Offline for a few days without an easy way to do updates (unless you like tencent weibo :-), but here are some notes for touring Beijing:
Restaurant Reviews. There a huge variety, but basically for the overseas traveller who wants some pretty interesting (but safe!) food, Fodors and Trip Advisor tend to be too touristy and out of date, Yelp isn’t here, Dianping is very local and you need to be fluent in Chinese. Timeout seemed to have the best lists of places to try.
Learning Chinese. The tools keep getting better. Perapera is a cool addon for Firefox that has popup translations that are in pinyin and Chinese and English which is useful. You can also create word lists and import then to the free Anki app which creates flash cards that runs on lap tops (their iPhone version costs $24!). But you can get StudyBlue or Chegg for free.