八八吧 · 88 Bar

I’m going to tell this story backwards from the way I read it on billsdue, because I have a different take on it.

Part 1: BaoBao BengBeng (宝宝蹦蹦)

BaoBao BengBeng is a safe, candy-coated virtual world for kids. See the video above — there are rooms,…

Continue readingSafe virtual worlds for Chinese children?

If you like Chinese teens singing online, or if you just want to see what a lot of young women seem to be using the Internet for in China, you’ll want to check out Mingming1986’s YouTube channel. It makes sense, of course, given the Chinese love for karaoke. 

Mingming86 is a Hong Kong video collector who specializes in webcam karaoke by…

Continue readingtaking karaoke online: singing cute songs in China

I find it difficult sometimes to keep track of Chinese power politics.  Now the Brookings Institution has provided us with a lovely, succinct 2-3 minute video analysis of the two new top leaders (Shanghai Party Secretary Xi Jinping and Liaoning Party Secretary Li Keqiang) who were recently promoted as possible successors to President Hu Jintao, at the 17th Party Congress in October. The…

Continue readingthe Youtube approach to understanding Chinese politics

Since September, 2007, Shanghai government released a new regulation about house renting, in which group rentals are considered harmful and have to be got rid of. Lots of apartments were checked and walls were destroyed by government people. Young people living in this kind of apartment were persuaded or even forced to sign a paper and move away in a certain period of time. Let’s…

Continue readingShanghai ban on group rentals: “I don’t like this Regulation”

gorgeous, isn’t it?  Dr. Pan Meiyun is a professor and professional photographer who has been taking pictures of the Olympic construction sites over the past two years.  SSPhoto, a website for Chinese scenic photos, has a page of her National Swim Center, aka Bubble Building, photos.

Over the last three years, three and a half million mobile users have
created over 14 million “red” SMS messages (“红段子”), which have been downloaded
and passed on over 100 million times, according to this Xinhua article about Guangdong’s “red SMS culture” (红色短信文化) (in Chinese), found via Zhejiang Online.  “Healthy” red SMS have…

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Great factoid found from a (somewhat old) SF Chronicle article about Alibaba (the China-based company best known for their web service that connects
manufacturers from China with customers around the world) Specifically, how they
get manufacturers in middle-of-nowhere China aboard and online:

“Beneath its high-tech sheen, the success of Alibaba.com relies on
the…

Continue readingThe door-to-door salesmen of tomorrow

We had a visit in Palo Alto from Dr. Pan Haidong, CEO and founder of hoodong, China’s most popular wikipedia and wiki software.  The hoodong wiki has over 1.5 million articles written by over 250,000 contributors, and the HDwiki software has been downloaded 200,000 times and currently supports over 1000 other websites in China. Pan Haidong was in town for a meeting…

Continue readinginnovative Chinese wiki software: interview with hoodong

Researchers at Peking University’s Institute of Computer Science and Technology, with the University of Mannheim’s Laboratory for Dependable Distributed Systems, just released a fascinating paper laying out the technical aspects of virtual asset theft and modeling the relationships among various actors in the Chinese virtual asset economy.  The paper is quite technical, but contains a lot of meat for the nontechnical reader as…

Continue readingblack markets in China’s virtual assets economy

[Second Update: I guess I take comments more personally than I should!  This was an act committed by a single person and does not represent all of China, nor all Chinese people’s views on how to treat animals, any more than any act of violence committed anywhere represents an entire nation. It has gained attention and public outcry in China–that’s why it was posted on…

Continue readingwhat’s on Chinese video sites: dog trouble on Youku