Click for full-sized image with translations.
There’s more here. Via Longyin Review.
Archive for the 'Web 2.0c' Category
The 6th Chinese Internet Research Conference is themed, “China and the Internet: Myths and Realities.”
It takes place on June 13-14 in Hong Kong. Topics are interesting, and registration only costs 300 HKD.
Twifan.com is a Chinese mashup that searches posts and users on two of China’s microblogging sites, Jiwai.de and Fanfou. Someone there also had a great idea — a comparison of the top 100 most-followed users of Twitter, Jiwai.de, and Fanfou.
As an independently operated webpage, we do not have any direct connection with FanFou and Jiwai.de, so this ranking might be more objective. We have use the public timeline news from Fanfou and Jiwai.de, put them in a database and analyze them. If your name does not appear on the list you may not have updated your posts recently, so we don’t have your material at the current time. Please make some posts and then check back to find your name on the rankings, at which time you might well see it come up.
Unfortunately, Twifan’s great idea doesn’t seem to be operating at the moment. Davetroy is reported as the most popular Twitter user with 11, 758 followers but in fact he currently lists 12, 761 followers. Wanhuai is the current Fanfou user with the most followers: 1493. And the “top users” on Jiwai.de all stopped posting last fall, or are listed as having no followers at all. Hmmm. Maybe someone at Jiwai didn’t like the comparison.
It WAS a nice idea, however. I’m all in favor of more mashups that bring English language and Chinese language data together in real time.
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.
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.
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.
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 China Media Project, based out of the Hong Kong University, ran a recent blog article called QQ runs interactive feature page on the problem of “fake reporters” in China, which pointed out the wave of innovative news dashboards coming out of Mainland Chinese online news sites.
The screen below, taken from the QQ news page suggested by China Media Project, has a graphic-intensive title (roughly translated as "Uncovering the most fake reporter in history"), below which is a snippet of the latest news.
Then on the left are the previews/summaries of full articles accompanied by the respective photographs, and on the right are some primary sources that give a look inside the "fake reporter’s" world.
Then if you scroll down, there is an reader poll on the right and then a box on the left for reader’s comments (but in a format more reminiscent of BBSs than blog comments).
I find it interesting how they’ve managed to leverage the screen to put up multiple articles, viewpoints and pieces of evidence (rather than the typical one article per page format that most news sites take).
The feature article below, from daqi 大旗, uses a similar two column layout, with previewed articles on the left and reader comments on the right. What they also do is quote an excerpt from Baidu Post (the Baidu all-purpose BBS) as a way of putting up another viewpoint.
Note, however, that these are the dashboard views for feature news items that have had multiple articles written on them. So they do not replace the current single-page articles (which are linked to) but they do augment the currently article-centered news.
A gander at the China version of Google Labs reveals several "new" projects:
- Google’s Windows app for pinyin input:
-
A Life (生活) search, which includes categories such as train tickets, food, work, and housing.
-
A Navigation (导航) portal, which serves a giant page of text links. Nothing new by any means.
-
A "Hot Charts" (热榜) section, which categorizes top search results the same way Baidu does in its "Wind Cloud Charts" (风云榜).
- Within the charts section though, is a banner for a Google-CCTV co-production: "Google and CCTV-2 co-planned "Qing Guo Qing Cheng, A program to present China’s most popular cities to the world".
The Google part of the site seems to be devoted to search results on certain cities and various related photos, charts and graphs.
Note the prominence of Google next to CCTV in the above banner.
Over on the CCTV site for the show (it seems like the city promotion is a TV show), the main banner focuses on CCTV & TsingTao:
With Google + CCTV on a small banner below. And it seems to suggest Google is responsible for its global outreach efforts. Doesn’t seem that impressive after all, huh?
More importantly though, stay tuned this week, for what Baidu’s been up to recently, and you can decide who’s coming out on top 
Was poking around Chinese video-sharing website 6rooms today and discovered a link (shown above) to the Chinese Animated Shorts Oscars!
I hunkered down and watched quite a few of them, which I’ll highlight before moving onto my conclusion:
花鞋子 Colorful Shoes, by the TianJin Academy of Fine Art, is my favorite pick. It’s a nicely produced claymation set in a village, and despite a threadbare plot, is incredibly evocative of a mood + scene/setting.
And then, screencapped above, a couple of shorts that didn’t really stick for me: A 3D bad guy plotting stuff; the Empress meets the first animators; and daddy loves his daughter. As you can see the production values were also quite a bit lower than the first two films. (In the animation world, that translates to a lack of time, a smaller team, smaller budgets, or less experienced artists.)
My conclusion? It’s looking up for animation in China — there are positive signs in terms of production values, plots and an air of experimentation. However, the work here still lags behind that of the top art schools, say, in the US.
The catch is which factor causes this lag: time spent, access to technology, technical skill, or "creativity"?
Our first subtitled Chinese video! It’s the story of Wang Qiang, a Sichuan barber who grew up making model planes and eventually built his own and became a self-taught pilot. This is one of the things I love about China–an ordinary guy can build his own plane and fly it, without a whole lot of interference from anyone. Especially in rural areas. The government appears to be trying to crack down on some of them, according to this story of a farmer-pilot from Zhejiang province. And not everyone is as lucky as Wang Qiang: an amateur Beijing pilot (called the "birdman" recently had a crash.
For those of us interested in translation work: to do this I used mojiti.com and would definitely recommend it. It’s unbelievably intuitive and easy to use. You just tell mojiti what video you want to upload and it does it for you, then you add "spots" to it. You can get anything that’s on Youtube, Yoqoo, Tudou, and a number of other sites. I think that the video is "open," meaning that someone else could go in and edit the translation or add their own spots.
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