Google keeps on losing market share

Google keeps on losing market share to the domestic search engine Baidu, reports China Web2.0 review based on a new report by CNNIC. Baidu now get 74.5% of the Chinese internet users as primary users of their search engine, compared to 62% last year.
That can be explained by the fast growth of the internet by 30 percent over last year, when new Chinese users will most likely use a local heavy weight in stead of a foreign less known search engine. More troublesome is that Baidu is also winning in the high-end users. Google get 22.11 percent of the high-end users in the first-tier cities, but only 5 percent in the third tier cities.

SCMP remains firmly behind a firewall

Chris Axberg, the editor in charge of the website of the South China Morning Post has left his job after a disagreement between management on the financial firewall the leading daily is maintaining, reports Shanghaiist.
Today the New York Times will remove the financial barriers (called TimesSelect) to read parts of its paper and - with the notable exception of the Wall Street Journal and parts of the Financial Times - financial firewalls are considered to be a nono for online publishing.

Axberg, who recently spearheaded SCMP’s relaunch of its online platform, confirmed his departure was effective from 28 September, bringing an end to an eight-year tenure with the company.
Sources indicated executive director, SCMP Group, Kuok Hui Kong was the front-runner to take the reins. Axberg said although he had advocated the SCMP’s online site becoming free for users with advertisers driving revenue, management had opted to retain a subscription-based model.

This is the verdict of online guru Jeff Jarvis on the move of the New York Times, but the same goes of course for the SCMP:

Bull. TimesSelect represented the last gasp of the circulation mentality of news media, the belief that surely consumers would continue to pay for content even as the internet commodified news and — more important — even as the internet revealed that the real value in media is not owning and controlling content or distribution but enabling conversation.

How to detect nonsense in articles on the Chinese internet

The Washington Post made a very sloppy article on this intriguing subject: how are the Chinese authorities going to control the internet and mobile communication? It started with a little anecdote that was new for me, but when I read this I knew I was losing my time:

It hasn't been for lack of trying. The Public Security Ministry, which monitors the Internet under guidance from the Central Propaganda Department, has recruited an estimated 30,000 people to snoop on electronic communications. The ministry recently introduced two cartoon characters -- a male and female in police uniforms -- that it said would pop up on computer screens occasionally to remind people that their activity is being tracked.

The urban myth of those 30,000 police officers monitoring the internet is the official benchmark that we are leaving serious journalism. The number has never even been proven and - it has been argumented before - on 162 million internet users that is actually a very low number. That number - if true - only proves China does not take controlling the internet very serious.
For the ministry of Public Security it might be news that they are under the guidance from the Central Propaganda Department. There is a committee of about 17 government departments who try to discuss how the government should deal with the internet, but none of those departments takes the overhand.
Of course, the cute cartoons - what a way to crack down on the internet users - were not introduced by the ministry, but by the Beijing public security. It is a very local affair, but Western media try to make small things big by declaring them wrongly into national issues.

MSN is looking for a China partner

Weird news as Chinese media report that MSN has lost its joint venture partner Shanghai United Investment in MSN China. Foreign companies can only run this kind of operation when their Chinese partner has a majority. So, its Chinese partner is looking for a buyer, otherwise there would not be an operation anymore.
It underlines a story by one of our Chinabiz Speakers Paul Denlinger, who explains in Chinabiz why more US entries in China fail.

Cyber nanny into overdrive

Danwei summarizes the first emotional reactions at the Chinese internet as our internet nanny seems to go into an overdrive, ahead of the 17th Party Congress in October. As Jeremy Goldkorn notes, the lady even makes Wang Jianshou from Shanghai frustrated, and that takes a lot.

What is happening is bad enough: thousands of servers and ten thousands of websites just being unplugged is quite a disaster for those involved. The actions also seem to be rather localized in stead of a concerted China-wide action.

Of course, some of the local authorities are very eager to show they are doing enough to guarantee a harmonious society, not realizing that what they do might reach the opposite. I have no information from the bigger cities, where such a disruption might cause severe economic damage.

Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei has gladly agreed to join our speakers' bureau at Chinabiz Speakers, although it might take a few week before we have his profile active.

Internet nanny drives me against the wall

For a while I thought I could live with the internet censorship, or our nanny as some call the grumpy old woman. While being irrational and wrong in itself, I would be able to find patterns I was sometimes even able to explain to outsiders.
For example, for a long time - apart from real emergencies - new IP-blocks would only get in place at the first working day of the month. This was all based on the basis principle of any bureaucracy: we take ourselves very serious, but do not like to work too hard.
By reducing the actual number of IP-blocks the Great Fire Wall (GFW) even became slight more efficient, since many newbies did not see a good reason to educated themselves on circumventing that wall.
But now the old woman has gone crazy and all my old certainties seem out of the window. First, she blocked Feedburner. What sense does it make to block the world's largest producer of RSS-feeds? Maybe nanny wanted to punish Google, who bought Feedburner recently, for not joining the non-sensical declaration on self-discipline on the internet, that was signed for the first time by Yahoo and Microsoft.
Now, today the English section of Wikipedia was closed again, and act that made really no sense to me. The problem of course when you cannot make sense out of it (unlike in my first example), the punishment does not make any sense. It only forces more angry users to get their proxies in place again.

Redirecting to ChinaBiz Speakers

A very nasty cold (unfortunately) and an increasing workload at ChinaBiz Speakers (very fortunately) have caused an ongoing reduction in my postings here. While the cold is over - thank you for asking - the work at our speakers' bureau is slowing asking a higher toll. I will continue to write here, I would not be able to stop, but I see that I'm increasingly missing bigger trends.
Anyway, I'm redirecting some of my communication tools. I was already very reluctant to switch on my personal Skype-connection, because of the increasing load of nice but often irrelevant chatter. Now, in the future, I can also ask one of my colleagues to take the Skype beat. That will be nice.
For more corporate propaganda, visit my other weblog.

Feedburner feeds unavailable in China

I just learned that the Feedburner feeds are unavailable in China. A bit of a nuisance, since I just started to just them for this weblog. Be advised that this weblog also has an atom-feed that works as well and is also available on the home page.

Crackdowns are in the air again

a crackdown against piracy in Fuzhou

Regular readers of this weblog know I get mildly amused when Western media start writing about crackdowns, especially when the government tries to go after the internet. This week we had even two cases.

First, China's central government promised Germany to crack down on efforts to hack official German sites. A story in the German magazine Der Spiegel said that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had been hacking the computer systems of important German ministries.

The story was stinking like a one week dead fish already from the start and not only because of the lack of proof of the allegations. The "security breach" was already discovered back in May, but only published just ahead of the visit of Bundeskanzlerin Merkel to China. That indicates a clear move to set the political agenda and perhaps give other subjects lower priority.

Let's look at the reality online. We just had this beautiful story about an Australian teenager who unabled twice in one day expensive porn filters the Australian government had activated. Then there is the story of this other teenager who unlocked Apple's iPhone successfully. Of course, when the German state security discovers they have been hacked, they cannot say they have an issue with perhaps a few million bored Chinese teenagers. They have to come with something big, say, the PLA. I side here with some of my Chinese friends who say Chinese teenagers are probably better positioned to crack websites than the PLA.

Equally funny was the pledge by some of China's largest weblog hosts, including Yahoo and Microsoft, to act responsibly and rely on self-discipline, whatever that could mean. Of course, this was the basis of many alarmist articles, I happily ignored. Fortunately, Rebecca MacKinnon decided to read some Chinese bloggers before jumping on the bandwagon of the alarmists.

They seem to view the pledge as a bunch of bureaucrats making yet another meaningless pledge to justify their existence. Keso points to a long list of other self-discipline pledges made over the past few years which, he says "other than giving us joke material, they've pretty much not amounted anything."

Most beautiful saying: "loud thunder with light rain". As Rebecca notes, just following blindly press releases by organizations like Reporters Sans Frontieres or others, without confirming first with Chinese sources, it not done anymore. More at Rconversations.

Crushing the online conversation - Sam Flemming

Sam Flemming

Life at the internet in China has always been rather rough. With annually millions of youngster smelling the freedom of being able to say whatever they want, triggers off - next to very beautiful things - a lot of aggression too.

Originally they were called the "chatroom warriors", angry young men denouncing almost anything they would meet online, often becoming a nuisance for the more experienced users, looking for a decent discussions.

Sam Flemming now focuses in his latest entry at a the latest technological move of the chatroom warriers of today, the "Baidu Post Bar Crushing Machines". China's leading search engine Baidu has developed a tool that makes it really easy to start online discussions, but the latest technology has now developed a tool to crunch those discussions.

"Forum Crushing" refers to netizens using "Forum Crushing Machine" (爆吧机), a software designed to let users continuously post content with different IP address until the forum is overloaded and "crushed."

Sam Flemming warns:

For now, such "crushing machines" target mostly fan clubs sites. But don't be surprised if in the future it is brand related forums which are targeted. (Baidu Post Bar is filled with forums dedicated to such as this one for McDonald's. In this age, engaging consumers could result in a black eye.

Sam Flemming is also a speaker at Chinabiz Speakers. If you want to invite him for a speech, do let us know.

First official day at Chinabiz Speakers

t Today was the first official day of Chinabiz Speakers, the project that might pop up here every now and then. What makes this project special for me is that it also offers an opportunity to test some of the new-media techniques I have been reading, learning and talking about in a very practical way.
The morning began by sending off press releases to media outlets and through mailing lists of different Foreign Correspondents Clubs. The classic press release is more or less passe, but I do think it is for a lot of purposes useful to write up in one page what you are up to and where people can call you. Otherwise, sending off press releases to the old media was only a way to pay tribute to my old occupation, since I do not expect too much off it for our project.
We are - in terms of news - squeezed between 12 million recalled toys and a collapsed bridge. You have to know your place. But where in the past you could only hope somebody would still notice you, today a project like ours can follow the long tail. We do not have to be Harry Potter's to get things done.
Using your networks and relationships is key in the new-media toolkit, building up conversation with your different constituencies. Fortunately, the speakers' business is very much a people's business, even better, people who are supposed to bring in huge networks themselves.
Plan one was to get a core group of now slightly over 30 speakers on a closed mailing list to start forming a group. Some of the speakers do not each other, but some don't.
Plan one also failed, at least today, since the Google mailing lists have a quota of 30 people and by putting 31 on my list, I triggered off the Google spam alarm. My list was not activated and I seem to on a waiting list while a real human being looks at it.
Plan two was the mobilization of my own network. I had prepared emails to my friends and contacts that could be interested in the project and started to blast them off. What I first noticed was how many people are still on holidays: many out-of-office messages came back. What was further striking is the huge number of people who changed email addresses in the past two years. Then the Google spam guards hit again: after 500 emails they thought I should take a brake and they blocked my account for 24 hours. Fortunately, there is still Outlook.
Then we started to reactivate Chinabiz with a piece on KFC by one of our speakers Warren Liu. With over 20,000 subscribers interested in business in China Chinabiz is a network of itself and we are going to ask our speakers, if they are not yet one of our columnist, to join that stable of writers every now and then.
My digitally advanced friends suggested I should also start a group on Facebook. I did so, but this might not yet be the tool for the biggest part of my constituency. But in terms of networks, you can never have enough of them. In less than 24 hours, I have now already 26 members there!
That is very short my virtual marketing strategy for ChinaBiz Speakers. I will report now and then about the results.

Update: Ah, forgot to tell you that ChinaBiz Speakers has of course its own weblog. It focuses more on operational issues but shows also how the network is slowly getting into place. I think.

Who is reading the China Daily?

I'm not, not even their own editors read it, illlustrates ESWN with a nice screenshot, but somebody must have discovered this. The China Daily picked up a sentence from Reuters that would normally have been sanatized in a report on the Olympics:

"Security was tight around Tiananmen Square, where troops crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 with huge loss of life, as crowds gathered for the celebrations."

Of course, we cannot blame them for not reading their own propaganda, but it looks like somebody is going to shop wood for a while in one of the few forests taht have not yet been cut down.
More at ESWN.

Internet and business at EU Chamber Shanghai

Sam Flemming

Sam Flemming, one of our expert speakers, will be speaking on Friday next week at a morning session of the European Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai on Internet and business in China.
Of the other speakers I only know Ken Caroll of ChinesePod and he also has a great story to tell. The other two I do not know, although hear from the CEO of Ebay China could be fun too, if he is willing to share why his company is doing so badly in China. Mostly though that is not a favorite subject for business people at public events. (Remember to make a reservation on Wednesday at the latest.)
Our Chinabiz Speakers site has its own "internet" section, but I'm still missing some of our speakers there: the site is still under construction. Sam is there, but we should also have there Shaun Rein, Kaiser Kuo and Isaac Mao. And soon many more.

Has Jongo.com a chance?

China Media News comes after earlier entries with more news about Jongo.com: the project I had already written off is said to continue with the support of the UK investors. Today's entry includes what I consider to be the funniest statement of the day:

The Managing Director of Jongo once said, "It takes a long time to build a portal, but once it's profitable, it is basically like printing money." Expect to see more of Jongo in the future, just not the near future.

It might explain a bit the lemming-like behavior of the UK investors who have until recently been pouring in 100,000 US dollars per month into the project. It shows such a lack of understanding how things have worked, work and will work in China that I can hardly set myself to the boring task of explaining all this.
First, the operation is illegal, a foreign entities are banned from having this kind of media organizations. There is nothing against being illegal in China, as long as you do not get noticed. And you cannot print money without being noticed.
The Chinese portals (who now have a potential customer base of over 160 million internet users in China, compared to maybe a few million who might be interested in and English language service) had a hard time. More than ten years after Sohu, Sina and others took off, things seem to be picking up for the first time. They have been under threat of being kicked off the Nasdaq more than once because they underperformed. The news market has certainly changed dramatically: there is no market for a web1.0 service like Jongo is offering.
You wonder what consultant has been making money on this project. I know Cam of the China Media News only arrived when it was all too late, but somebody has been giving dramatically wrong advises here.

Xinhua dives into citizens reporting

A citizen reports

The state news agency Xinhua as a nice go at the phenomena of "citizen reporting" and gives a fairly solid overview of the conundrums in the collaboration between unpaid volunteers and professional news organizations. They conveniently ignore that apart from grabbing a camera and getting footage for the traditional TV-stations, those citizens can also start their own broadcasting station for little costs. But otherwise it covers the main issues pretty well.

Cui Jianzhong, chief producer of DV Observation says, "Our citizen contributors mostly cover the stories happening around them from their own perspective, which is different from professional journalists, but closer to our audience."

Of course there is the odd bureaucrat who wonders where the world is going to when unlicensed citizen reporters roam around in China, but he is served off:

"There's no law saying that only the professional journalists can cover news. China's constitution guarantees every citizen's freedom of speech," says Guo Zhixin, legal counsel for DV Observation.

Well, that is good to hear and I will put the last quote apart for frequent usage in the future.

Blogger unblocked, blocked and unblocked again

For those who are still interested in what our moody internet nanny is doing: the blogspot-domains owned by Google (or blogger) are unblocked again.

A blocked blogger got his court hearing

Global Voices translates the weblog of Shanghai-based blogger Yetaai who tries to sue China Telecom for blocking his website.
After quite some delays he got his court hearing and a verdicts is due, well, within the next six months that is. The real case is of course against the Chinese internet censorship or GFW, but by suing China Telecom for their poor service, there is suddenly somebody to sue.

Public outcry on Blackstone losses

China has lost about 500 million US dollars of its 3 billion US dollars investment six weeks ago in Blackstone, causing public anger, writes the International Herald Tribune.

"O senior officials of the Chinese government, please do not be fooled by sweet-talking wolves dressed in human skin," said one of several Internet postings compiled by an anonymous blogger on Sina.com, a Chinese Web site. "The foreign reserves are the product of the sweat and blood of the people of China, please invest them with more care!"
In a sign that the Chinese government may be censoring criticism on the sensitive issue of government investment losses, the blogger's entry was visible on the Web site on Thursday afternoon but had disappeared by Thursday night. Other entries by the same blogger were blocked, but milder criticisms of the Blackstone investment could still be found.
"It is really alarming the speed with which the Chinese government entered into this investment," said another posting, signed as "anonymous person 586215," that remained on Sina.com through Thursday night.

Not too much lingdao, please

former lingdao Chen Liangyu

Today we have been working on the website for our Speakers Bureau and one of the tasks was to find a captive slogan to go along with the name. With the help of some online friends (thanks Marc!) I came up with: Chinabiz Speakers Ltd. A leader in opinion leaders.

Near brilliant I would say, if I wouldn't be the author myself and it would allow us also to, eh, get some help from Google and Yahoo in promoting our service. By systematically combining the worlds "China" and "opinion leader" in for example all the fifteen profiles where it would be appropriate, I was sure we would be scoring very high in the combination of those two words in the search engines. A sure winner.

Unfortunately, my Chinese partner did not agree. In the Chinese translation that would create a bit too much lingdao, and that could attract the kind of attention we did not want. I still hope he finds a good way to translate this slogan in a less harmful way.

Old news at NowPublic.com

news from Shanghai

The internet is bubbling again. When you belong to the digital vanguard you might have noticed that the "citizens journalism" site got 10.6 million US dollars in funding. It claims to have 120,000 volunteers in place, able to make the site into a real news wire.

Of course I checked out who their people were in Shanghai and found only news that was more than three weeks old. The news at their home page looks not very to the point, as they only report very smallish incidents that would at best have made it to the local newspaper.

How Harry Potter was translated into Chinese, in two days

Chinese fans of Harry Potter would have to wait for months, before they would be able to get a decent translation of the latest adventures of their hero. Meanwhile, sloppy online translations and even fully fake Harry Potter books would hit the Chinese market, mostly over the internet. This time the last Harry Potter book was translated in two days time. In yWeekend (here in a translation by ESWN) Xiao Wang, a first year high-school student, explains how he tested and organized the 60 volunteer translators online, using their QQ-accounts.

Xiao Wang:

"There are about 20 high school students. They are mainly third-year high school students who are on summer vacation after taking the university entrance examinations. Among us, there are about seven or eight who have previously participated in translating Harry Potter books. For the majority, this was their first participation in a large-scale translation project.
Previously, they had only done some translations for practice during their spare time."

Xiao Wang is also the operator of a special Harry Potter section at Baidu, China's largest search engine, his position in the online network of Harry Potter fans. His translation might be the best, but is done without the permission of the official publisher of the Harry Potter books the People's Publishing House. Xiao Wang:

"Actually, I feel that we have very little impact on the official translation of the book. Genuine Harry Potter friends will always want to buy the official version, because the quality is better and they want to collect it. I had done a poll about how Harry Potter fans want to read Harry Potter 7. More than 100 persons participated, of which almost 70 want to buy the official Chinese-language translation. Only 2 persons said that they will only read the Internet translation."

More at ESWN

Low on blogging

I just realized that my blogging activities must have been on an all-time low. The heat, the quasi-holiday and increasing activities - including many lunches - for the speakers bureau have kept my attention away from this weblog.
Also, playing around with Twitter and Facebook has provided some alternative, and very easy, outlets for my writing needs. Just a few touches of your keyboard, and the world knows you are around again. Compared to those tools blogging is still a bit harder, although they are very limited in what they can take.
Anyway, perhaps this weekend gives some more freedom.

Internet ventures rake in more business

A few new figures suggest that internet companies in China are in the lift in terms of both getting business and ad money in. China Web2.0 Review signals that e-market leader Taobao has consolidated its leading position in the C2C market with a 72% market share in the first quarter of 2007.
Quoting a report by iResearch:

According to the report, the C2C online shopping market in China has been gaining great momentum over the past six months. The report shows a lot of data to back up their claim. The transaction volume of Taobao for the past six months is RMB 15.7 billion, which has increased by nearly 200% comparing to the same period of 2006. Taobao has 39.9 million registered users by the end of June 2007, increasing over 80% comparing to the same period of last year.

That does not mean Taobao or its parent Alibaba.com is already making money. Who is making money is Baidu, China's largest search engine. CEO Robin Li announced the company had increased in the second quarter total revenue more than 100 percent to US$52.7 compared to the second quarter last year. Profits went up 142.7% to US$18.6 over the same period.

Philip Toy steals my article

Some bloggers really have a hard time to get something of themselves on their weblog. Take Philip Toy who gladly stole my article. Not very smart these days, since we notice this theft right away.
Philip Toy should also write a thousand times: "I was a thief and I regret it." You can do it here in the comments.

Print censor eyes online publications

Time for code orange as the General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP) announces it will try to regulate online publications. According to the China Tech News Kou Xiaowei, a deputy director of the print censor, his organization is preparing a system of approval and permission for online publications.
China's regulatory system for media is highly segmented and the different regulators one by one try to get involved in the online media, who are breaking down the traditional segmentation of the media. At the end of last year the State Administration of Radio, TV and Film (SARFT) tried to get hold on the video sharing market, but basically got nowhere, at the time.
When the regulators are fighting to hold or even expand their turf they are up for a fight with colleague censors, the industry and the audiences, who increasingly turn to the internet. My prediction is that GAPP will not get very far, but might still be out to kill some chickens to scare off the monkeys, as the Chinese saying goes.

The lagging online ad market, more

Kaiser at Ogilvy reports about a meeting he had with 50 Tsinghua EMBA-students, all senior executives of Chinese companies. He asked them about their explanation for the fact that consumers spend a huge percentage of their time online, while ad companies keep on pouring most of their marketing budgets into TV-stations.

The answers were intriguing, honest, and often very funny: One gentleman basically said that at least in China, people in a position to determine ad spend spend all their days actually running their businesses, and their evenings getting drunk at Karaoke parlors, and they can’t be bothered with learning about the Internet. Others said that marketing decision-makers extrapolate from their own Internet use, which is very purpose-driven: they hunt for specific bits of information and never bother to look at ads. Most boiled down to “it’s a generational thing,” and everyone was confident that the gap will close.

Citizen journalism takes off at QQ

the Jinan-page at qq.com

The China Media Project points at a first experiment at Tencent's QQ in mobilizing citizen reporters. On July 18 Jinan was hit by a devastating flood that killed 26. At QQ of Shenzhen-based Tencent editors asked for input of their users:

how is it we have only this frosty [unfeeling] information about "26 dead", 6 missing and 171 injured? We want to know how those deceased passed away, and why ... ( in a translation by the China Media project)

In a few hours time, the dedicated webpage was flooded with material from local citizens, hinting a a failing local government:

Yesterday, the water flooded into our house. Our house is on the first floor. We were just sitting down to eat. Dad went off right away to find sand to fill up bags, but the water came too fast and washed the bags away. It looked like a dam had burst, and the water was putrid. Today Dad's busy building up the threshold. It's too thin and needs to be replaced. No one cares. Our government is just busy making money.

QQ is a highly successful internet service provider, belonging to the top-3 internet companies in terms of traffic and organizing a large portion of the now 162 million internet users in China. Because of that position they are very well positioned to experiment with this kind of citizen journalism and are likely to follow up after this initial success. Citizen journalism is here to stay, how to organize it, that is the question. Officially internet portals can only republish news that has been already in one of the censored traditional media, but this new feature could mean a diversion from those old restraints, if the regulators take it easy.

Update: Global Voices has a thorough overview of all the citizen reporting in China concering the floodings. Nice pictures too.

Problematic email delivery in China?

China's internet censor system has been messing around with email messages coming into the country, says Danny Levinson of BDL Media and an article at Reuters.

In layman's terms, the problem seems to be that often, but not always (and unfortunately not always easy to replicate), emailing into China from outside servers get bounced, and sending from inside China out also sometimes, but not always bounce. Sure, this happens in general, sometimes. But since about 2AM on Monday morning, it's been quite problematic.

I have been writing before about the new nanny-software China seems to be testing, but had not noted any problems with the email delivery. What is annoying is the unpredictable way it switches off my Google news searches, but I just restarted my proxy and that problem is now gone.
It is clear that we can throw our old ideas about how the Great Firewall of China's internet censors works in the dustbin. Like the introduction of previous systems, new systems cause a massive amount of problems and the only positive side of it is that in those precious months you can actually learn how the system works.

The South China Morning Post still does not get it

I just got the kind invitation from the publisher of the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post for a three-month free subscription on their website. He flatters a bit my weblog, but unfortunately illustrate to have no clue how these new media work.
Basically the paper remains behind a firewall and lifting it for me for three months does not help me to use one of the most important features of the new media: the link. As long as I cannot link to them, why should I actually bother to spend my time reading their paper or even pay for it?
The South China Morning Post has decided not to become part of the ongoing debate I'm happy to belong to. As others have said, survival is not mandatory.

Update: Danny Levinson builds further on the case on the poor performance of the traditional media going online in "Dow Jones gets what it deserves in Murdoch".

MSN, MySpace China to cooperate

When China Web2.0 Review announced a merger between MySpace China and MSN China, denials appeared very fast. Now, a new partnership between both companies has been announced, not a merger, but interesting enough.

MSN China takes outsourcing strategy to build its Chinese portal, it cooperates with dozens of partners to provide various content and services to its users. Content and service providers have to pay for several millions Yuan a year to be a partner. However, because of MSN’s heavy traffic and extensive user base among Chinese white collar, they still regard MSN China as an effective way to quickly expand their user base.

stock blogger faces jail

According to the Financial Times the weblog of Wang Xiujie (35) was more popular than that of Jinglei. One his weblog "Big Brother Leader 777" he gave advice on how to invest on the stock market and he also had a popular sms-service. He now has a problem:

Wang Xiujie, 35, was arrested in the north-eastern city of Changchun after an investigation into his unauthorised investment consulting business, Xinhua news agency reported. No charges have yet been filed.

How far can you go in blaming your employer

The case of a disgruntled foreign lawyer at a Chinese law firm is now definitely getting out of hand. Danwei reports they saw (and got screen shots) at Google ads of what appears to be a fake ad of the Zhong Lun Law Firm that in fact leads to the weblog of the lawyer.
I first decided to follow this case. An employee using a weblog to get even with an employer is an interesting case, regardless who is right or wrong. Obvious, Jeff Brauer was angry and it is always nice to have a peek in those private affairs.
The original post has now been deleted, after Jeff got a visit from his former boss and managing partner he perceived as threatening. But at least the managing partner promised him he would get the money he was entitled to and Jeff would delete the blog. He then did delete some entries but went on to disclose some practises at his former law firm that would suggest bribing judges. When you are in it for a compensation, not the best way to please your former employer.
Other, now deleted, posts had already raised my doubts on his ability to make sound judgments on what is really happening in China (here one in the Google-catch).
Obvious Jeff sees China as a country where law has no value and he has now decided to ignore the law himself. That might again illustrate some rather poor judgment skills that would become a major problem in seeking new employment.

Update: Well, the case seems to be settled, out of court and out of the blogs.