Archive for the 'P2P' Category

A brilliant approach to P2P lending

Published
by
Jason Li
on September 19, 2008
in Commerce, News, P2P and Web 2.0c
. 0 Comments

Qifang and PPDai are both online peer-to-peer lending systems, where you can donate small amounts to people who are often poorer and from rural areas (it is a form of microfinancing).

But where PPDai focuses on the fast and high returns, Qifang takes it a step further:

Translation of left side:

An open style scholarship platform: Need help? Want to help?

Get in now > Safe, Simple, Free.

By focusing on loans for people who can’t afford education, they’re appealing to a belief in the power education, which may just have enough altruistic sway to sidestep people’s distrust of others, and is certainly a much better story than empowering petty village commerce that does who-knows-what.

Think of donating to education as the China equivalent of people in the US donating to small entrepreneurs in the developing world (e.g. Kiva: Loans that change lives).

And as proof of their social mission, the right block on the screenshot above says:

Post-disaster reconstruction communication platform: Enter now.

Help someone get through school in China at Qifang now.

opening up to Chinese tweets: Dave’s experiment

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on March 16, 2008
in Blogs, News, P2P, Politics, Religion, Translation and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

Dave’s experiment is brilliant. It probably takes this kind of situation to open up new practices across virtual spaces, which even though technically just a click away, tend to seem as far away as Mars.

In a nutshell, he’s got a tutorial for non-Chinese readers to sign up to a Chinese twitter-clone called fanfou, in order to start having a dialogue with Chinese folks who can speak English, regarding the current Tibetan protests. Imagine if conversations get started that will continue into the future.

I’ve signed up for fanfou and got myself a home page, but it’s not intuitive, even for someone who reads Chinese. Dave is now my only fanfou friend, and I used Twifan, which appears to search across multiple microblogging apps in Chinese, to search for tweets on Tibet and 西藏 (there are a lot more using the Chinese characters, but this will not help those who need to communicate in English). It’s not clear what could happen next. Maybe the problem is that it’s 4:30 in the morning on the mainland. We’ll see.

Dave is translating Tibet-related tweets here.

So microblogging and online videos are being brought squarely into the fray. Roland Soong writes about what’s happening on Youtube:

There is a propaganda war going on
YouTube because this is clearly one of the top video news sites. In a
propaganda, you win the share of voice and then you can win the share of
hearts and minds. Therefore, you want the videos that favor your
narrative to dominate. You also want unfavorable videos to be drowned
out. Therefore, you mobilize your people to post as often and as much as
possible….The
point here is that using YouTube to track Tibet developments is low-yield,
high-maintenance work.

Chinese wiki-book offers new organizational archive model: IBM个人电脑事业部员工回忆录

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on October 9, 2007
in P2P, Portals, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 3 Comments

Ibm_wikibookHoodong

The first Chinese "wiki book," written by an online collective (see this WSJ article on wikibooks), is garnering attention in virtual China.  Named “IBM Mafia” (The Memoir of former IBM PCD employees) IBM个人电脑事业部员工回忆录, the wiki book was written on Chinese wiki site hoodong.com’s open source wiki software, HDWiki.  It is getting hot on the most popular portals: SINA, QQ.com and Sohu.  The book looks to be a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the development of Chinese IT elites, their attitudes toward work, career, and global IT brands, and Chinese global technological ambition from the inside. Rather than a group-edited piece, it’s more like an anthology of former IBM PC Division employees’ experiences.

Imagine if the site grows as an archive and we see hundreds of people’s stories being recorded?  I think it will.  Many Chinese people are
willing to participate in organized group events, and there’s such a
need for a place to reflect on the social changes of the past 20 years.
This could be a model for other organizational archives: how about a首钢
Capital Iron and Steel wiki book?  Or a Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences (CASS) wiki book, with entries from all over the world?

Here’s how the book is described on its homepage: 

The Memoir of Former IBM PC Division Employees was written and edited online by over 100 former IBM employees, using the HDWiki system.  They were all IT elites from IBM, and the majority were from IBM’s Personal Computer Division.  The memoir realistically represents work life at IBM.  The work is divided into six sections: Section One, The Old Me, records the studies, work, and daily lives of the employees before they began work at IBM.  Section Two, In the Proximity of Giants, introduces how employees entered IBM,  what the interview process was like, and how they were trained.  Section Three, Personal Transformation, describes how these IBM employees continued to study and grow, changing from green youths to seasoned salespeople, managers, and technicians. Section Four, Work: Bits and Pieces, records scenes and events from each person’s different work experience.  Section Five, Acquisition of the Century, records each person’s experience of the acquisition of the century.  Section Six, The Road Ahead, describes everyone’s work and life after the acquisition.  This book is the first time that nearly 100 IBM PC Division workers have gathered together; this true record, and set of lessons they’ve drawn from their experiences, is vivid learning material that will be hard for young people to find in their careers. The entire division used hoodong’s wiki platform to write together online; 100 IBM employees from around the world used Web 2.0 methods to record their youth.

A new introductory section has been added after the above intro was written, which makes all the others one chapter later in the book.  Hopefully the project will develop with time and media attention.  There may have been something like 100 IBMers working on it, but some of the sections are pretty light at present.  For instance, "The Old Me" section has three entries: two stories ("The Distance from Baoshan to Pudong," "Goodbye Botwave") and an essay ("An IBMer’s Early Life"), each of which look readable and interesting.

the Sina page

the QQ page

Isaac’s murmurs: digital tracks in virtual China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on September 20, 2007
in Blogs, Design, Mobile, News, P2P, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 0 Comments

If you really cared about emerging Internet practices and their social impact in China, AND if you were trying to keep up with social media, AND if you didn’t have all the time in the world to read blogs, AND if you read Chinese…you might just check out or even subscribe to Chinese venture capitalist and social entrepreneur Isaac Mao’s Twitter stream. 

Isaac_twitter

Here’s Joi Ito’s Twitter stream in English, which helps give an idea of how the streams can create a kind of ambient intimacy among users.  But Isaac is stepping it up a level, to something that is closer to IM + blog + IRC/BBS.  Not only do you find Isaac’s ongoing thoughts throughout the day (such as the recent: What’s up with Air China’s service? The flight attendant on an international flight didn’t know whether the meat in the main meal was pork or chicken, and in the end everyone voted and decided it was chicken LOL), but Isaac is using some very cool little applications like Twitterfeed, which lets you read the RSS feeds he subscribes to (blogs such as mindmeters, Techmeme, and 我blog故我在), and Twitterfox, which lets you view his buddies’ Twitter updates (also known as "Tweets").  You can follow conversations across Twitter, kind of like comments back and forth on a blog or a BBS, but all on one page, and often referencing blog posts, news, and random experiences nearly as they happen. 

It starts to feel extraordinarily exponential…people like Isaac are moving fast with this stuff and are creating new virtual experiences and spaces as they go. 

The flow of fan translated manga around the interweb

Published
by
Jason Li
on June 11, 2007
in Art, P2P and Translation
. 1 Comment

Manga

Introducing: 漫漫看 (loosely translates as Read A Comic). The site allows you to view, online, page by page, the latest manga (= Japanese comic) releases. The text within these manga has already been translated into Chinese. There are similar sites in English, though they are much more underground than their Chinese counterparts.

The translated text is often traditional rather than simplified Chinese, though both are present. Of the two manga I browsed, one was a scan from an official Taiwanese published release of a book, while the other seemed to be a translation from the latest installment in Japanese aggregated comic serials. The latter fan translation included the usual fine print about supporting the commercial versions when they come out and not selling the fan translation.

Interestingly enough, the English versions of one of the manga I looked at had traces of text that was sometimes in simplified Chinese, sometimes in traditional Chinese, sometimes in Japanese. This suggests that the comic was translated from Japanese to Chinese, then from Chinese to English.

From what I’ve seen, Chinese translations of Japanese comics are pretty easy to find because Chinese translators are quick to churn them out. (It helps that Japanese is more similar to Chinese than English.) Meanwhile, Japanese-to-English translators are somewhat of a commodity in the fansubbing/translation community. So for the series I looked at, there happened to be more Chinese-to-English translators available/interested and so the translation became second-hand.

In this way, virtual china acts as a bridge between the Japanese and English speaking worlds.

virtual China: a tour on Vimeo

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on March 4, 2007
in Food and Drink, P2P, Travel, Video Clips and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

I like going to Google Video and Youtube every now and then and doing some searching in English and Chinese for different China-related topics.  You never know what will turn up, and the randomness is the fun of it.  Today I checked out the variety on Vimeo, a sort-of hipster’s Youtube.  Searching "China" reveals 17 pages of videos, everything from slice-of-Beijing Beijing night market and Tian’anmen kite-flying, to Meet a Chinese (self-intro of a young Chinese guy at an American prep school).  These kinds of videos let us experience certain kinds of places that we might not want to visit in real life, such as this crazy amusement park-style supermarket in Shenyang, or inside this Wuhan nightclub. 

Most seem to be made by non-Chinese folks, visiting or living in China, except for a series by Hangzhou blogger (and Lost fan) Vincent Du, who treats us to a group of Bosch friends singing for one another at a dinner–a great Chinese custom, if you ask me, even though it can be painful if you’re not used to singing in public.

Chinese urban body mods

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 15, 2006
in News, P2P, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 1 Comment

Molive/Moobol brings us a series of photos of this street artist, from an unknown Chinese city, who sticks metal wires into various parts of his body with not a drop of blood.  Link.
Urban_body_mod

A nets-eye view of the Chinese police

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 9, 2006
in News, P2P, Photos, Politics and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

Citizen journalist site Molive/Moobol 直播客 has a special section called "Chinese City Management in the Eyes of Netizens," which collects both positive and negative on-the-scene photos of policemen such as "Beijing City Official Steals Money from Beggar" and the follow-up story from the New Capital Daily in which both the policeman and the old woman he was accused of stealing from refute the accusation; photos of a group of police and social workers trying to get homeless people out of an underground pedestrian walkway; and a series of good deeds performed by Beijing city management.

Most common seem to be pictures of officials and police trying to maintain public spaces in the face of China’s urban beggars and homeless, who often show up in the photos resisting attempts to be taken away for "assistance." According to one story, a woman who wanted the police to stay away from her told them she was covered with lice and they’d jump on anyone who got too close. (The photographer said s/he had bites for the next week).  The photos tell a complex set of stories about those on the front lines of the downside of Chinese reforms–that is, the poorest, the weakest, the crowd, and the police.  You see the abject poverty of peasants who come to the city to beg, the difficulty of getting them off the streets, the abuse of the weak in broad daylight, and how Chinese citizens armed with camera-phones are practicing sousveillance — "watchful vigilance from underneath". 

A homeless peasant in the city:

Homeless_1

Homeless_2

Other photos like this one from the Beijing policeman and the old woman beggar–whether or not he stole her money or not–bring the arrogance of authority into full view:

Police_and_nainai

While still others, like this one from a Guangzhou crowd angered at a police beating of a street peddler, show officials and "crowd representatives" negotiating public acceptance of an apology:

Pointing_at_police

top Chinese video-sharing sites 视频站点

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on November 18, 2006
in Blogs, P2P, Video Clips, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 1 Comment

Joy Chan 陈佼, who regularly posts insightful comments on China’s IT/Web2.0 world, posted an informal analysis of Chinese video-sharing sites 视频站点 on Nov. 6 that has gotten a lot of play in the Chinese blogosphere. 

Chan points out that Google’s purchase of Youtube caused some anxiety among video sites in China, since it’s a path that none of them can hope to follow–there are no companies like Google in China who would be interested in buying a video site. He then shares what he calls a"crude and subjective" analysis of Chinese video sites’ Alexa traffic rank, in the hopes of starting a wider conversation.  Here are some excerpts in rough translation:

After Youtube’s meteoric rise there have been a lot of Chinese imitators, probably something like 1-200 of these types of sites.  Here I use Alexa’s TOP SITES traffic rank as well as my own understanding to look at the top 7 video sites that are completely modeled on Youtube: 我乐网（www.56.com), Mofile（www.mofile.com), 我秀（www.5show.com), 土豆网
（www.tudou.com), 爆米花（www.pomoho.com), UUME（www.uume.com), 六间房
（www.6rooms.com）

…All of the 7 have received venture funding.

Comparison of Alexa Rank 8/3/06-11/3/06

Alexa_rank_2

 

Even the top-rated Chinese site, Mofile, is only 265 on Alexa. None have really broken through in terms of traffic and talk of "video sharing sites exploding in China" is no more than just that–talk.  Of course, there’s still a lot of room for growth.

Continue reading ‘top Chinese video-sharing sites 视频站点’

supporting Jay Chou: fans and leaks

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on September 10, 2006
in Blogs, Music, P2P and Video Clips
. 2 Comments

Jay_chou_2

From the blog of mainland Chinese blogger Flypig, this September 1 post and its comments describe some of the context around an instance of downloading pirated music — in this case, the anticipated "Still Fantasy" 《依然范特西》from Jay Chou 周杰伦, one of Asia’s most popular singers.  The album was released three days earlier than scheduled after the album was leaked online: 

Flypig wrote on 9/1/06 (rough translation):

I saw this news item on Yam: "Jay Chou’s New Album Leaked–Early Release Across Asia" 2006-9-01. Because of leaking, Jay Chou’s new album "Still Fantasy," originally scheduled for release on September 8, will now be released across Asia on September 5.  Alfa Music record label CEO, Yang Junrong, expressed his dismay at such disloyal acts within the industry and promised to resort to the law.  Disloyal workers at a mainland Chinese record production facility stole master copies of the album for their own profit, and sold them to disreputable, illegal websites, with the result that the songs had already appeared online before the album had been released."

Practically in tears of excitement, I went to eMule and did a search.  Found a whole pile of .rar files. If you’ve installed eMule, click on this link [hyperlinked in original blog post] to download it.

My favorite song is "Listen to Mama" 《听妈妈的话》. If anyone has the lyrics, please share them!

Of course I’ll [also] buy the official version. There are so few singers these days who can still write and sing.

Link: Faraway《千里之外》: MV 1 minute version, 4 minute version, 7 minute version

Of interest: as soon as the news of a leak gets out, fans are all over it, even if they plan to buy the official version in a store. Comments to Flypig’s post included those who also prefer the real thing:

First have a listen.  I already pre-ordered it a long time ago anyway.  It’s still more comfortable listening to a CD…

and someone who suspects the pirated version might not be authentic after all: After listening to this album I feel it’s got to be a spoof.  Not all of the songs are even from the new album.  We’ll have to wait until it comes out to know the truth.

ScYui’s blog followed up with this: 

Last night I saw that Jay Chou’s new album "Still Fantasy" was available online to download, and three of the songs even had the lyrics.  I wasn’t surprised — the same thing happened last year with his "November’s Chopin" album.  They said it was going to be released at the same time around the world, and then a few days beforehand it appeared online for downloading.  It’s not that Chou is looking out for us mainland fans, rather the source appears to be the mainland factory that was pressing the CDs….

After losing my CD player I haven’t bought any more CDs. I haven’t listened to any fewer songs, just get them naturally from the Internet. But you have to support Chou’s new album, so I ordered a copy from Joyo, even had it shipped by air. If you support him too, buy a copy…

Note: eMule is a P2P file sharing client.