Monthly Archive for April, 2006

Baidu’s alternative Wikipedia

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on April 20, 2006
in Web 2.0c
. 2 Comments

Baidu_baike2

Baidu, China’s leading search engine, has launched the Baidu Encyclopedia (百度百科), according to China Web2.0 Review .  As of 7:30 today it had 2768 articles written; at 7:51 it had 2909…you can see the articles piling up before your eyes. The intro says:

Baidu is in line with the equal, cooperative, and sharing spirit of the Internet…it provides a stage for Internet users’ creativity. 

Since Wikipedia is blocked in China, we’ll see just how creative Baidu writers can actually get.

And a reader asks: How can you edit it this way? What if there’s a mistake? How reliable is this encyclopedia?

Random survey of articles written in last few minutes:

  • dictionary definition of the word

    赫然 (hèrán)

  • "setting standards" for Baidu Encyclopedia’s characters
  • BitTorrent
  • a popular dance
  • more on editing standards
  • population, zip codes, area of all counties within city of Ganzhou
  • amber
  • failure modes and effects analysis
  • more on editing standards
  • diamonds

PBS on China; and, see your English language website in Chinese

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on April 19, 2006
in Government, News, Politics and Translation
. 3 Comments

PBS NewsHour did a piece yesterday on the current state of Chinese Internet censorship.  Speakers included an anonymous Chinese software engineer, Orville Schell (Dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism), Xiao Qiang (China news aggregator and media activist extraordinaire), and Minxin Pei (Carnegie Endowment and wellknown China scholar). 

Much of what was said was not new if you’ve been following the issues, but I thought a few things noteworthy:

  • more than 100,000 Chinese use proxy technologies
    to circumvent Chinese filters every day
  • Minxin Pei says that Google.cn "has introduced a revolutionary technology of
    translating English into Chinese instantly with about 75 to 85 percent of accuracy." Pei’s point is that this opens up a world of uncensored English-language content to Chinese Internet users. 

link to read transcript  Update: PBS’s Frontline transcript, with Jeremy Goldkorn, Rebecca MacKinnon, Yan Sham Shackleton, and John Palfrey, goes into a lot more rich detail than the NewsHour piece.  See the transcript here.

I had to try out the Google.cn translation tool, so I typed in "Institute for the Future," and from there went to this blog itself.  First of all, it’s fun to see your own site with the familiar design elements, but in Chinese rather than English.  However, as those of you who can read Chinese will see from below, the translation gets the general jist across but loses a LOT in the process.  I’ll be interested to explore how many people actually use this in China, and how useful they find it. (A rough re-translation of the "About Virtual China" first sentence is actually pretty funny: "China is a virtual simulated exploration and experience…".)   

Virtual_china_english          Virtual_china_chinese_2

link to see this blog in Google-translated Chinese. [Update: the link doesn't seem to work anymore despite my best attempts!] 

But it’s probably not fair to test a translation tool on that sentence anyway.  Why don’t you try your own site? Go to Google.cn, type in your keyword, press the button that says Google on it.  Then click on the purple text that looks like this, next to your website, to initiate the translation:
Translate_page_beta

A bit of fun

Published
by
Jason Li
on April 19, 2006
in Web 2.0c
. 1 Comment

060419_makepiclogo

Makepic.com makes name-stamp images and bar codes on the fly, amongst other things.

060419_makepic2

Via PostShow.

Hangzhou virtual maps in public places

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on April 19, 2006
in Geoweb
. 0 Comments

Emaps_hangzhou

In earlier posts I mentioned the wonderful customizable maps of "My E-City", (我的E都市).  It looks like the same graphic interface has been launched in real world places throughout the city of Hangzhou as well.  My E-City has maps for Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Xi’an among others; don’t know if they’re visible on those city streets too.

link

(via Tim Wang’s eLearning blog)

top-down regulation and bottom-up sharing

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on April 18, 2006
in Blogs, Film, Television and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribune has a nice article on the paradox of today’s Chinese media ecology.  You’ve got heavyhanded regulation on one hand, and rampant p2p damn-the-copyright file sharing on the other.  Some things off limits, most things not.  Osnos notes:

…as blogs grow unchecked, they are creating a generation of Chinese who
never read the state-run People’s Daily newspaper but routinely use a
file-sharing protocol to download films or television programs that
their government officially rejects. It is a generation raised to
expect a censored world and an uncensored one…

link
(via China Digital Times)

reverse-engineering GuGe

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on April 18, 2006
in News, Search and Translation
. 5 Comments

Okay.  According to Pacific Epoch, Eric Schmidt translates Google’s new Chinese name, GuGe 谷歌, as "fruitful and happy song."

Red Herring says “valley song” or “harvesting song.”

ChinaTechNews translates it as "Happy Song."

John Kennedy at Global Voices says it should be "valley song."

China’s official news agency, Xinhua, translated it as "song of the grain" and now says "song of the harvest of grain."

"Valley Song" sounds the neatest in English, but to my mind doesn’t capture the key meaning of gu 谷 which is "grain."  That it also means "valley" is nice, but according to the various articles I’ve read, it doesn’t seem to be the primary meaning.   

I’m going to stick with "Song of the Grain" for the literal translation, but use GuGe for short since the whole point is that it’s a unique Chinese name/brand, not an English translation of a Chinese name!

Internet Tag!?

Published
by
Jason Li
on April 18, 2006
in Web 2.0c
. 1 Comment

060417_tagren

Tag人.cn (Tag People.cn) is a registry of people who have tagged themselves things such as Beijing, designer, NBA or ajax. You register, assign tags to yourself, and other people find you through tags.

http://www.tagren.cn (Thanks Micah!)

Via 分享2.0 via PostShow.

some people against GuGe

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on April 17, 2006
in Search
. 0 Comments

No_guge

Postshow points us to a grassroots anti-GuGe campaign being waged by some hardcore Chinese Google fans.  As of 10:40 pm Monday evening April 17, 944 had signed an online petition against using the new Chinese language name, GuGe "谷歌".  468 prefer the original English name (indeed, the Chinese version is the first time Google has changed its name to another language); 177 say they’d prefer 狗狗 (dogdog).  They’d like the company to rethink the name. Rough translation:

"Google, we love you, but we do not love "GuGe"" [Song of the Grain]…..
"The name "GuGe" makes us feel ill!  Even more, it makes us disappointed!"
Google, do you hear us?

We believe that the name GuGe will influence the hearts and minds of Chinese Google users and Google supporters, and could even eventually affect Google’s influence in China.  We don’t feel the company respected the vast majority of users during the process of choosing a Chinese name for Google, nor did we experience Google as having a consistently transparent, equal, and open corporate culture…

GuGe makes you think of:

in any case, it’s something that is not google
it’s a bird name
a poor peasant busy doing the spring plowing
…

link

Chinese students share info to go abroad

Published
by
IFTF
on April 17, 2006
in Web 2.0c
. 1 Comment

CNet writes about Chinese smart networking students, who are using websites to form teams of up to a dozen, in order to prepare the very best applications to the best American schools:

A posting at one of the most trafficked local Chinese sites [unfortunately you have to register to read it--Lyn] keeps an ongoing list of the latest admittees from China, including one to Harvard, one to Princeton, five to Yale and six to Stanford, among the 65 schools listed….

The Internet provides not only an information exchange but also helps to connect students concerned about everything from how to write admission essays to how to prep for interviews, said Tina Shi, a graduate student from Shanghai who went to Stanford last year. "Students also use the message boards to facilitate offline events. In my year, we had four or five application teams, each with 10 to 12 people," she said.

Link

top websites investigate, rectify their content

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on April 17, 2006
in BBS, Government, News, Politics, Portals and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

自查自纠

DoNews reports the announcement of the first results from the self-censoring clean-up campaign undertaken by 14 Chinese major portals.  The movement is referred to by the phrase above, zicha zijiu, lit. self-investigate, self-rectify. The 14 Beijing-based portals include Sina.com, Sohu.com, Netease, Tom.com, Qianlong.com, and Yahoo’s China portal.  On April 17, 11 of these released more information on their efforts. 

Beginning on April 6, for instance, Qianlong conducted educational training sessions for its entire staff, regarding the correct understanding of the current circumstances and "strengthening the sense of social responsibility" for morally correct web content.  On April 7, each group of leaders and each staff member undertook the first round of correction and rectification of inappropriate news content on web pages for which each was responsible.  By April 13, Qianlong had shut down and deleted 3 suspicious BBS forums, 800 suspicious articles, 3174 suspicious photos, and 134 comments.

For Sina’s part, it got rid of 15 forums, 159 articles, and over 130,000 forum comments, revised the language of over 20 headlines, and increased monitoring of blogs and news discussion forums. 

link (Chinese)