Mobile calls cause global warming

Houston, we have a problem

Chinese state media have of course been silent on the next environmental disaster China is causing for the world, but fortunately, the Dutch media are on top of it. While in China the number of mobile callers is rapidly nearing the half billion, a group of fifty scientists in Columbia have revealed that mobile phones contribute to global warming.

Not the batteries are the problem, but the billions of calls heat up the waves. Solutions have not been given, but we can better start raising pigeons again. Hold on, maybe we should first ask fifty scientists if raising pigeons is not bad for the world.

Where are the blind in Shanghai?

Huangpi Nanlu Subway station

One of the points where Shanghai really does a very good job compared to other cities I know it in facilitating life for the blind. I'm not blind myself, but have been participating in registering this kind of facilities in Europe, or mostly the lack of facilities.

In Shanghai most pavements, all subway stations and many other place are having these dots and lines (at the picture in the middle) that allow blind to feel with their stick where they are going. Now, of course you can find the odd place where it is also used as a place to park bicycles, but mostly it should work very well. In theory.

Since what I'm missing are the blind people themselves to use this. First, I meet in the city center (compared to other Chinese cities) very seldom blind people and when they are there they do not use the stuff. Maybe somebody should teach them how to use it. Where are they anyway?

Taking a language class online - ITV-Asia

Ken Carroll

Over the past week a new online media venture took off, ITV-Asia, with interviews for business people on doing business in China. In one of the first interview Ken Carroll of Chinesepod.com explains how he took 18 months ago his classic language teaching business online in a web2.0 mode.
He is now 15 million downloads further and the concept has become a nice example of how to take a brick-and-mortar business successfully online.
ITV-Asia is an offspring of IVT-Japan, now moving in China and Asia. The operation does still need some fine tuning. The streaming technology does not stream that well at my computer, possibly because of the poor broadband quality. That will be solved in the weeks to come.
Disclosure: The China Herald is in early talks with ITV-Asia to join a combined advertising platform together with other content providers in the region.

Three shot dead at Dalian police station

pictures taken after the shooting

At the police office of the Xiongyyecheng town in Dalian Railroad Department three citizens have been shot to dead by police officer named Su Kai on April 26. The local authorities are trying to suppress the news, writes ESWN in a translation of Observechina.

The three citizens were in the police station to ask for compensation. The circumstances have not been clarified yet.

Longhua: innocent entertainment

Only a few years ago Shanghainese had a good time by walking up and down Huaihai Lu with inflatable hammers. Compared to that, the festival at the Longhua Temple is really very exciting. When you take you time to get in the mood, it becomes actually fun, the crowds, the enjoyment, the children riding on mechanic horses and playing in plastic waterbikes. And there is of course the food. A good tip from Shanghaiist.

Longhua Festival

Hu Jintao beats Bush in Time top-100

Liu Qi next to IOC-president Rogge

Time magazine published its list of the top-100 most influential people and again I had to struggle through a list of people I have often never heard off. (Here is the list, here the link to Time.)

US president Bush has lost his position, while his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao still goes strong. Beijing Party Secretary Liu Qi made it and that seems closely connected to his efforts to get the Beijing Olympics in 2008 in place. Liu doubles also as the chairman of the Beijing Olympic Committee.
Of course Time had also to include one of the modern Chinese power brokers with weblogger Zeng Jinya, the wife of dissident Hu Jia, to keep the list nicely balanced.

Shanghai's shopgirl wants a break

Amanda Zhou of 8 Days

What I like more then reviews of books or movies is when Shanghainese women take each other on. Shopgirl's Shanghai has taken this drastic way of reviewing her peers to the internet and this is what she has to say about Amanda Zhou:

Now this girl Amanda Zhou working for Shanghai Magazine 8 Days will hate me for bringing this up. She is according to 8 Days an "it-girl". Perfect body, perfect face, best clothing style, successful business woman, etc. Give me a break..........
Orange is indeed a trendy colour this season but wearing an
orange polo just doesn't do it for me. I'm sorry.

There are many more of those reviews on her weblog. I just discovered that it was hit by the official firewall. Guess they have maybe some jealous women at their desk too.

Alert: Yahoo sees money in China

Jerry Yang in a cheerful mood

When Yahoo-founder Jerry Yang tells an audience in the US he sees potential for making money in China on advertisements, I cannot stop laughing. It is bad enough he helped in the past the authorities to send journalists to jail (remember, this is still the day for the press freedom), making money in China has never been his strongest point.
At least in some of the media reports he gives a clue about a smart strategy. After two years he does think it makes sense to call Jack Ma again, who took over Yang's China operation for a rather decent fee.

China does not make it on the CPJ-evil list

Today it is the worldwide day of the press freedom, so the tough ordeal journalists have is high on the agenda of many meetings. This morning I was interviewed by the Dutch radio, together with colleagues in Romania and Zimbabwe about the situation in China.
Of course. I was my balanced self, pointing at the lack of freedom among the traditional media and the emerging freedom we do get online. But just mostly, I do not expect those critical NGO's to say to the world, alright, China is not doing that bad. You expected the average load of single-minded propaganda that has to convince the world they need those NGO's.
So, when I got the annual list of bad countries by the Committee to Protect Journalist (CPJ), I was really amazed to see China did not make it into the top-10 of evil countries.
I still have to see what happened here, but for the time being I will be out to honor the day of the press freedom at the journo-drinks at the Cotton Bar at Anting Lu. I might pick up some more news there.

Vigil for Alan Johnston in Beijing

Alan Johnston

BBC-correspondent Alan Johnston is held captive in the Gaza for weeks. The BBC is organizing vigils for him to urge his early release in several capitals, including Beijing, today.

From the invitation:

The Beijing vigil will be held this Thursday, May 3rd, and we will meet at 7 pm at the main gate of the Jianguomenwai diplomatic compound. Please come and show your support, bring along family and friends as well, and spread the word to other interested people.

Comparing the Hong Kong and Macau media

Simon World picks up the discussion on the May day riots in Macao and how the media have covered that event. A nice summery in a quote from Ivan Choy Chi-keung of the Chinese University:

"The big newspapers in Hong Kong are kind of anti-government - cynical about the government," he said. "The two biggest Macau newspapers, the Macau Daily News and Jornal Va Kio, are owned by pro-China people and in sympathy with the government."

Troublesome: Losing email on my Gmail-account

Over the part two days it happened at least three times to me: recent emails at my Gmail account could not be found. Last night I had to call back a potential client in Florida, I routinely looked up her initial email and my reply. Both were gone. Fortunately, her contact details were saved in the contact list, at least it indicated it was not me losing starting to make things up, but that there really has been an email.

This morning I had to participate in a radio program on press freedom and I tried to find back the initial email and my subject proposals. Both were gone. That is potentially troublesome when an email service says I never have to throw email aways, and they start losing them. I'm not even a CEO of a listed company that has to lose emails.

Developing my radar screen for news

Danwei used its recent revamp to introduce a tool to "aggregate" or collect the news. On its home page, it is called "From the Web", but it is much easier to use their RSS-feed into your RSS-reader.
Since the aggregators are slowly replacing the traditional media in the way how people try to get some order in the chaotic online publishing business, it makes sense to have a closer look at it. I will later use my own selection of aggregators to explain how in my case my dragnet fishes up the information I want from the internet.
There are roughly three kinds of aggregator. There are the hand-picked ones, like those by Chinabiz (only China business) or Global Voices (only weblogs). Then there are the automated ones, says the Google News and Yahoo News. Those you can manipulate them up to a certain degree, for example you can select news on key words like "Shanghai" or "search engines", but it is basically algorithms, apart from the initial selection of media that is being searched.
Third is a hybrid of those two and you find an example at your left hand side. It is my selection of feeds I use on my RSS-reader and would include feeds from handpicked sources and automated ones.
Are you still there?
This is my radar for China-related news in English. Not the China Daily and of course not the South China Morning Post, since you cannot even link to them. The selection can go wrong in two ways. First, there are too many "doubles" or "triples" in the selection. That means that the same article shows up more than once. So, at this stage I only add aggregators that give information I do not get from others. Danwei's aggregator is still in the waiting room, but the one from Jongo I kicked out. They did not add value to my selection and were not really using authoritative and identifiable sources.
The other problems is that I might miss important news. In China, because of the availability of so much information, you need to make a selection. So, every now and then I discover I'm missing a source or subject I find important. That means, you have to try and include those sources in your RSS-reader.
In the column on your left hand side, you find my selection of China-news. I do have other hobbies, but did excluded them from this tool, because that cater really for another audience. According to my RSS-reader I now monitor 222 feeds and that is after a major cleaning operation.
Why did I write this piece? Because I think it is important you know how I select my news. In the past that was all to obvious and you could mention a few big media. Now, that process has been much more diluted, and knowing how other select their news is - at least for me - an important issue.
How does your radar screen look like?

The traffic of this weblog

I just had a look at the traffic figures to this weblog over April and I'm stunned. I knew already that traffic was going up but I have never seen it grow that fast. There are huge differences though in the different ways people read this blog.
The number of RSS-readers has been rather stable, slightly under 2,000. The number of visitors on the other hand went up 20 percent, to almost 60,000 visitors, compared with March. The biggest jump is in the number of unique visitors that went up 50 percent, to almost 30,000, compared with March. Compared with February the jump is even more remarkable and more than doubled.
That probably means that the number of incidental readers goes up faster than the number of regular readers. Search engines seem to have an easier job in finding this weblog, and I see that the number of this for specific articles (yes, porn and sex are doing pretty well, thank you) has been climbing rather fast. That might be due to the revamp of the lay-out of the China Herald, but could also independently mean that the search engines are getting better.

China no issue for Hong Kong labor rally

May march in Hong Kong

I bumbed into this lively account of yesterday's May march in Hong Kong. An amazing range of subjects: for a legal minimum wage, regulation of working hours, collective bargaining, equal rights for sex workers, deaf and others. Even the odd Marxists were there.

But then I was missing this one word "China", that was only mentioned once in a casual way. China does not seem to be an issue for the Hong Kong labor movements and I find that strange.

Shooting at Macao labor rally

ESWN translates different accounts of the violent incidents at a labor rally yesterday in Macao. One police officer drew his handgun and shot into the air, according to one account with blank bullets, according to another with real.
Just wonder why armed police officers would walk around with blank bullets in their handgun anyway. From the pictures at ESWN it looked like the police did not expect violence and were only dressed lightly.

Muckrakers with Chinese characteristics

Investigative journalism in China has taken a new twist as victims of corruption and other official misdoings can hire muckrakers online, writes the Washington Post. (h/t China Digital Times). The story goes to Qinglong where farmers were successful in dealing with local corrupt officials.

"Of course, we were very happy to hear the news," said Shuai Changqing, one of the farmers who led the fight against local officials.
The farmers, it turned out, had more than a small role in making the news. One of their own had hired Xu as a reporter, for a negotiated fee of $265.
What happened here in Qinglong was typical of a new kind of journalism that is emerging in response to the Chinese Communist Party's suffocating censorship of newspapers, radio and television. With no more investment than a computer and a taste for taking risks, several dozen Web-based investigative journalists have set up sites and started advertising their willingness -- for a price -- to look into scandals
that traditional reporters cannot touch.

Journalists who were confronted with the censorship in their own media have been publishing their blocked stories more often on the internet, but this is the first time it turns into a business model. Returns are modest, as might be expected, since most of the victims do not have much money to spare.

The power of a blog: the nail house revisited

A 26-year old vegetable seller from Hunan province, Zhou Shugang, used his weblog last month to tell the story about the Chongqing nailhouse, a story he covered in person, after the traditional media were banned from writing about it.

Now the weblog has only gained in popularity, writes the South China Morning Post, in a follow-up story.

Homeowners across the country flocked to the site in hopes of attracting attention to similar causes, among them 45-year-old Shanghai resident Chen Jialiang, whose house was flattened in his absence last year.
Mr Chen's trip to Chongqing did not yield him any mainstream media headlines, but he did secure a lengthy report with pictures on Mr Zhou's blog for himself and 12 other households in his district. Mr Chen said the exposure might lead to a breakthrough in his dispute with the developer.
"I'm very grateful to Zhou Shuguang for putting forward the case about our houses. Our problems would have been solved long ago if we had got the same attention that the Chongqing couple did."

The trial of Lan Chengzhang's murderers

The killing of Lan Chengzhang earlier this year in Datong gets a follow-up as the six suspected murderers are coming on trial. The many stories written about the case, not only revealed the wildwest going on at China's mines, but also the war going on to keep the accidents out of the media.
Real reporters were being bribed and illegal reporters, just out to make a buck, were being beaten up or even killed. According to AP:

The trial started Sunday at the Intermediate People's Court of Linfen in Shanxi province, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Six of the suspects were charged with "intentionally causing physical hurt" while a seventh faced charges of harboring the other suspects, it said.

Distributing an (almost) free paper

Last week we had a first discussion about a new project that involves the distribution of a free paper. First the other participants had to laugh when I brought it up, but I wanted the distribution method as a part of the feasibility study. My argument: when you cannot deliver the paper into the hands of the target group, it might end as old paper after it leaves the printing press.
Every weekday I see how the free Metro Express is delivered at the Shanghai subway. Not only is the paper only available within the "paid" zone of the subway, each pile of newspapers has somebody handing out the paper, one per piece for each passenger. At the exits scavengers pick up the papers that have been read.
Danwei shows how the Beijing Evening News created themselves a problem as for one day the paper was a record 208 pages, for half a renminbi. The Post Office delivered 400 tons of paper to the subscribers, but almost none of the newsagents had the paper for sale. They had a better way of making money.

Real estate or the stock market?

Not surprisingly, our Chinabiz-columnist Sam Crispin, clings to every sign the Shanghai stock market is ready for a crash. Sam makes a living in real estate and for that industry the recent six months have not been the best. While we cannot say that the real estate industry is falling flat - as has been predicted wrongly for years - things are also not going that well either.

Hundreds of thousands Chinese investors - and not only them - have been investing in the stock markets as that market has gone up since last year, despite an occasional dip. In his latest column Sam refers to an article in the South China Morning Post by independent economist Andy Xie, who predicts massive mayhem when the government does not cool the market down now. (Unfortunately, the South China Morning Post is hidden behind an outdated financial firewall, but if you look very well, you might find Xie's column here.)

Now, I'm not going to deny there is a bubble and, yes, a correction will come. But what I find strange is that the Chinese media present Andy Xie's story in a different way than the Hong Kong newspaper. In this summary of an interview Andy Xie gave for Phoenix TV we seen an element that would have messed up the argument for the South China Morning Post a bit: Xie says that despite the expected short-up correction, the Chinese stock markets will move upwards for the foreseeable future.

So, yes big problems, but when you prove to have a strong stomach, you might see it through. The difference in tone says more about the different media than about the real situation. The South China Morning Post still seems to love a decent doomsday scenario for China.

Who owns your comments?

Intellectual property rights on the internet in China seem to be developing faster than in other fields. Earlier this month we wrote already about virtual property and its threats, but now Danwei points at an court verdict between internet portal Sohu and online forum Dianping on the ownership of comments.
Dianping collects reviews by internet users on restaurants, shops and other venues and publishes those online. Sohu republished a part of those and Dianping sued. Sohu's argument that there could be not intellectual property on user generated content was dismissed by the court and Dianping, who organized the content in the first place, got damages.