A pseudo-realistic photograph at the frontier of photo sharing
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:
- 送鲜花 = give fresh flowers
- 拍砖头 = hit [with?] a brick
So far, the votes for this set is 28 flowers to 2 bricks.
How is all this relevant?
- This is another example of how China’s internet employs many content editors or seekers to discover “hot” content to bring it to main portal sites.
- The trackbacks (being able to find the original post) is a sign of a maturing internet, in case this, at Daqi.
- American sites would use a thumbs up/thumbs down rating system, but the Chinese version is more graphical, and has more personality — it’s entertaining, just the way most Chinese people like it when it comes to the internet.
Do Americans not talk about offering bouquets or brickbats to express their approval/disapproval of things?
Hmmm… I have not heard of it this way, and in fact I did not know what a “brickbat” was until I checked it up a moment ago.
You may be right though, the “brickbat” definition does match what they were trying to do, though I have not seen it used in any English-speaking websites that I know of — have you?