An exhibition using “infographics” to compare and contrast cultural differences between east and west, from a Beijingnese artist in Germany.

See the exhibit online at Yang Liu Design; via Information Aesthetics.

The folks at AsianOffbeat must have a really good network for scouring Chinese websites for the bizarre and wonderful!  “3 Nanjing Youths Build 4.5 Meter Transformer” appeared on QQ.com news on Oct. 9, and AsianOffbeat posted it the same day.  Even with a time difference, that’s pretty fast.

The three fans, who grew up watching the Transformers…

Continue readingchinese real-life Transformer

The first Chinese “wiki book,” written by an online collective (see this WSJ article on wikibooks), is garnering attention in virtual China.  Named “IBM Mafia” (The Memoir of former IBM PCD employees) IBM个人电脑事业部员工回忆录, the wiki book was written on Chinese wiki site hoodong.com‘s open source wiki software, HDWiki.  It is getting hot…

Continue readingChinese wiki-book offers new organizational archive model: IBM个人电脑事业部员工回忆录

Floating around the Hong Kong cyberspace this morning, a YouTube clip of Hong Kong Cable TV’s New Channel report about the trouble Air China is encountering flying into New York.

• The news report plays a taped conversation between an Air China pilot and an American air traffic operator.
• The Chinese pilot speaks gibberish, starting off with an English word but…

Continue readingCaught on tape: Air China’s pilots unable to speak English

My colleague Jason Tester found this on CoolHunting.com: it’s called Rack Magazine.  It appears to be going for a young male audience and has a half-dressed woman kneeling down and…looking into an open oven (an oven! very “chinese street”)…on the homepage.  Ａdidas is a prominent advertiser, but aside from that there’s no sign of who’s behind it. …

Continue readingchinese/english youth street culture mag

My IFTF colleague David Pescovitz, one of the editors of BoingBoing, one of the world’s most popular blogs, pointed out that BB is being selectively translated into Chinese on Little Waves / 小波波 blog.  This all works with BoingBoing’s Creative Commons license. Nice!

I received an IM from China today:

"你能上我们这边的网站吗?"
"Can you access my internet [from there]?"

I’ve always wondered when this would start–this is the worldwide web after all.  TV Links, a website in the UK, works as a linkfinder for streaming movies, TV shows, anime, cartoons, and documentaries. While some of the links are to sites like Veoh, Stage 6 (especially for material before 1990) and occasionally Google…

Continue readingChinese sharing movies for the world

A friend sent this over this article to me today, entitled:

特别报道：全国各地惊现纸馅月饼
(“Special Report: Country-wide Shocking Paper-filled Mooncake”)

The article describes a famous person named “Jason,” who went home with a box of mooncakes and discovered a secret note inside:

Translation: “Jason: Happy Mid-autumn Festival!”

Upon further examination, I…

Continue readingHappy Mid-autumn Festival!

The Asian Studies WWW Monitor points toward this analysis of unofficial cross border trade between India and China.  It gives the geographic details of routes between Arunachal, Sikkim, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh and Tibet and Xinjiang.  These routes have been in operation for centuries if not longer, and despite official customs efforts, apparently there’s a lot going on.  Excerpts:

…

Continue readingblack market goods on the move between India and China