media - Convergence in practice

Elizabeth Osder finished with a rather solid speech on convergence of the media her two-year stint at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism and rightfully showed off with the result of her students, that was applauded by the attendees. This is how online media can work and where journalists can show we can add value to what to often is limited to the personal ramblings of the relative elite. Giving a voice to the people is an important task.
My main worry is how this kind of products would be financed. Apart from the big media, very few could actually afford to make this kind of productions. In that way is weblogging in fact a rather elitist activity (although the costs are much lower). Nothing against those elitist activities, but it should not be limited to that very literate few.

media - Confusing news on China’s internet cafe’s

(Later in Tidbits)

Looking behind the news from China is revealing, as it shows how Chinese and Western media use the same techniques in sanitizing the news, be it with different agenda’s. The news from AP that China has closed down more than 8,600 internet cafes fits the classical image of China as a repressive force, cracking down on free speech. The main source of confusion: AP cuts and past the news of the official state news agency Xinhua and squeezes it into an angle that it considers fit for Western consumption.

Xinhua brings the same news but from an official Chinese perspective: internet cafes that do not stick to the law and allow juveniles in will be closed down. The government is a benign father that takes care of its children, it their message.

Nobody knows what really has happened. It seems likely that Xinhua has been hustling some rather unreliable figures to push out a politically correct message. AP uses the same dubious figures to bring another message. Both can be qualified as propaganda. The ministry of culture - the origin of the news - is one of the more hapless sections of China's bureaucracy that often has to prove its existence by using empty propaganda.

economy - FT warns for car bubble

I almost missed this story by the Financial Times, one of the official cheerleaders of China's growth.
The question who is going to buy all those has been intriguing me already for two years. "The risks [of overcapacity], though, are huge, particularly for VW. Standard & Poor's, the credit rating agency, has warned that VW could suffer especially badly from a slowdown in Chinese sales. An overcapacity problem of some degree seems inevitable: the only question is when it will occur, and how severe and long-lasting it will be," the FT writes.

media - Great online stuff by USC students


Rosa is one of six people that are part of the multimedia production 'Making it in LA', a product made under the guidance of Elizabeth A. Osder and subject of a lunch meeting tomorrow.
Both envy and admiration struggle for dominance when I see what kind of beautiful stuff students of the online media program at USC Annenberg school for journalism make. This is what online media should be about.

travel - Chinatown LA: pretty dead on a normal day


On a tour in downtown LA I discovered the oldest of the three LA China towns and jumped out of the car to have a better look. It was almost like SARS had hit the town, so empty was it. Apart from a few elderly ladies who spoke Cantonese it was pretty dead. It might be due to the moment I was there, a weekday on five o'clock in the afternoon, but many of the shops seemed to be permanently closed or were even empty. Not a very encouraging sight.

media - New technologies at USC

This afternoon students at IMSC at the USC here in Los Angeles showed us some amazing new technological developments. Remote media immersion means, say, experiencing the most advanced 'Lord of the Rings' effects over the internet. Compelling sound effects where only the smell is not yet transmitted, but that might be a matter of time. They were doing tests with musicians playing at different places in the world, and a director in another place. Might still take a few years before you have this in your office.
Interesting was also the way geospatial data were integrated. By combining digital maps and other information this technology could provide more information into one map. Interesting was that for different reasons the different maps never worked out precisely and we had a discussion on whether this kind of information would be more reliable or less reliable when original data were adjusted. Do we reflect the reality better or do we create a new reality. Of course I had to bring up the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade a few years ago. No certainty yet.

media - Nanfang editor might escape sentence

Cheng Yizhong, the chief-editor of the Southern Metropolis News, might get escape charges for corruption, that have largely been seen as a way to get even on the way his paper dealt with SARS, corruption and other hot issues in China, the China Digital News reports, quoting the South China Morning Post.
"Sources said former Guangdong Communist Party chief Ren Zhongyi, a reformist, and former party official Wu Nansheng had written to current party secretary Zhang Dejiang asking him to make his views on the case known," writes the SCMP. "The China Youth Daily has described the case against Mr Cheng as a joke and urged the central government to step in. Mr Cheng was first arrested on January 8 but released after deputy party secretary Cai Dongshi intervened. He was re-arrested on March 19 after the court handed a 12-year sentence to the tabloid's former general manager, Yu Huafeng, for embezzlement, and jailed Li Minying, a former director of the newspaper's parent group, for 11 years for taking bribes."

media- Integrated media at USC

Tomorrow a visit at the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at USC in Los Angeles, where we get a preview of the latest media technology. This weblog is mainly about text and pictures are picked up every now and then. But in the end audio and video will be an integrated part of the upcoming new media.
Now is seems a real lab situation, but far-reaching changes are ahead and tomorrow I will learn more about that development. Remote media immersion, a panoramic demonstration and geospatial data and view aims are on the agenda an by tomorrow I might be able to tell you what it means.

travel - Universal Studios: Nobody walks in LA

Today at the end of the afternoon a few hours to hang out the tourist. Of course I went first to see the Universal Studio's in Hollywood. Obvious a very succesful destination, but it could intrigue me only for about an hour. "Nobody walks in LA", quoted an LA friend from a famous song. I defied that saying, even worse: I took the metro to get there and was one of very few.
LA is - compared to SF - a real city with between seven and eleven million inhabitants: just as in Shanghai nobody has a real clue. While Shanghai is only starting to build up a car park, in LA that is already done: the city has for that reason spread out over an enormous surface. It would take an expansion to Ningbo, Hangzhou and Nanjing to achieve a similar situation in the Yangtze delta. And many more, much wider roads. That seems now an undoable situation, even unwanted when you would ask me.

travel - Route one California


On the road yesterday, along the coast in California.

media - Propaganda war heats up

Foreign media, like The Guardian, provide more details on what is already called 'a power struggle' by others.
The original article by journalism professor Jiao Guobian carries references to permission 'by elders' he obtained before starting the war against the propaganda bureau. It is for sure a dinosaur in a death struggle and the question is whether the animal will kick back. When it does not, it signals we have reached a 'point of no return', since others will become even more daring. I keep my fingers crossed for professor Jiao, but am not sure this point of no return is already there.

travel - Annenberg's school of journalism

Just back from a lunch with Larry Pryor, director of the online program at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC in Los Angeles and a prior meeting with Elizabeth A. Osder, now visiting professor at the school. Elizabeth asked us not to look at her website, since she has not been updating it for a long time.
A rather dynamic climate, with - at least some of the faculty - being really on top of things.
Yesterday a beautiful trip along Route no.1 from San Francisco to LA. Picture are still due, but Andrew has not yet been online yet.
The May holiday in China certainly has slowed down my email traffic with the mother country more than the Sasser virus, that has brought down the Annenberg today.

travel - On my way to LA

Today I will be traveling to LA with Andrew Lih, so posting will be light. I might resume this evening again, depending on the availability of internet connections. My expectations are rather low.

internet - Why blocking does not work

A fun story from our techie friends that illustrates my point that blocking the internet does not work because the negative fallout is too large.

internet - A second blogger evening in the Bay area


"Leave it to bloggers to travel 5000 Pacific Ocean miles in order to read each others' blogs," comments Patrick Delaney after a beautiful evening, first in his home and then in de local jazz club.

censorship - Is the propaganda ministry on the way out?

Yes, says Li Xiguang, director at the Centre of International Communication studies and dean of the School of Journalism at the leading Tsinghua University in a recent book on the internet in Asia. He paints a picture where the traditional ways of controlling the news in China have been eroded over the past five years and have made the propaganda bureau's increasingly obsolete.
Even when that is true, the controllers are kicking back aggressively, writes Joseph Kahn in the New York Times. I could not get to the original story (although I guess that the NYT is not blocked here in the US), but fellow bloggers Joseph Bosco and Peking Duck report extensively. "Beijing professors say censorship in China is worse than before", says Peking Duck.
It looks like a dinosaur is hitting around. They are still around, they might be dying, but cannot be ignored. You might get stepped upon, although some of the Beijing professors are now daring enough to hit out.

blogger - Permalink found

I have been wondering how to get the permalinks in my entries, so you can find back the individual entries better. Just now Isaac Mao found out they have been there all the time. I have changed it so it can be found easier.

blogging - Comments&pictures by Jay Cross


Jay Cross of the Internet Time Blog in Berkeley visited the China Digital Future Conference and the bloggers dinner, including revealing pictures.

media - Link to wikipedia added

After Andrew Lih's strong contribution yesterday in Berkeley on the wiki-media, I realized that I had not added a link to the famous wikipedia on China. That omission has been corrected now.

travel - A village called San Francisco


Some post-conference entertainment. Fellow blogger Patrick Delaney took me along for a tour of San Francisco and of course the Golden Bridge was on the agenda. San Francisco has a poor 700,000 inhabitants, rather small compared to the 20 million in Shanghai. The wealth that has gathered here in de past two decades during the high tech era mainly came to the Bay Area because of the proximity of the universities like Stanford where many of the companies started.
I was lucky enough to catch one of the 20 sunny days in San Francisco: most of the time it is foggy and cold, so quite different from LA, where I hope to arrive tomorrow together with Andrew Lih. USC's Annenberg School of Journalism is one of our targets for later in the week.

blogging - Comments on Napsterization

More bloggers start to report/comment on yesterday's sessions. Here is Mary Hodder of Napsterization and the official China Digital News.

blogging - China's Digital Future

A nice illustration of blogging on the spot. Our panel in action and on the background pictures appear made by Kevin Wen. It was a bit distracting, people told me later, but blogging is rather distracting, so that fits very well. Andrew Lih is missing her, since he had to operate the laptop.

internet - Good for travel

The story is that the internet and improved connections make it possible for people to stay home more often. Yesterday somebody observed that the oppposite is happening and indeed bloggers seem to travel more than ever. A good way to meet so many friends in person I only knew from cyberspace: Andrea Leung, one of the forces behind living in China, and avid moblogger Kevin Wen of course, apart from the people I mentioned earlier.

blogging - China bloggers hit Bay area

Were were not as bad as the Berkeley Rugby team that won yesterday the national championship, but party time hit big last night when China bloggers came together in Berkeley after the China's Digital Future conference in Berkeley.
Patrick organized the after-dinner deliberations in the French restaurant La Note and Kevin and Isaac (mo)blogged all along.
The conference ended the second day in a much more positive note than the first day, that ended in some one-sided China bashing. In the second part the story became much more complete, I felt. Was too much involved myself and leave it up to other to report on our last panel with Andrew Lih, Isaac Mao and Madanmohan Rao under the guidance of moderator Paul Grabowicz.

internet - Surfing more popular than traditional media

Youth prefers surfing the internet over watching TV, if they have to choose, says Bu Wei of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Only 6 percent would prefer a newspaper.

censorship - Typepad available in China again

A report by CSR in China. I cannot check it myself since I'm in the US. Most changes in blocks are done at the beginning of the month, so this could be a change. No news on blogger.com.

Berkeley - Year of the internet opinion

The case of Sun Zhigang is taken as an example of how the internet influences the public opinion in China. The graphic student died in January 2003 in custody in Guangzhou after he could not show his ID card.
After it was reported in the papers the internet users reacted angrily. Law experts weighted in, wrote letters to the NPC to ask to repel the old law that allowed the police to arrest people who could not show their ID card. That happened consequently.
"2003 is the year of the internet opinion", says Hu Yong, translater of Negroponto's work and part of blogchina.

internet - No news from Google

Andrew McLauglin of Google is present but does not want to talk about Google. Their IPO is his reasonable excuse, but we would love to have heard their take on their block in Chna two years ago.

The freedom of cyberspace - the WTO column

Now at Chinabiz


30/4/2004

Berkeley, CA - My venture into cyberspace in Shanghai started slightly more than nine years ago in a classical Chinese way: on a bicycle. In the China Daily (the Shanghai Daily did not exist yet) we read next to the articles about the "running dogs of capitalism" articles about the internet and how China would open up for this new dimension of reality.

Now, in those days we did not believe anything the China Daily was writing, so my Australian friend and I stepped on our bicycles and roamed the universities for more information. The stories academics at those universities told us about the internet were enthusiastic, although they could not assure us that we would be online very soon. It would take a few years from then.

We learned that between the different departments a struggle was going on. Some ministries saw the internet as an indispensable tool for China's economic development. A second group feared China would open the box of Pandora and lose control of the country. And a third group of departments thought they would get a good opportunity to make some money themselves.

The 'liberals' won the struggle, although they also had to do some concessions to the conservative side of the government. Controls and restrictions are still in place but the freedom in cyberspace has emerged in a great way. Initially I had to register at a special bureau of Public Security to get permission to go online, but that office must have been abolished. Initially many foreign websites were blocked, so everybody got very much used to using proxies to get easily around then. Even the CIA joined the frenzy by sending me daily new proxies to circumvent the Chinese internet blocks.

But the number of blocks has gone down tremendously. Last week I visited the site of the DPP in Taiwai - can an organization be more evil? - and there was no block. Other filter methods disappeared after they caused tremendous economic damage. Perhaps newcomers online might no longer be familiar with the system of proxies because they are no longer indispensable.

Li Xiguang, dean of the journalism school of Tsingha University in Beijing confirms in a recently published book what has been obvious for some time: the traditional propaganda machine in China is losing the struggle from the internet, Shutting up people does not help anymore when the chatrooms in China get heated up. Despite several degrees of self-censorship in those chatrooms, the number of incidents where the government followed an online outcry is countless. When the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed, during SARS, when the US spy plane came down. The internet has become a new way for Chinese to talk to their government.

It is only 80 million out of 1.3 billion Chinese that is online, but it is a fast growing minority and a vocal one.

For the economy the introduction of the internet has been very beneficial. I cannot recall anymore how we survived without the internet. Traditional media and government control is on the way out, at the conservatives feared, but that has not brought disaster over the country. The changes are very much comparable with for example the US where traditional media are also losing their position and the government - and anybody else - is wondering how to talk to the people. The people are too busy to listen, they have found other priorities as the media are increasingly losing the trust of their audiences.

China is in the end less different than it thinks.

Fons Tuinstra

blogging - More Berkeley blogging by cnblog.org

Go here for more comments on the Berkeley conference on China's Digital Future.

picture - Your blogger in action

Thanks Andrew Lih!

internet - Sun fights Microsoft monopoly in China

John Cage of Sun Microsoft Inc. told about his company is going to share their software with China to allow a free development of new software without prior permissoin. In November in Chengdu they set up the China standard software corporations (SSC) that will deploy their software, a competitor of Microsoft's software, on two million desktops models.
"We gave it almost for free," Cage said. "You want to remove all inhibitions to built upon the work of others. Develop the freedom to innovate."
John gave yesterday a private show for fellows at the Western Knight Fellowship on the abilities to visit digitally almost every place in the world. Fascinating presentation.