Monthly Archive for June, 2006

different design traditions: 1957 contraceptive billboards

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on June 30, 2006
in BBS and Photos
. 0 Comments

Have been checking out the QQ.com BBS.  QQ.com is currently the 7th most popular site in the world, according to Alexa.com. 

Yesterday someone posted two extraordinary photos of billboard ads for contraception from 1957. This would have just 8 years after the founding of the PRC. From these we get a reminder that the U.S. and China are coming from very different traditions of public display and interaction design.  An art or medical historian could probably tell us what influences this kind of advertising reveals. 

Contraception_photo

The images are from the China 1957 Photo Album by pioneering photographer, film-maker, reporter, and writer Robert Carl Cohen.  Cohen was sent by NBC to accompany a group of young Americans who defied the U.S. State Department by extending a trip to the Moscow Festival of Youth and Students, and visiting China. It was a highly political move from both sides. From an August 14, 1957 New York Times article:

All the Americans making the trip showed their passports and turned in
their passport numbers to get visas issued by the Chinese Embassy here.
These visas, however, were issued on separate pieces of paper so there
would be no official record that any of the youths had been in China. 
   
The State Department contends that these making the trip are none the less
violating passport regulations against travel to and in China.  Christian
A. Herter, Under Secretary of State, in a special message to each of the
travelers yesterday said the United States and China were in a "quasi-state
of war," and further maintained that the youths would be "willing tools"
of Communist propagandists if they made the trip.

Unfortunately I can only access the first page of comments
(perhaps I need a QQ ID? Will have to see if it’s possible on a Mac) so there’s not much to translate beyond:

These are too…you know.

Yes, ads did used to be like this.

People then were more liberated than we are today!

China’s MSN Space/Live Spaces head to head with BaiduSpace 百度空间

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on June 29, 2006
in Blogs, News, Search, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 1 Comment

Time for me to do my homework on this.  I’ve been personally less interested in Microsoft online products and services for the past several years, preferring to explore other options.  But for understanding Virtual China, understanding MS is a must (as it would be for understanding virtual anywhere).

Did you know that globally, MSN Space had an estimated 100 million (100,000,000) unique visitors per month as of May this year? MSN Space launched in China in June 2005.

A Google search for MSN Space + China yields lots of information on MSN Space censorship and cooperation with Chinese authorities that led to the arrest of bloggers (for example, see 12/2004 BoingBoing post here and 6/2005 GlobalVoicesOnline post here).  Not much else on the spaces themselves and what people are doing there.

Top Baidu searches in Chinese are all "How-Tos" such as this MSN Space Forum where you can post questions and learn how to create, manage, and promote your page, this free background generator, or this excellent blog on the latest MSN toys.

This June 28 ChinaByte article on Donews describes the upcoming competition between MSN Space and BaiduSpace. The article notes that Baidu’s July 15 launch of BaiduSpace is timed to coincide with MSN Space transition to the new Windows Live Spaces, which promises users new functionality and social networking tools, plus look and feel.  It goes on to say:

In Baidu’s press release for BaiduSpace it says: Users are often disappointed by MSN Space’s speed and stability.  There are often problems like not being able to open the homepage or not being able to post articles. On some websites where the Live Spaces news was released, user comments showed that they didn’t care much about how advanced the new functionality would be, rather their main concerns were about whether speed and stability would be improved. A user who participated in BaiduSpace’s beta revealed that, compared with other blogging tools he’d used, the most striking thing about BaiduSpace was how fast it was and how little time was needed to upload and download photos. 

Hong Huang on why net publications may overtake print ones

Published
by
Jason Li
on June 29, 2006
in Commerce
. 0 Comments

Interesting snippet from the Danwei TV Hard Hat Show’s episode on "Hong Huang, Media Mogul and Blogger".

FYI, Hong Huang, 洪晃, is a high-flying "media mogul" who runs several magazines here in China, including the Beijing and Shanghai editions of Timeout. (Her mother was also Mao Zedong’s translator.)

In the middle of the episode, she comments on why net publications may overtake print ones, namely, because the print distribution system is "shit" and that current print distribution figures are all bluff-based. The internet has the potential to be a great distributor, and the 15 million visitors to her blog attest to this.

She draws an analogy with the success of mobile phones over land lines: back in the day, getting a land line involved a delayed process of sweet talking and elaborate gifting, and mobile phones were able to "leap frog" this process by providing instant access.

Watch episode.

Shirts for Sale!

Published
by
Jason Li
on June 29, 2006
in Design
. 0 Comments

We’ve blogged about this set of designs before, but who knew they were going to make them into shirts?

060629_juershirt

For purchase details (168RMB), see Choc_Orange’s webpage.

MSN Spaces + Google = BaiduSpace 百度空间

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on June 27, 2006
in Blogs, Design, Search and Web 2.0c
. 2 Comments

Baiduspace_1

Imagine MySpace pages MSN Spaces with the search functionality of Google and all its features, and you’ll see what Baidu is trying to create: BaiduSpace 百度空间, now in beta in China. Blogger Xiong Jiezeng has an analysis (in Chinese) of what works and what doesn’t, which should be of great help to the feature’s developers.

What Xiong Jiezeng likes:
–the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which my IFTF colleague Mike Liebhold describes as "new very lightweight scripting for agile user interfaces." These allow users to customize a homepage’s fonts, colors, and so on within a set of 10-20 page templates (pretty much what MySpace MSN Spaces does as far as I can tell). 
–clean, elegant text editor
–strong site visitor data, including referring webpage (which is great–TypePad also does it)

What Xiong Jiezeng doesn’t like so much:
–photo editor
–background music application is not linked to Baidu’s mp3 search bar, or to its Zhangmenren play list sharing site.  This seems strange given that some of Baidu’s popularity is driven by youth mp3 searches, which is a distinct advantage over Google.

Now imagine this on everyone’s phone.  They’ll get there. 

(via Donews)

Update: Catching up on some blog posts, I see that Mao Xianjia at China Tech Stories posted news about what I’m calling BaiduSpace, calling it Hi.Baidu.com. He characterizes it as a personal portal more akin to a Google personal home page or MSN Spaces. Frankly, I don’t know enough about the differences between all of these to be able to say for sure.  Web 2.0 stuff feels like a constant mash-up anyway!

Draft law to further push breaking news onto the net

Published
by
Jason Li
on June 27, 2006
in News
. 0 Comments

ESWN tells of a draft law that "will make it a punishable offense (50,000 yuan to 100,000 yuan in fines) for the media to publish independent reports on suddenly breaking incidents."

Lyn has blogged about the special role of the internet, specifically the BBSs, for breaking news. If passed, will this new law further push breaking news onto the internet and "defang the mainstream media even" more?

ESWN points us to the idea that 50,000-100,000 yuan may not be a large amount of money to a large media organization with hundreds of millions of RMB revenue, and that Hong Kong magazines already  regularly operate boldly in the face of fines.

It is, however, still a draft law and I haven’t been able to find any indication on how likely it is that the law will pass. Stay tuned for more.

more online revenge

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on June 26, 2006
in Home, News and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

In line with Howard French’s NYT article "Mob Rule on China’s Internet: the Keyboard as Weapon,"  China Daily reports that a young woman in Shandong has taken out her anger at her father’s infidelity via the web. The college freshman produced an  "Anti-mistress website" with details of the affair that led to her parents’ divorce this year. As China Daily notes, "she would rather sacrifice her father’s promising political career for a happy, re-united family." [I couldn't locate the actual site in Chinese.]

Jason blogged here about "China’s Most Famous Sexual Pervert," the incident French writes about, in which an extramarital affair was exposed in all its detail to an online World of Warcraft community. This led to an "Internet hunt" for the male lover and the exposure of his most private information.  The same thing, in essence, happened in the kitten crushing incident, when Chinese netizens hunted down a woman shown crushing a kitten to death with her spiked heels in an online video–the woman ultimately issued a public apology on television.

The girl in this case has not produced anything which leads to mob rule, rather she has exposed the family’s shame for all to see.  Given the stress and pressures of contemporary life in China, I would expect more such acts of private revenge, in addition to increased numbers of Chinese smart mobs who coalesce around specific issues.   

Chinese portal rankings

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on June 25, 2006
in Portals and Statistics
. 0 Comments

iResearch has compiled the Alexa data for us: Sina has the greatest reach (defined as how many Alexa users per million are using it everyday.  Alexa says that in the last 3 months of this year, Sina’s reach has grown by another 8%.
Average_daily_reach_1

Featured Art: explosives create art!

Published
by
Jason Li
on June 25, 2006
in Art
. 0 Comments

From the 佐佐佑 Donews blog, art created by explosives:

20060625_explosives1

20060625_explosives2

The comment underneath (by Fwolf) states, "Rich, really rich."

Via PostShow.

520 Netbar, Beijing

Published
by
Jason Li
on June 24, 2006
in Internet cafe
. 2 Comments

Reporting from an up-scale netbar (520数码天地) in Chaoyang, Beijing.

Here, seats are grouped into single-computer cocoons & round-table group-play canopies on top of the usual cluster-rows. The Saturday-afternoon clientele includes expatriate youth.

Below are the top 10 shows watched, all free once you pay the hourly computer usage fee:

20060624_bjbarmovies

They are, in order:

  • a wuxia serial (Taiwan)
  • a wuxia serial (Mainland), see this post about it being mocked on BBSs.
  • cgi shorts (N.Amer)
  • a gangster movie (HK)
  • sanguo Flash shorts (Taiwan)
  • an occult movie (HK)
  • a sci-fi 美女 movie (HK)
  • an action movie (N.Amer)
  • a sci-fi action movie (N.Amer)
  • a gangster comedy (I’m guessing here) movie (HK)

They are thumbnailed, in order:

20060624_bjbarmovies120060624_bjbarmovies220060624_bjbarmovies3

20060624_bjbarmovies420060624_bjbarmovies520060624_bjbarmovies6

20060624_bjbarmovies720060624_bjbarmovies8_120060624_bjbarmovies9

  20060624_bjbarmovies10

What surprised me most was that people were still watching Replacement Killers, Chow Yun Fat’s (80s HK movie star) first foray into Hollywood during 1998. After all, there are better guns movies (his older HK-based ones), and, despite the leggy poster, there are "leggier" movies  (the movies on its left and right may be candidates for that category). So why is it still so popular?