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Jared Braiterman, a principal at Giant Ant, recently showed me some of their work from their on-going research on youths and technology (dubbed “Mobile China China Mobile“).

Here’s an excerpt from one of their visual reports, entitled “Chinese Students Rarely Use Their Own Photos As Avatars” (download):

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Continue readingA cross-cultural comparison of profile icons

CICData has a great post on the English blog of its founder, Sam Flemming, which translates some of the nicknames and abbreviations that writers on car BBS use.  I’m guessing many of these are not limited to car enthusiasts — FB, or "fubai" (lit., corruption) is probably used offline as well, to refer to conspicuous personal consumption.  CIC’s Chinese blog has…

Continue readingonline Chinese car culture language

People’s Daily Online, English version, announced a new feature last week:

From today, China Forum will publish a question or a topic on the forum
once a week, you are warmly welcomed to give your answers or opinions
or comments. And best messages will be edited and published on our
homepage attached with your registered name. For…

Continue readinga burgeoning filter of English-language People’s Daily Forum

Via One Inch Punch.

Image excerpts spliced from scans of 王曲, the official journal of Hu’s #7 military school outside Xian. These particular panels are about military training during the War of Resistance Against Japan.

I’ve translated it as best as I could given the image quality.

Taken from Frog in the Well, the China…

Continue readingGraphic journals during historic war

This caught my eye when I was writing that Google post the other day, and I couldn’t resist:

Baidu 少儿, or Baidu Kids, is beautifully done and reflects Baidu’s understanding of the Chinese market. When I was doing fieldwork in Beijing last summer, one of the teachers we interviewed said that some Grade 1 homework assignments involved running…

Continue readingSo what’s Baidu been up to?

A gander at the China version of Google Labs reveals several “new” projects:

• Google’s Windows app for pinyin input:
• A Life (生活) search, which includes categories such as train tickets, food, work, and housing.
• A Navigation (导航) portal, which serves a giant page of text links. Nothing…

Continue readingWhat Google’s China HQ has been up to…

I can’t say much about other countries, but young people in China’s and India’s cities loooove the Fox TV show Prison Break.  On the advice of a friendly DVD shop salesman in Beijing (who, incidentally, hated 24 and loved the Sopranos), we bought the first two seasons this summer in China and began watching.  We were hooked.  Who knew that…

Continue readingPrison Break, Chinese fan art

I like to check in every now and then at Sina’s best photo posts to see what’s “hot.”  You can often find stories here that end up being circulated around the web, such as the video of the students abusing the teacher.  Most of the popular photo posts are about girls, such as this game that begins with a…

Continue readingwhat’s on Sina BBS photos: girls, goofs, and social injustice

Here is the impressive Second Life documentary by China Tracy, an 29 year-old alternative female artist, from Guangzhou, China, who was also invited by iCommons to give a lecture on iSummit this year in June.
To watch the whole film, please check here.  You could also find this documentary on YouTube and many other…

Continue readingUncertain Reality, Uncertain virtuality:Cao Fei