八八吧 · 88 Bar

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

Free Hugs have made it over to China (well, at least Beijing). Douban has a group devoted to the movement.

Photo from Ladynow.org.
Link via PostShow.

An AJAX-powered job search engine, with personal and company profiles, email alerts, notes, and a really, really shiny logo.

There is already quite a large batch of jobs listed, and the site is offered in both Chinese and English (the jobs are mostly offered in Chinese).

http://www.meijob.com/

Now a treat for the Mandarin speakers…

Continue readingmeijob: ajax job searching

Having lived many years in Beijing, I’m partial to northern China in the winter (I realize it may be an acquired taste!).  Two photoblogs, one from Dalian and one from Xi’an, start to convey the flavor of the bare branches, straight avenues, steam rising from roadside food vendors, bundled up pedestrians, smell of coal, and blue skies of a northern Chinese winter in the city.…

Continue readingnorthern China in winter