Author: Lyn Jeffery

Lyn Jeffery is a cultural anthropologist and researcher at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit group in Palo Alto, California. She studies new experiences enabled by connective technologies.

automated translation + SEO –> poetry

Posted on by Lyn Jeffery

The corners of the internet are lovely, dark and deep…Every now and then you come across content from China or Taiwan that has been run through automated English translation and search engine optimization, resulting in unbelievable thousand-monkeys-on-a-typewriter poetry, which may or may not be dangerous to your computer, just saying. My favorite, which now unfortunately only tells you the seven shocking foods that will…

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Supporting creativity wins on Chinese crowd-sourcing platform Demohour

Posted on by Lyn Jeffery

This is a collaborative post between Lyn Jeffery and Jason Li. Lyn begins by writing…

Crowdsourcing has been around for awhile (this 2006 Wired article nicely lays out the concept). Over the last three years, crowdsourcing has been applied to fundraising with stunning results on Kickstarter and Indiegogo (“Go fund yourself”), and…

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Ethnography of Tech

Chinese Chat Roulette–minus the naked bits

Posted on by Lyn Jeffery

I LOVE this: If you feel like chatting via text or voice with random strangers in mainland China, and you live anywhere in the world, download the free Tencent Weixin app for your iPhone or Android phone.  My latest favorite thing to do with a few minutes of boredom: check my Weixin for any “drift bottles” that have been thrown into the digital…

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Virtual China

“China phone” English-language info more in demand than ever

Posted on by Lyn Jeffery

I know we said farewell last year, and Jason has been running, single-handedly, the excellent 88-bar blog, but we still get comments on Virtual China posts and this one was SO GREAT that I just have to post it for you.

In Oct 2007 I wrote a post called “need for Chinese mobile hacking blog in English.”  …

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Ai Weiwei: lessons on dealing with Chinese officials

Posted on by Lyn Jeffery

There is something weirdly compelling about reading the transcripts of calls made to dozens of offices in search of specific numbers and names, part of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s attempts to force public clarity on data from the May 12, 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan.  You can read pieces of the list he and his friends have collected on his blog. …

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Virtual China

find english manuals for your chinese phone

Posted on by Lyn Jeffery

Last October I posted on the ongoing scroll of commentary on ChinaTechNews and pointed out the need for a blog to help non-Chinese speaking users figure out their Chinese-made phones.  Today, almost a year later, Jeff posted a link to a site called chinamanuals.com, where you can buy English manuals in pdfs and pay via PayPal.  Chinamanuals’…

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