Monthly Archive for May, 2006

May Day BBS: from labor to leisure

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 3, 2006
in BBS, Government, Photos and Virtual China
. 5 Comments

May_day_gongren

The May Day holiday, with May 1 International Workers Day as its center, is a time for Chinese throughout the country to consider the radical changes in ideas about labor and work.  Throughout the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s May Day was a large-scale secular holiday that celebrated the labor of peasants and the proletariat with vast parades and nationally televised ceremonies.  You can see pictures of old-style May Day parades (a women in pigtails on a tractor, etc.) at this BBS thread. 

Today, May Day is also the focus of government efforts to encourage consumer spending via domestic tourism–contributing to the nation by spreading the wealth.  The previous state-led vision of toiling farmers and factory workers is eclipsed by the new vision of a backpacking young urbanite or a wealthy family traveling to Beijing to see the Great Wall.  Not only is leisure seen as potentially as valuable as labor, but the kinds of labor that used to be held up as models are no longer valorized.  Most city dwellers have mixed feelings at best for the relatively poor, unedcuated migrant labourers who build their buildings, watch their children, and sweep their streets. 

This makes May Day a potent moment for national discussions about work and its usefulness.  This Netease BBS thread showcases the old version of meaningful work: dirty, hard, and manual. The comments are mostly about respecting the workers: 

Now those are real laborers!

Glorious laborers, we respect you!

Then there are series of photos of construction workers and farmers hard at work on May 1 itself.

Very few negative posts (they’re no doubt taken down fairly quickly), but a few said:

Socialism has given nothing to the honest. 

I’d like to go to all those tourist spots where all those people are eating, drinking, and making merry.  I suddenly thought of a question: who is really celebrating May First?

Have you ever thought about why they’re working on May First?  Because they have no choice! Because they live on the bottom rung of society!  Because they want to live like city people!

And in a perfect slice of Virtual China, a bikini (?) clad woman chimes in: Comrades, hard work. 

Bikini_post

Technorati’s Top 100: few Chinese blogs

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 2, 2006
in Blogs and Statistics
. 2 Comments

Technorati has a most recent list of Top 100 blogs, "as measured by unique links in the last 6 months." Ethan Zuckerman and Sam Flemming have both commented on why Chinese blogs are likely to be under-measured on Technorati (although it’s been said that Technorati is still better than the Chinese blog search engines). Flemming points out that some of the biggest Chinese blogs, such as that done by Chinese filmstar Xu Jinglei, get 100,000 page views per post and several thousand comments–but apparently, not as many unique links. It’s amazing how much we still don’t know about what’s going on on the Internet globally. Here’s some of what we do find on the Top 100:

First Chinese blog on the list comes up as #24, and is Fang Wenshan’s.  Fang Wenshan, otherwise known as Vincent Fang, is a young Taiwanese R&B lyricist famous for his work with Jay Chou, one of Asia’s most popular young singers.

At #68, Easy Start to the Day gives tips in Chinese on how to use MSN Spaces to start your own blog.

Then there’s Xiaxue at #69, one of Asia’s power bloggers, a young, flippant Singaporean woman who blogs in English, and loves her own image.

link to Sam Flemming post, "Where’s Xu Jinglei?"
link to Ethan Zuckerman, "English Blogposts No Longer the Largest Plurality?"

Update: Technorati has added Xu Jinglei’s blog to what they monitor; on May 4 her blog overtook BoingBoing as the #1 blog as measured by unique links.  Sam Flemming has a great summary of key issues here, including how influence is measured on the web and who is measuring.  The bigger question for me is: what does "influence" do for a blog and for whom does it matter?  I don’t think that Xu Jinglei probably cares all that much about what her PageRank is since her audience is reading and living within a Chinese language world, in which Google PageRank is not a big deal. 
 

May Day in Virtual China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 1, 2006
in BBS, News, Photos, Travel and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

Old_town

China is in an uproar for the next week as millions take off for vacations or visits home during the national weeklong May Day holiday.  Online, vacationers are:

  • giving tips on where to travel: the photo above is from a long, detailed Tianya post about where to go to see ancient architecture in Zhejiang province, and how to get there.  There are some beautiful photos on the post, much better than the usual shots of rebuilt tourist spots.

Baidu, the choice of most of China’s younger users, taps into the huge desire for getting away from urban settings with the following special feature on its PostBar Forum today:
Baidu_may_1

Fashionable life/Relax for 7 days of May Day holiday

Chinese Youtube/Myspace wanna-be, plus mainstream media

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 1, 2006
in Mobile, Music, Photos, Video Clips and Web 2.0c
. 2 Comments

Wangyou1Wangyou2

Another excellent Pacific Epoch interview, this one with Buddy Ye, the co-founder and CEO of Wangyou Media, a company that provides a platform for users to share audio, video, and photo content, with mobile services as well. They call themselves a cross between Myspace and Youtube, and you can see elements of both in the interface. The kicker is that the company also turns that content into mainstream media content by creating a weekly radio show, monthly CDs, and possibly a TV show in the future.  So users get to hear themselves on the radio and buy their own CDs.  Reminds me of blurb.com, which takes personal digital content and turns it into old-fashioned hard-cover books. 

And check this out: you get "points" for including ads in your content (3-5 second spots), with which you can claim prizes.  You can also get points for reporting "inappropriate content," if it manages to get past management. 

Wangyou claims over 3 million users.

What’s missing? At first glance, at least a good system for rating and sorting the content, beyond "new" and "hot". 

link to interview
link to Wangyou site
link to Wangyou videocasts–you may have to register to view them.  I’ll be exploring.