to take over the world. It's just a shame that Mandarin is such a devilishly hard language to learn... all those characters, you see.

But I digress. Latest evidence of China's almightiness is its fervent enthusiasm for Skype, which has signed up almost 100,000 new Chinese users a day over the past three months.

Skype's partner in China, Tom Online, now has at least 23.5 million registered users in China – and analysts reckon that could be a wild underestimate.

Chinese legal barriers mean that SkypeOut isn't available there, and Skype's chief exec Niklas Zennström recently admitted it could be two years before China's government changes its mind. When and if SkypeOut does become available there, just watch those numbers shoot up again. Now that's popularity.