I found this via an attribution on Fons’ China Herald, and it looks like it will be worth visiting every now and then, especially if more people start contributing (that’s always the issue with these web 2.0 things, isn’t it?): Chinamemes describes itself as “a web 2.0 social news site with a focus on Chinese Internet and Technology companies.” It…

Continue readingnew Chinese tech news site

Tencent, QQ.com’s parent company, is being sued by an angry user for impersonating a friend and getting him to link through to a contest site.  Damages sought: 40,000 Q coins, and 445 5-digit QQ numbers (see previous post on the value of QQ numbers).  Is this the first time that a court of law has been asked to award…

Continue readingQ coins: Chinese virtual currency gaining value in the real world

Tuesday’s 7.1 earthquake in Taiwan has caused a minor communication breakdown in Asia. BBC reports that Taiwan, South Korea, China and Japan are affected (and I would like to add Hong Kong).
Local websites are wholly accessible, as are certain big websites (BBC, Google) but not the majority of the web.

Reporting from the field, Jason Li, “This sucks. But the Facebook…

Continue readingInternet Broken in Asia

We’ll be taking the next few days off to celebrate the holiday season.

In the meantime, here a few tidbits from Christmas in Virtual China:

• “The Christmas Flavor” Increasingly Intense; Should We Refuse Christmas?“. Chinaren.com article with comments, discussing the foreignness of Christmas and what it means that it’s all over the streets of…

Continue readinga bit of Christmas in Virtual China

Check out the very cool VisionUnion.com site, which on its English page describes itself this way:

With rapid updated information, the content of VisionUnion covers the
complete designing industry. We have 12 columns — News and
Information, Plane Designing, Industrial Designing, Multimedia
Designing, CG animation, Architecture and Environment, School Union,
Members’ Works, Union Arena,…

Continue readingChinese industrial design/art works online

If you think watching advertisements on purpose is fun, you’ll want to check out the selections at iAdChoice where they rate and recommend Chinese video clip ads, interactive websites, animated ads, rich media ads, and more.  You can also search by industry rather than format, as in transportation or…

Continue readinglooking for Chinese ads? you got ’em

Molive/Moobol brings us a series of photos of this street artist, from an unknown Chinese city, who sticks metal wires into various parts of his body with not a drop of blood.  Link.

The Wall Street Journal wrote last February (note: subscription only) about tuangou 团购 (literally, team buying) websites, where as in MeetUp.com, strangers arrange to organize themselves around a common interest.  But for tuangou, it’s all about shopping, aggregating enough people to be able to get a discount or better terms on everything from cars to home remodelling materials to…

Continue readingtuangou 团购 team buying websites

Thanks to Rania Ho at DancingToasters for scanning in these gorgeous maps of Beijing’s over-, under-, and around-passes.  As she writes on her blog, “it’s as if the civil engineer had “heard” there were such things as
cloverleaf interchanges in the world and then reversed engineered it in
the form of a chinese knot.” If you like maps,…

Continue readingBeijing cloverleaf maps

Citizen journalist site Molive/Moobol 直播客 has a special section called “Chinese City Management in the Eyes of Netizens,” which collects both positive and negative on-the-scene photos of policemen such as “Beijing City Official Steals Money from Beggar” and the follow-up story from the New Capital Daily in which both the policeman and the old…

Continue readingA nets-eye view of the Chinese police