Shanghai China Snippets Observations about living in Shanghai and China in general

I don’t get it. The “That’s Shanghai Magazine” website has been under some restructuring since they lost the original website as a result of some Chinese-style business tampering. They got a new domain, put a new website online and today started sending their newsletter. Hey, wait a minute..

The mail is sent from a strange Microsoft address and there is no subject.

So I emailed them but got a nice ” Delivery Status Notification (Failure)”

I still got some questions though:

Is Microsoft now the owner of the That’s Shanghai Magazine?
Is “That’s” using Microsoft’s mail server to save some cost?
Is the mail address real or a spoof?
Is using the mail server of a different company a normal business procedure?

Anybody got answers, let me know.

The Beta testing of Yahoo’s New 360 Degrees Blogs has started. I was fortunate enough to get an invite from Threadwatch (A nice site/blog about internet marketing). I have a lot of invites left so if anyone is interested in checking it out, drop me a line.

In a related note it crossed my mind that this might be a good chance for Chinese bloggers to get their word out without being blocked. Although I am not sure if it’s already available in China I can imagine that once it is, it is less likely to get blocked right away. The main reason being that blog.360 is a sub domain of Yahoo. I am sure it will be technically possible to block just sub domains but I am also sure that it will create more negative buzz then blocking blogspot.

update: I just realized that one of the features of the 360 degrees blogs is that you can decide who’s allowed to see it.

Just noticed a new blog that has an original focus, Metro Society – a little sth about life in and around the Shanghai metro stations.
Only 3 stories yet but would like to read more. The only nagging thing has to do with the bloghost, being Microsoft. You cannot post a comment as “You must sign in using a Microsoft .NET Passport to publish a comment to this website.”. Well, no way, so I’ll try a Trackback, maybe that’s allowed.

Sometimes the whole blogging thing seems a virtual quotation and link game. I quote A who quotes B who quotes C etc. In the end of the day we have all have been quoting one another, although each quote has been spinned a bit to the left or the right depending on the author and still, it can be useful. Bloggers are also supposed to be polite so in the process they link to the one they are quoting.
And here comes Trackback. Until now my knowledge didn’t go beyond knowing the name. I did some search on Google and found a Dutch blog, which referred me to another blog, which has a neat podcast with pics, a picscast, that explains the concept pretty well. This latest blog compiled the picscast with the help of a guy who is doing the explaining in the picscast.
Besides quoting A who quotes B who quotes etc. I can now, by using trackback, actually let A and B and C and etc. know that I have quoted A (which means I also have been quoting B and C and etc.) and not only by linking to them but also by letting them to link to me.
That’s what Trackback does, simply said.

So as I got my link from the Dutch Blog and got the real Trackback explanation from the other blog who worked together with yet another blog I guess I just have to let them all to link to me.