Apparently no-one in business is immune from the innovation imperative these days, and one must be seen to be creating the conditions for innovation, if not actually being innovative — yet it’s one of those words that have been bleached of practically all meaning through overuse. Still, there’s an important cultural battle going on regarding what innovation is and who…

Continue readingQQ Labs QQ实验室: the battle of the innovators

Have you ever been forced by a client to copy an English language website?
Have you ever been blamed by a leader for producing something “unsophisticated”?
Have you ever felt unsure when the “English” website you copied keeps on looking wrong?

For those of us who are interested in how people from different cultural contexts “see” things online differently–a…

Continue readingChinese and English language website design

After having used Babelfish for all this time, I finally checked out online dictionary Dict.cn, which Jay Dautcher told me about a year or two ago. It’s really good, especially if you read Chinese, because it provides you with the word you’re looking for in various sentences.  You can get a sense of how the word works.  Another nice touch…

Continue readingnew favorite online Chinese dictionaries

“City 2046” 《都市2046》Chinese MMORPG officially launched on Sept. 26, after several months of beta testing.  The game takes place in a futuristic urban environment, obviously. It’s billed as “the first massively multi-player 3D online game set against an entirely realistic urban background,” but was alleged in the Chinese gaming media in July to be a copy of a Korean game also…

Continue readingmarriage in the virtual city: City 2046 《都市2046》

On Sept. 23 China announced the launch of the world’s largest pure next-generation Internet. Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) will replace the current Internet, which is Internet Protocol Version 4. The Chinese network, called CNGI-CERNET2/6IX, or CERNET2 for short, and broadly referred to by the name China Next-Generation Internet (CNGI) project, currently links 167 institutes at 25 universities, in 20 different cities (…

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One of our first posts on Virtual China, and still one of the most popular, was on the homemade inventions of various farmers across China: boats, cars, subs, and so on.  There are also homemade airplanes out there.  Now it’s an amphibious vehicle, being reported via “China’s BoingBoing,” Postshow.

On…

Continue readingthe inventiveness of Chinese farmers Part Two

K.M. Lawson at the multi-author China history blog Frog in a Well, provides a detailed tutorial on how to use Google Books to find open source historical material about China, and how to download texts in pdf format. Google Books allows you to do full-text searches of the books that are indexed already by Google, and apparently, to…

Continue readingGoogle Books + Chinese materials

I sometimes come across a Chinese character, often part of someone’s name or a place name, that I don’t know how to pronounce.  Here’s a handy character-to-Pinyin translation application, which is generously offered for free on a website called Ping Asian Imports.  They say that they get over 500 visitors a day using the service.

“Have you ever seen such a fancy government building?  Seeing the broad, stylish square in front of the Tai’An Municipal Government [in Shandong province], who would still dare to say that we Chinese are poor?!”

An example of what’s driving the Chinese economy: massive real estate projects intended to project power, respect, and wealth.  Apparently also a topic…

Continue readingon the BBS today: luxurious government buildings

ESWN translated a story that illustrates, for me, the speed at which digital content can go from private to full-on mainstream public in China.  It’s a significantly different understanding of the unspoken rules of Internet privacy, than in say, the U.S..  (Not that these rules aren’t constantly being rewritten: think of the recent Jason Fortuny “sexbaiting” story, in which he…

Continue readingalternative “rules of privacy” in Virtual China