An exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China.
鲍昆 Bao Kun is (according to billsdue) a renowned photographer in China, who joined the Chinese Photography Association in 1983 and also taught at the University of Science & Technology Beijing.
His photoblog has some great work, including a post (full of photos) about New Cities New Citizens:
Via billsdue.
Some of you may have heard that China is going through a very, very cold spell right now and that the army has been mobilized to help out the citizens.
I found some photos today on awflasher that I’d like to share.
Via awflasher.com.
I came across a BBS on Sina tonight, images from an exhibition of photos of Chinese inmates in asylums, period unknown, location unknown. They looked uncannily like someone taking photos through a security camera…but then Jason figured out they were photos of photos hanging on a wall.
For non-Chinese readers, go to the bottom of the page and click on the image that looks like this, in order to scroll through the 4 pages of photos:
From 传说狼的联盟的BLOG
In the past decade, the pollution in Hong Kong has been getting more and more serious, and most of it is attributable to the winds that bring the haze from factories in the Mainland.
But sometimes, it’s our own fault, or, if you prefer, the fault of the big corporations in Hong Kong, as was the case a few days ago:
The caption accompanying the photo above (taken by my father): "Smoke and steam from the 3 chimneys of the HK Electric power plant [see left side of enlarged photo] at Lamma Island clearly clouded the sky!!"
See original photo here.
gorgeous, isn’t it? Dr. Pan Meiyun is a professor and professional photographer who has been taking pictures of the Olympic construction sites over the past two years. SSPhoto, a website for Chinese scenic photos, has a page of her National Swim Center, aka Bubble Building, photos.
I was clicking through news portal Daqi and noticed this obviously fake yet incredibly evocative photograph:
The author is 麦田精灵 (wheat field fairy), and the picture seems to have been hand-picked from a non-Daqi forum: the 云南信息港 (Yunnan Information Port)’s photo sharing forum. The user profile doesn’t yield much information about the picture’s creator, except that she has contributed to over 20,000 posts on the Yunnan forum and that she can be reached at km@sina.com.
A Daqi editor picked up these photographs off of the Yunnan forum and created a feature out of it on Daqi’s new photo sharing section (大棋图海). In this section you can check out the original source of the picture (a feature which is actually often missing on other sites), comment on the picture (actually links to the original Yunnan forum), and vote on the picture in two ways:
So far, the votes for this set is 28 flowers to 2 bricks.
How is all this relevant?
Jason posted on Citybar/City8.com last summer, and I thought I’d give a little update because I love it. City8 gives you a beautiful high res full-screen photo of the place you choose, which you can navigate for a 360 degree view, move closer and farther, annotate, and see others’ annotations as well. (Tip: click on the middle of the green nav tool. It will take you to full screen. Wait for it to resolve). The short video (in Chinese) on their homepage with "Little C" shows you what the site can do. You can follow it even if you don’t speak Chinese (there’s a City8 English tab at the very bottom of the page but it only allows you to search in Shanghai and Beijing, and it has much less functionality than the Chinese version).
At the home page you can click on the images of 8 different cities (Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Jinan and Wenzhou of all places) and just play with the locations they give you (places to eat, tourist spots, places to shop). The site is also searchable by street or keyword. You can also enter your own spot to see what’s there.
You can drop into, say, the Five Horses Mall in Wenzhou and get a pretty good feel for what street life looks like in Wenzhou on a nice day. Great stuff!
An email arrived this morning from IFTF’s Jason Tester with the subject header: "What if France is making a backup copy of itself in China?"
The email contained a link to a post on Super Colossal titled: "China: USB External HD to the French."
The scenario, laid out by Super Colossal, is this:
Thanks to Reuters/Aly Song for the great photograph.
Jared Braiterman, a principal at Giant Ant, recently showed me some of their work from their on-going research on youths and technology (dubbed "Mobile China China Mobile").
Here’s an excerpt from one of their visual reports, entitled "Chinese Students Rarely Use Their Own Photos As Avatars" (download):
The research result is that, of the profile pictures analyzed, only 4 of 200 Chinese students abroad used their own picture as their icon versus 58 of 200 Americans.
Yet the sample contains some bias: the data for the Chinese users came from a BBS called 未名空间 while the American sample was UC Berkeley students’ blogs on Livejournal. Additionally, UC Berkeley students are far from homogeneous: I would say that the Chinese-Americans occupy a middle space between the two and therefore dilute the results.
Regardless, the original statistic, 4 of 200, stands. Yet, it’s the remaining 196 that is interesting. For example: why do people like to use baby pictures, and is that actually them as a baby?
Here’s a Flickr stream of more Giant Ant research artifacts, or you can read my 15-minute analysis on MySpace CN vs US profile pictures (blogged back in April).
Recent Comments