An exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China.
Plagiarized book alert! The offending item is:
Inside: Tons of illustrations used without permission, and texts ripped straight from the Little Chimp Society site.
The offenders are listed as being from Hong Kong (see here for full details), but when the offended parties tried to contact them, they found out that the phone number was for an air filter manufacturer and the ISBN number was faked.
Are they really from Hong Kong then? Probably, but I hope not.
Via Drawn!
Cool: TBWA’s Olympic ad for Adidas.
Makes sense? I don’t know — yes, there are many people in China and so I’m guessing the theme is something grandiose along the lines of “standing on the shoulder of billions.” But it’s looks a bit like they’re competing somewhere in hell — not my idea of a good brand association. (Would any of my account planning readers like to chime in here?)
Maybe they’re tapping into some sort of macho thing — see my previous post on a GM car ad.
Via the Longyin Review newsletter.
This looks like a very cool undertaking. Collabor8 (C8) is an 8 week project that will run from the 28th of April to the 20th of June, bringing together Chinese and Australian designers in a series of online courses and discussions. It’s being put on by the Omnium Research group at the College of Fine Arts. It’s completely free for participants, who should be studying graphic arts in China or Australia. From the website:
Design students from Australia and China will join forces for eight weeks, with project convenors, teachers and special guests worldwide, to work collaboratively within a fully online learning environment.
The aims of C8 include:
• providing design students in Australia and China with the opportunity to work collaboratively on a graphic design problem thereby emulating new trends toward global team-based networks within industry.
• stimulating new ways for designers to work collaboratively across cultural boundaries.
• the development of environmentally friendly and sustainable graphic design for ceramics, textiles, product and environment design.
Fun finding of the day — a recipe-diagram for cooking chicken with beer! (Rough translations given in maroon.)
Go to original post (currently down) or photo on Yupoo.
Via Global Voices Online’s Memedia translation (an old issue). Thank you tian for fixing my translation.
Happy Chinese New Year!
P.S. I really like this set of characters from 张小盒 (Boxy Zhang), but…
They do resemble these guys from Japan alot…
LiLei and Han MeiMei were the two main characters from a series of middle-school English textbooks used by Mainland Chinese students in the early 80s. I’ve unearthed a small wave of nostalgia about them online, including speculations on their love triangle with Englishman Jim Green and an annotated cast of characters.
Then some artists converted retro nostalgia into modern art, kitsch and a roadshow:
Interestingly enough, they also gave named them 李磊 and 韩美美 as they described in one of their first blog posts:
"他们没有中文名，我就先这样叫他们。试试看反响如何？大家有新意见么？ (They don’t have Chinese names, let’s call them this for now and see what the reaction is? What do you think?)"
Via Bigik.cn.
I recently discovered Charles Frith’s blog, Punk Planning, which details his journeys through China as a planner from the advertising world.
(FYI: In the advertising world, the planner is the bridge between the consumers and the writers/producers. They’re typically the ones running focus groups and interviews, and are responsible for crafting creative briefs to capture the essence of the consumers’ viewpoints.)
The writing in the blog is a little bit too rambly for my personal taste, but there are frequent gems, such as:
UPDATE: David Pescovitz over at Boing Boing has discovered that the artist responsible for these is Lei Xue, a Germany-based artist from China.
- Polythene sheet insulated windows… with a Snoopy decoration hanging in the middle of it.
- Coal fired oven (I really have a thing for kitchens).
- The outdoor fridge.
Check out Charles Frith’s blog — Punk Planning.
We had a visit in Palo Alto from Dr. Pan Haidong, CEO and founder of hoodong, China’s most popular wikipedia and wiki software. The hoodong wiki has over 1.5 million articles written by over 250,000 contributors, and the HDwiki software has been downloaded 200,000 times and currently supports over 1000 other websites in China. Pan Haidong was in town for a meeting with hoodong investors DFJ.
A common stereotype is that Chinese technology is not innovative but merely derivative. Americans talk about Chinese web companies and services in terms we can understand: "the Chinese Google," "the Chinese FaceBook," "the Chinese Youtube," and so on. And yet, with all of the web2.0 action in China, you know that there are things happening in virtual China that could be adopted and even monetized in the English-language environment. Says Pan Haidong, "At first we were the copycat. "C2C" is a "copy to china" model. Then we improved it and localized it and other Wiki developers outside of China learned from us and embedded these features into their systems."
Hoodong is an example of how we can miss what’s innovative about
Chinese online platforms, tools, and features, simply out of ignorance and the lack of
English-language information on such developments.
Notes from interview with Pan Haidong:
There was a lack of wiki software in China. Before HDwiki, there
were around 200 wiki sites in China, most of them using
MediaWiki–which is the basis for Wikihow and Wikipedia. But the
software is difficult to use in terms of user friendliness, features
and functions. It’s too hard for Chinese characters and doesn’t quite
fit Chinese internet user behavior. So that has made most of the
Chinese wiki websites stagnant and unable to draw in more users.
That’s why we developed our free, opensource software, the first of
its kind in the world. Hoodong wiki. We released the first version in
November of 2006 and by November of 2007 we have version 3 with added
functions, features, and more stability. There are about 1000 websites
using our software, consisting mostly of tech researchers, OS groups,
government, universities, and high school students.
Wikis are really popular in tech companies like Sina and Sohu
because it’s a very good tool or platform for the software industry,
for working on documentation. And it’s easy for tech guys to adapt to
this new software. Sina, Sohu, and Netease have a lot of internal
wikis.
I can’t quite get a good read on this conference, it has a mix of design/branding/art/architecture people from all over, and the scope stretches across innovation, design and brand. It has potential, and isn’t egregiously expensive, and would be good to check out if you’re in Hong Kong then.
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