Continue readingWould that it were so: twifan’s microblogging comparison

Dave’s experiment is brilliant.  It probably takes this kind of situation to open up new practices across virtual spaces, which even though technically just a click away, tend to seem as far away as Mars.

In a nutshell, he’s got a tutorial for non-Chinese readers to sign up to a Chinese twitter-clone called fanfou, in order to start…

Continue readingopening up to Chinese tweets: Dave’s experiment

Photo: Teaching people to distinguish fake goods from real, Zaozhuang city, Shandong, 3/9/08

As an anthropologist, March 15th has always been one of my favorite holidays in China.  It’s International Consumer Rights Day/ 国际消费者权益日, the day when there are tables set up in public for consumers to learn more about their rights, the streets are festooned…

Continue readingthe biggest Chinese rights game in town: it’s March 15

CityIN’s press release arrived in my box this morning, and it looks pretty interesting.  It’s a Hong Kong-developed social networking service that can work on your mobile, and it uses QR codes, which always seem so smart to me but which have not taken off much of anywhere outside of Japan.  The Wikipedia entry…

Continue readingCityIN: mobile networking, QR codes in China?

If you’re looking for a place to find people to do translation jobs for you, either from English to Chinese, or Chinese to English (or possibly any other languages), one place to check out is 1x1y.com, or 翻心翻译.  On the jobs board you can find people and companies who post their prices, number of words per day, and email addresses. …

Continue readingChinese translators site

I put this together for a talk today and thought I’d share it for those who haven’t read the latest CNNIC report (#21) or who don’t feel like combing through it for some of the basics.  The data comes mostly from that report, but also a bit from ESWN and ars technica.

Number of Internet…

Continue readingChinese Internet stats, some basics circa late 2007

Netease’s “news” forum has this item today, on a group of rather shabby streetwide fortune tellers: On those who know the fate of others.

With great difficulty I managed to sneak up on these people and secretly take a few photos.  Could it be that they can see their own fates?

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Continue readingon the BBS: fortune tellers on the edges

I came across a BBS on Sina tonight, images from an exhibition of photos of Chinese inmates in asylums, period unknown, location unknown.  They looked uncannily like someone taking photos through a security camera…but then Jason figured out they were photos of photos hanging on a wall.

For non-Chinese readers, go to…

Continue readinglayers of looking: eerie images of Chinese mental illness

I recently received an email from a young Chinese friend who mentioned being inspired by amateur Welsh opera singer Paul Potts, who won a British idol singing contest last summer.   I’d never heard of Potts, but a quick Baidu search turned up a wealth of Paul Potts videos on Baidu video…

Continue readingcan we get someone like him? The Paul Potts story in China

Danwei and billsdue have already blogged this stuff, but it’s just so brilliant that I have to repost!  China’s most popular indigenous MMO, ZT Online (征途), which is run by a guy who got rich selling a vitamin tonic, is described in a Southern Weekly article that was taken down after its publication online, but…

Continue readingChina’s exploitative MMO: ZT Online 征途