From the wonderful design blog of choc_orange:
Monthly Archive for February, 2006
3 of the 4 new domain names announced by China’s Ministry of Information Industry yesterday, going into effect as of tomorrow (March 1).
This could be a Big Deal — the beginning of an "alternate root" — the beginning of another Internet, according to some experts.
My colleague Mike Liebhold directed me to an analysis by Michael Geist, well known Canadian Internet scholar, who notes that:
The alternate root has always lurked in the background as a possibility that would force everyone to rethink their positions since it would enable a single country (or group of countries) to effectively pack up their bags and start a new game. The U.S. control would accordingly prove illusory since a new domain name system situated elsewhere would be subject to its own rules. While the two could theoretically co-exist by having ISPs simply recognize both roots, the system could "break" if both roots contained identical extensions. In other words, one root can have dot-com and other other can have dot-corp, but they can’t both have dot-com.
A group of scholars located in Australia, the U.S., and Singapore have launched an English-language blog for brainstorming ideas on "how relations between Japan and
China can be improved, bilateral conflicts resolved, and problems
ameliorated." It would be cool to have the site in Chinese and Japanese too, but probably prohibitively expensive to translate.
The site is collaboratively edited by Peter Van Ness (Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU), Amitav Acharya (Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Mel Gurtov (Political Science and International Studies, Portland State University), and Richard Tanter (Nautilus Institute at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology).
Without a really good Chinese blog search engine (see previous post), it is going to be difficult to keep up with the Chinese blogosphere. China Daily, reporting from the annual meeting of the
Internet Information Service Commission of the Internet Society of China in
Hainan, says:
Fang Xingdong, chairman and CEO of bokee.com, China’s largest blog website,
said in an interview, that he foresees a volcanic rise of blog writers in the
coming years. Fang estimated that China now has up to 12-15 million active
bloggers, who are contributing 65,000 blogs an hour.
"Their writings are freewheeling, dynamic, and interactive with millions
reading and commenting. These people are making thousands of varied statements
on the Internet," Fang said. "It is really a mistake to say there is no freedom
of Internet speech in China."
(via Chineseinternetresearch)
Pacific Epoch has great data on Chinese online gaming markets and companies. You can get a free pre-release of their 2005 Q4 report here. Just a few of the many useful findings:
- percentage of game-playing internet population doubled from 2004 to
2005, with about 37 million gamers reported at end of 2005. - EA has committed to building a 500 person team in China by 2010; the Koreans are already ahead in the game, however. Legend of Mir continues to generate revenue–10% of all gaming revenue in 2005!
- WoW has opened up a generation of Chinese gamers to Western game and visual vocabularies such as what dwarves and elves look like.
Blogger MuMu’s profile picture.
Type in a URL. Hit Enter.
Your blog is worth XXX RMB (data from Alexa).
Source: http://www.postshow.net (worth 40,906 USD)
For the comparatists out there, a similar Technorati hack (from Business Opportunities Weblog) rates PostShow at 206,621 USD.
Original image by 阿华 on Yupoo.
Source: http://www.postshow.net
And the non-China version:
Source: Flickr, originally by Ludwig Gatzke
Background
芙蓉姐姐 (Sister Hibiscus) made waves on the Chinese internet in mid-2005 for posting photographs of herself posing semi-provocatively accompanied by narcissistic commentary. The caveat was that she was not particular attractive to say the least. The hype and press started within the BeiDa and TsingHua BBSs, where the original posts were, and spread to most of the major news sites, even making it to the Washington Post.
And…?
Almost a year after her initial appearance, we find that she still lingers in the collective memory of China’s netizens: in the form of a Flash MTV that parodies her journey to becoming a pop star.
Notes
- The entire video is written ironically.
- Cultural references to video games (RPGs in particular), and to opening song sequences to WuShi serials.
Source: http://www.kring.cn/
Check out Jim Rossignol’s wonderfully rich description of gamers and culture in South Korea. Can’t wait to spend more time in China this year to dive into China’s gaming culture. Written for PC Gamer (UK), via Terra Nova.
Seoul, South Korea. To a fanfare of Asian nu-metal and the sound of a thousand screaming fans, a young Korean man enters a dazzling arena. Like an American wrestler at the heart of a glitter-glazed Royal Rumble, he strides down a ramp towards the stage. Adorned in what appears to be a space suit and a large white cape, he heads out to meet his opponent on the stadium’s ziggurat focus. Amid a blaze of flashbulbs and indoor fireworks he climbs the steps, and is exulted by the thronging crowd. Only twenty years old, and with no less than half a dozen TV cameras tracking his progress, this bizarre figure seems to be unfazed by his predicament.
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