While we are busy writing about Xu Jinglei’s blog knocking BoingBoing off the top spot at Technorati, bloghoo.Sohu.com puts Xu well below China’s really popular blogs–at least on Sohu, one of China’s top portals. Nydia Chen, who’s working with us at Virtual China this summer, will be doing a comparison of the top portals’ blogging ranks, so watch and wait!
Song Zude 宋祖德 is a wealthy mainland Chinese TV and film producer/director. He’s also the writer of Sohu’s No. 1 blog, which has received over 8 million hits since he started writing it in February of this year (as in, 4 months ago). He describes himself as 18 years old "at heart," and loves nothing more than composing vicious critiques of popular Chinese stars (including Taiwan and Hong Kong). His posts are funny, mean, and full of juicy opinionated gossip.
For instance, in the last week alone he asks Zhang Ziyi if she isn’t ashamed for taking the mantle of "China’s first female star," when her English is probably worse than his own. And he slams Taiwanese singer Zhang Huimei and singer/actress Yang Chenglin for being unpatriotic, stupid, and slutty.
See a bit more about Song Zude’s "poison pen" here, at Danwei.
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)
Youmeiti blog reports the opening of the First Cellphone Film Festival, put on by the daily Shanghai webzine Metroer. The short films (20 sec. to 2 min.) had to be submitted by cellphone to the Metroer website. They were produced using digital cameras, video cameras, and phone cameras –anything really, so long as it could be submitted by cellphone.
Chinastic reported the contest as it was being kicked off in February:
Filmmakers said using cell phones is a great way to make a short movie
with little skill, money, and no access to professional equipment.
You can download some of the roughly 50 short films–some crashed my system, some said they needed more upgrades–but Shanghai Freak loaded nicely. Hip French music in the background. Kind of interesting to consider what you can do under the limited conditions of something transmissable by cell in China in 2006.
link to Youmeiti post
download Shanghai Freak by going here and pressing the blue download button which looks like this:
download additional films here, clicking on the titles in a row on the far left, or on the purple link at the lower R hand side of the screen to scroll through additional choices, and then looking for the blue download button.
If you’ve been following the anti-Japanese sentiments in China about how Chinese actresses Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li should not have played at being Japanese geishas in Memoirs of a Geisha, then you have got to see one of the funniest pieces ever from the 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors, an Asian-American comedy troupe out of the San Francisco Bay area.
It takes awhile to load but it’s worth the wait.
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