Archive for the 'Podcasts' Category

global lifecasting: Justin.TV gets Chinese characters

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on July 21, 2008
in Blogs, Film, Podcasts and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

I’m doing some interviews with people who are playing with different reality media, and Justin.TV is a great example. The site recently got its one millionth user.  Most are like me, I’m guessing, and just sign up so they can navigate the site better.  But some are doing what Justin.TV is set up to do: broadcasting some or all of their lives, in real time, via a fixed or mobile webcam.  Many of these “lifecasters” also maintain a running chat with viewers, or have interactive games and contests.  Then there are what appear to be streaming TV channels, such as canal rcn colombia.

As of a few days ago, the site can be read in traditional and simplified Chinese characters.  A search for “China” reveals 22 hits, and a 中国 search, 0.  However, either I am missing the boat on how to get these things to play, or almost all the China channels are inactive, such as this from user “hello china” which as far as I can tell was done 9 months ago and has not been added to since then.

Let’s keep an eye on this and see 1) who the first Chinese lifecasters on Justin.TV will be; and 2) how lifecasting will show up on PRC websites, not on Justin.TV.  Probably some people are already doing it and I’m just not aware of it.

podcast: on China’s “eco-Potemkin village”

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on June 6, 2007
in Design, Government, Podcasts and Politics
. 1 Comment

Ethical Corporation is a publisher and conference organizer on corporate ethics–broadly defined.  Their material is fresh and thorough.  You can sign up for a newsletter, and they have short podcasts as well.

Listen to this podcast with Toby Webb, EC’s Editor, and Paul French, their Asia-Pacific Editor (who is also publishing and marketing director at Access Asia), discussing Dongtan, the Chinese eco-village project being built on Chongming Island outside of Shanghai.  The second part of the interview is mostly about the politics of this project at home in the UK, which is a great illustration of how these international development projects always have multiple motivations behind them.  Of interest:

"…now every province in China wants to do one of these.  It’s almost as if, if I build this small green village with a couple of windmills and some solar panels, then we’ve done with the environment and I can go back to my strip mining and my dirty steel mill." 

"Now what they’ve done is scare all the [migratory] birds away by building these environmentally friendly buildings…so in a sense you’re destroying the natural environment in order to create an environmentally friendly environment…"

For more on Dongtan, link via CDT, see the IEEE Spectrum magazine’s excellent article, "How to Build a Green City."

One tiny critical point, a genuine question for those of us who are foreigners and think and write about China: why is it that so many of us continue to use the Cultural Revolution as a reference point for what’s happening today?  Isn’t it kind of like using the San Francisco Summer of Love, 1967, as a common reference point for understanding something about current American culture?  The CR was between thirty and forty years ago–that’s a long time.  Of course it had a massive impact on many levels, but so did the free love/sexual revolution/women’s liberation 1960s movement in the U.S., but we don’t continue to reference it.  Or maybe we should?

language learning drives virtual China experiments

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on February 11, 2007
in Education, Games, Podcasts and Virtual China
. 2 Comments

The desire to communicate across linguistic barriers is driving a lot of experimentation in the online world.  While we wait for translation software to improve, people around the world are studying Chinese in order to get closer to the Chinese people, and Chinese are studying English.  Virtual environments are starting to provide platforms for Chinese and others to learn from one another.  Here are a few projects that point the way forward:

  • IBM’s John Tolva alerted me to the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University, which has two efforts I’m particularly interested in.  The first is an MMO (massively multiplayer online game) called Chengo Chinese . From the game’s design framework, available at the Confucius Institute MSU website: The new Chengo Chinese [will consist] of four virtual worlds: “villages”, “towns”, “cities” and “cosmopolitans”. The four virtual worlds will progress with increasing complexity, advancing from ancient times to modern times and from countryside to cities. Those different virtual worlds represent a variety of cultures and living styles, and teach different cultural contents and language in correspondence with learners’ language proficiency and cultural knowledge. Learners will start with “villages” and advance into “towns” after they grasp a certain level of Chinese language and cultural knowledge and reach a certain point. [In addition,] the players can choose five career paths in this game, which include: scholar, businessman, kongfu master, officer and historian or archeologist. Players encounter different experiences based on their individual career choice. Furthermore, players with different career goals co-exist in the virtual worlds and interact with each other. In addition, the game also contains many artificial intelligence ‘robots” (i-bots) that can interact with the players.
  • The Confucius Institute is also in the process of purchasing an island on the online world Second Life, which they plan to equip as a kind of virtual language learning and cultural experience.  (Rebecca MacKinnon notes here that Second Life doesn’t support Chinese characters as of yet).
     
  • ChinesePod, as most readers of this blog will already know, continues to be one of the earliest and most innovative Chinese language programs using podcasting.  They offer free, daily podcasts with humor and intelligence, backed by careful linguistic expertise and years of experience of living in China as a speaker of Chinese as a second language.  They also offer business vocabulary and a blog to discuss learning issues. 

new website rankings from 2006

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on January 11, 2007
in Auctions, Blogs, Games, Geoweb, Podcasts, Portals, Statistics, Video Clips, Virtual China and Web 2.0c
. 6 Comments

Looks like the big news is that Sohu is no longer in the top 3 portals in China, but has been knocked out by Tencent.  55% of Chinese Internet users used Sina last year; 51% hit Netease; 48% used Tencent, according to the Internet Guide 2007 China Internet Survey Report (in Chinese), put out by the Data Center of the Chinese Internet. The rest of the top three rankings as follows:

blog sites: Sina 33%; Qzone 19%; MSN 16%
IM: QQ 79%; MSN 34%; Sina UC 11%
search: Baidu 81%; Google 36%; Yahoo 26%
car sites: Sina Auto 17%; Sohu Auto 12%; Pacific Auto 11%
games: QQ 37%; Lianqun/Ourgame 20%; Shanda 20%
podcast/video sharing: Toodou 10%; Yoqoo 9%; Mofile 9%
C2C auctions: Taobao 55%; eBay 37%; Paipai 20%
mapping services: Baidu 33%; China e-Map 中国电子地图网 19%; Go2Map 图行天下 11%

Link to Chinese BBS post (via TOPChinaLabs).

China’s podcasting: a bite of current stats

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 17, 2006
in Blogs, Podcasts, Statistics and Video Clips
. 1 Comment

Podlook_hanzi

Podlook

China Web2.0 Review points to recent statistics (originally translated by cwr, edited by me) from Jack Gu’s blog (Gu Shaofeng), founder of Chinese podcast aggregator Podlook. Gu notes that, despite the numbers below, he and other Chinese experts are seeing a plateau in terms of quality of content and number of listeners. "On the one hand," he writes, "there’s too little good, ongoing content.  And on the other, the mass audience doesn’t have enough of an attention span."

CWR adds context: Podlook is the largest podcasting directory in China.
Though a Podlook-based data analysis may not reflect the exact whole
picture of Chinese podosphere, and the development of Podlook’s
platform itself in [the last six] months also influences its findings and
conclusion, the report and data is still very useful and important for
us to understand Chinese podosphere.

1. In May 2006 there were over 33,000 podcasters [on Podlook], a 70%
growth compared with January 2006. The number of podcasts was nearly 145,000, nearly tripling during the same time period.

2.  Education and criticism genres are most popular, but most podcast content focuses on entertainment and personal life. 

2. 15.6% of podcasters produced at least 5 episodes, compared with less than 8% four months ago.

3. 22% of podcasts were video, up from 17% four months ago; 1% were Flash; 77% were audio.

4. About 23% of Podlook podcasts were aired at least 10 times, up 15% from four months ago; nearly 80% were aired less than 10 times.

5. Many new podcast hosting sites emerged in the period from January to May –
especially those which provide audio and/or video services.

6.  It’s unclear what the author means exactly, but it is said that "independent" podcasts are very popular, but very rare: less than 2% of the total. 

Get the stats (in Chinese) here.