This just in: a new blog produced by the good folks at Ethical Corporation, who have a great website, magazine, and set of reports and conferences already available, focusing on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in China and elsewhere. Much of their online material is subscription only after a two-week trial, though one can sign up for a free weekly newsletter, and now, we can access the blog.
Their editors and writers are based in London, Shanghai, Dallas, Buenos
Aires, New York, Hong Kong, and Mumbai.
Monthly Archive for October, 2006
I simply couldn’t resist and had to return to Molive.cn’s citizen photojournalism site again today. It’s pure China Daily odd news heaven, produced by who knows what kind of people, the kind who like to report on strange things for the rest of us to read. The kind who are photoblogging, because that’s another name for what this is. Aggregated photoblogging. Top photoblog on Molive belongs to Ah Nian, a 40 year old man from Hefei, Anhui. In fact, Ah Nian contributed the first three items below. Since there’s nothing that doesn’t happen in China, perhaps we’ll be seeing some new perspectives on life, news, blogging, and sharing content here. I haven’t found any newer stats on how many people are viewing or uploading yet. But China Daily.com.cn is posting photos with a [MOLIVE.CN] byline.
Today on "Latest Essential Content–Exclusive," we find these stories from October 18. [Editors filter content before it goes online, so perhaps it takes a day for things to appear]:
- [Hefei] "Water Walking Ball" Becomes Latest Entertainment Fashion: Ah Nian saw this in a park in the city of Hefei, Anhui province, and describes it as "an elegant activity" combining "entertainment, health, weight loss, and competition."
- [Strange] Stones Grow Hair Too: seen in a museum of unusual rocks in Xiamen
- [Xiamen] "Meat Rock": Another unusual rock from the same museum. This one looks exactly like a side of meat, and the author says that you really can’t tell it’s stone until you touch it. It’s said to be naturally occurring.
- [Nanjing] University Students Want to "Eliminate Poverty": October 17 was "International Poverty Elimination Day." A university in Nanjing held an activity, in which students participated enthusiastically. Here the students are, posting their pledges to eliminate poverty on a mural.
- [Danger] Why Are You Crawling on the Electric Wire? A little vine is crawling up into the electric wires in Dexing city, Jiangxi.
Molive.cn is a Chinese citizen news site that’s photo-heavy and makes wonderful browsing. According to this Christian Science Monitor article (written already a few weeks ago, so the numbers are surely bigger by now):
Eric Zhang, a former staffer at the China Daily news organization based in Beijing, has launched
www.molive.cn, a
site that lets ordinary people gather news with their camera
cellphones. The site, launched three weeks ago, lets people post photos
they have taken to their own personal websites with small descriptions
of the scenes. Editors comb the postings and put the best ones on
Molive’s home page. The site is young but already has more than 100
people posting on it from all around the country and more than 20,000
readers a day.
It’s searchable by tag, and as of today the most popular tags are motorcycles, quality 素质 , sales promotions 促销, and interesting news such as this 30 cm. diameter clump of bees that gathered underneath an electric motorcycle in Xi’an.
But take a look as well at the tricyle cart photo pool, the ever-popular accidents, and beggars…
If you haven’t visited it yet, or recently, you’ve got to see the menu (sorry) at eatingchinese.org, a glorious site that brings together everything to do with chinese food that can be done online, including:
chinese crepes on YouTube–what a great idea to expand upon for all of us living and traveling in China. Videos of street food being prepared all over China, available for food lovers to figure out how they might do it themselves.
photos of regional cuisine such as this gallery of food from Xi’an (with the famous yangrou paomo 羊肉泡膜, or mutton broth with broken bread). (They probably don’t need millions of photos of Sichuan hotpot, but they might appreciate some unusual meal you had recently).
chinese food discussion forums such as Chinese fast food: Not Western Fast Food in China, or Chinese Fast
Food in the West. What’s up with all the Hot Pot chains named for furry
cratures? How is Ronghua Chicken doing? What about Ma Lan Noodles, Da
Niang dumplings or "Real Kung Fu Eats?" and
Chinese Menu Translator Project and Chinese Food DIY for those who want to make it better at home.
Plus many, many links to readings like "Jews and Chinese Food," or "History of Beijing Halal Cuisine"–and to the Flickr Chinese food photo pool (a group with 568 members).
The site is clearly a labor of love, done by someone who calls himself Gary Soup. Enjoy. Contribute.
So says a Chinese professor when discussing the educational experiences of Chinese youth in Internet cafes. A recent controversy surrounding the strict regulation of Internet cafes, played out over the past 6 months in the small town of Fangshan in Shanxi province, reveals the very real concerns of parents, educators, businesspeople, and bureaucrats about what the Internet is for, who should be able to access it, and who will profit financially from it.
Thanks to Roland Soong at ESWN for translating a long article on the Fangshan situation. In Fangshan, a town of less than 30,000 people, a rash of illegally operating Internet cafes were shut down with an "iron fist" by the local country secretary, prompting national media coverage. The clampdown was driven by issues of illegal operation, inappropriate targeting of minors (the vast majority of users are under 18), and what sounds like basic disturbance of the peace as local officials were repeatedly called in by parents who wanted to find a way to keep their children from playing games rather than studying. From the ESWN translation:
The city encourages green [Note: green here means morally healthy] Internet centers in the streets. The libraries in Wuxi city are doing that. We feel that we have to provide outlets for the children to go to," said Wuxi city deputy mayor Zhou Jiaqing. "Adults and young people should have strictly segregated areas of Internet access," said professor Ling Yun…
"The children should get on the Internet cafes organized by specially designated organizations instead of purely commercial operations, because this affects our next generation."
Professor Ling Yun recommends: "First, the schools ought to prove the venues. Then the cultural and especially the education departments ought to assume the responsibility, such as seriously managing the Internet
cafes. The adults can go to the commercial Internet cafes. That will be easier to manage."
Stardict is a translation engine that allows you to select multiple dictionary sources at a time, to get different interpretations of the same word. You can choose anything from the Oxford Chinese-English Dictionary to the Soothill-Hodous Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms.
The caveat: You have to pay to select more than five search engines at a time, and you have to pay to access some of the more specialized dictionaries.
However, several blogs had flagged StarDict not for its translation capability, but for its ability to access the Chinese version of Wikipedia by selecting it as a "dictionary."
PERK 破壳 is the duo of You Zao 由早 and Wowo 窝窝, a Shanghai design studio set up in 2004.
Check out their fantastic illustrations and stickers, among other goodies:
(via 早 blog)
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