An exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China.
Before any of you get excited, the reference to "mao" is a transcription of the word for cat:
TVMAO is a website that has plot summaries for more than 50,000 shows on more than 300 channels in China. Some sociologist could probably mine it for some funny data, but what I’m concerned about is: why Garfield!?
Thanks PostShow!
China Net Investor picks up on a recent press release from Nokia announcing that in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the mainland, high-end N70 and N90 handsets will come preinstalled with applications to access Baidu (China’s leading search engine) wireless search services.
Users will be able to search news, images, and a Baidu online community.
Where’s Google?
PostShow links to a blog entry over at fjliang’s blog entitled "Employee bloggers beware: blog monitoring services are here."
After a bit of text, they sarcastically hail the blog monitoring service:
Sam Flemming’s blog itself speaks of the Shanghai Daily’s (and others) emphasis on his work invading the privacy of bloggers, even though they "only collect publicly available information that any of the 111 million Internet users in China can also access."
It seems like China has not yet been rocked by the employee-blog scandals that the US experienced in the past two years that brought blogs out into the open. Is it only a matter of time?
Chinese holidays presented with the appropriate Chinese calender dates and astrological signs.
Source: PostShow
Today on the Netease BBS: The 8th annual Shanghai Spring Real Estate Market, held last week at the Shanghai Exhibition Center, one-upped the booth babes of other trade shows with a real estate girl. As the BBS poster says (rough translation):
This is something that hasn’t been seen before in real estate fairs…Car shows have "car models," sports events have "babes," but having a female model stripped bare in this kind of an environment, will using these methods really sell real estate?
Commentators weigh in all sides:
"Whoever marries this woman is an idiot."
"This is totally normal."
"This is an artistic experience and they’re going to make a lot of money!"
"Are they selling real estate or sex?"
"Shameful!"
China’s official news agency reports that online "high-tech fortune-telling" sites are poisoning Chinese teenagers, taking them away from their studies. Will try to find some of these in coming weeks!
link
(via Gerry Groot at Chineseinternetresearch)
The Asian Studies WWW Monitor recently profiled a go-to site for understanding basic demographic data and coming changes in China. Gerard K. Heilig has an impressive body of work that presents data on Chinese demographics, fertility, land use, and food production, through animations, CD-Roms, and maps. Heilig’s homepage links to some of his publications, such as Can China Feed Itself: a System for Evaluation of Policy Options, which contains data on three different models for projecting China’s urban population in the next several decade.
His latest effort, China-Profile, contains a range of data (such as figure above, Population by Age and Sex in 1990) on human development, natural resources, policy, economy, science & technology, infrastructure, and culture.
Hao Wu, self-described "biologist-turned-capitalist-turned-writer & filmmaker wannabe," has a brilliant analysis of the position of many Chinese internet users. His "Do I Have to Take a Stand?" is critical reading for those who are trying to figure out why Chinese bloggers would, for example, deliberately shut down their own blogs as a joke on the overzealous Western media (see previous post).
The post goes over such questions as "Why are are foreigners so gaga over issues of free speech?" and "Do Chinese care" [about "free speech"?].
"Do I Have to Take a Stand?" ends like this: "But wait, would that land me in prison?"
Hao Wu has been in jail since Feb. 22 of this year. More info here.
Cao Fei, a Guangzhou-based artists, has exhibition in NYC running from now till April 8.
Link via Alternative Archive.
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