Jay Dautcher alerted me to the current number one video on Google Video.  It’s been seen over 280,000 times, almost 100,000 of those in the last 24 hours.  It’s a 77 minute video called The Rape of Nanking (Nightmare in Nanking), originally produced in English by a Dr. Rhawn Joseph and his Brainmind organization, and now voiced over…

Continue readingtop google video: sensationalist “Rape of Nanking”

Check out the great article on Tao Ran’s Beijing military hospital Internet addiction clinic in the Washington Post yesterday.  It’s the best inside description I’ve seen yet.  One thing it does is highlight the pressure Chinese kids are under to perform academically in middle and high school, the pressure Chinese parents feel to ensure their children’s future success, and the perception that the…

Continue readingcreating successful children: no Internet?

It’s hard to take care of the public commons with a population 4 times the size of the U.S. This is especially obvious when you have hundreds of millions people mixing and milling across the country, going home, and taking vacations during their Spring Festival holidays. Often times it’s not the big issues that make a difference, but the
small things that can make…

Continue readingSpring Festival: 小处不可随便 don’t forget the small things

Happy New Year! 新年快乐！ 恭喜发财！

Moobol/Molive (photo credits: qazzaq321) presents a glimpse at a rural Chinese New Year (or rather, the cooking done the night before):

More to come! Link to original post.

Was going over my photos from fieldwork done at Microsoft Research Asia last summer and found these photos my friend Neema and I took when we were at the Beijing railway station. We had just asked the counter in one of the waiting rooms about our schedule, and here is a photo of his copy of the schedule:

…

Continue readingArtifact miscellany: train schedules

Jay Dautcher writes: I typed http://www.google.cn.com/ into the URL by accident, check out what
you get – Shenzhen call girls!

Rex Wong, a Hong Kong UI guy, points out the problems of setting up a tag cloud in Chinese:

• Sorting: Do they sort by pinyin (preferred by Mainland Chinese) or by strokes (preferred by Hong Kong Chinese even though it’s hard to gauge how many strokes goes into a character)?
• Font sizing: Some Chinese fonts do not scale up well…

Continue readingThe perils of Chinese tag clouds

The desire to communicate across linguistic barriers is driving a lot of experimentation in the online world.  While we wait for translation software to improve, people around the world are studying Chinese in order to get closer to the Chinese people, and Chinese are studying English.  Virtual environments are starting to provide platforms for Chinese and others to learn from one another.  Here are a…

Continue readinglanguage learning drives virtual China experiments

This week, an illustrated blog diary called 胖兔子粥粥的笔记本儿（Fat Bunny ZhouZhou’s Journal).

Translations in maroon.

The illustrated blog, via PostShow.

Seeing Youtube from Chinese eyes, this video about Xu Jinglei and her blog traffic is being hailed as an example of “China’s first company to use Youtube for advertising.”  Donews has an article which discusses Youtube as a platform for promoting Chinese businesses to overseas audiences.  The video was posted on Feb. 7 by a Chinese fan and has been viewed…

Continue readingYoutube: ad venue for Chinese business