八八吧 · 88 Bar

Belinker is like Dodgeball, but for China: via SMS, it alerts your nearby (within 1500m) friends as to your whereabouts, and you be will alerted to crushes (or in Chinese, 梦中情人) nearby.

You have to sign up on the internet first and there’s a fee if you send more than 50 “belinkers” a month.

Its currently…

Continue readingChinese version of Dodgeball

跑跑卡丁车 (“Kart Rider”, or “Crazy Racing”) is one of the most popular online games in China. It’s basically a variant on the Mario Kart formula, and comes from South Korea.

Here’s a Flash version of the game, which is sadly stripped down, but still fun as a casual game:

At Icebin’s blog, via PostShow…

Continue reading跑跑卡丁车 Kart Rider – Flash version

TTBUG涕涕虫网站 (“Booger Bug Site”) is an online hub for the Booger Bug character.

First, it features a bunch of high-quality Flash shorts, funny and with a great Looney Tunes-style soundtrack.  All shorts do not feature dialog, and I think it’s because they want to reach out to an international audience. I mean, they have an English website.

I…

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Molive/Moobol brings us a series of photos of this street artist, from an unknown Chinese city, who sticks metal wires into various parts of his body with not a drop of blood.  Link.

The Wall Street Journal wrote last February (note: subscription only) about tuangou 团购 (literally, team buying) websites, where as in MeetUp.com, strangers arrange to organize themselves around a common interest.  But for tuangou, it’s all about shopping, aggregating enough people to be able to get a discount or better terms on everything from cars to home remodelling materials to…

Continue readingtuangou 团购 team buying websites

Thanks to Rania Ho at DancingToasters for scanning in these gorgeous maps of Beijing’s over-, under-, and around-passes.  As she writes on her blog, “it’s as if the civil engineer had “heard” there were such things as
cloverleaf interchanges in the world and then reversed engineered it in
the form of a chinese knot.” If you like maps,…

Continue readingBeijing cloverleaf maps

Citizen journalist site Molive/Moobol 直播客 has a special section called “Chinese City Management in the Eyes of Netizens,” which collects both positive and negative on-the-scene photos of policemen such as “Beijing City Official Steals Money from Beggar” and the follow-up story from the New Capital Daily in which both the policeman and the old…

Continue readingA nets-eye view of the Chinese police

“The Ningbo City Managaers Welcome You!”

The ongoing experimentation in online governance and bureaucratic transparency continues. It would be interesting to do a comparison between municipal management department websites in China and elsewhere, to see what the categories of information are.  Ningbo’s site has news such as the prosecution of an illegal construction project, or the announcement of…

Continue readingChinese urban life: city management online

A retrospective look at the Anti-Dog law protests, through the eyes of the participants:

And the journalists:

The difference is subtle: the professional journalist stands away from the action, snapping a photograph; the citizen journalist stands in the crowd, snapping away while being jostled around.

Photos via ESWN & BBC…

Continue readingCitizen VS Professional Photography

QQ号为什么值钱？“Why are QQ numbers worth money?” is the title of a December 4 article in the Fan Group’s Computer Fans《电脑爱好者》 .  What kinds of QQ numbers are considered the best? How is the value of numbers calculated?  The anonymous author sheds some light on these and other questions, with the caveat…

Continue readingmarket value of virtual QQ assets