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

The [tag]Washington Post[/tag] has a nice series of articles on [tag]China[/tag] and the Digital Revolution.

The writer, Philip P. Pan, who is based in [tag]Beijing[/tag], will be online Today, Feb. 21, at 11 a.m. ET to discuss the digital revolution’s presence in China, the government’s efforts to censor Internet content, see [tag]Wikipedia[/tag] and the rise of [tag]blogging[/tag].

Here is the link to the discussion and here the link to the overview of the series.

Direct links to his articles:

The click that …

Wikipedia .. Reference Tool On Web Finds Fans

Bloggers Who Pursue

And to finish it off, some amusing tidbits from the post.:
Words you don’t want to use online

I never knew studying finance in Switzerland is that hot.

You may have to register to read these articles but it’s free.

A nice piece on the infamous censors of the [tag]Chinese internet[/tag], found and translated by Zonaeuropa.

The[tag] job description[/tag] of a [tag]chinese[/tag] internet police woman can be summed up like this:

The principal work of the ([tag]China[/tag]) Internet police is to look around the [tag]Internet[/tag] to catch criminals. They monitor the Internet bars (to check whether there ar no underaged users), they look for [tag]pornographic[/tag], reactionary and other harmful material on the Internet and they solve [tag]Internet crimes[/tag] based upon the clues (This last one gives confidence.. .)

It ain’t as thrilling as the [tag]reporter[/tag] expected.

The reporter kept hoping to find some problems during the work. In the end, the reporter felt that the letters on the computer monitor screen were dancing in the eyes and could not be seen clearly. Still, no problems had been found. Ma Xiaoting told the reporter that the Internet police search for harmful information at least four hours a day. She comforted the reporter: “Usually, we don’t find anything all day. If we find problems every day, then the crime level on the Internet is too much.”

They hardly find anything.. they are still in a learning curve I guess and let’s hope they stay there until the next century.

For the whole story: Zonaeuropa

A very funny [tag]cartoon[/tag] made by Mark Fiore about the big three [tag]American[/tag] tech companies in [tag]China[/tag].

Click here

(found through threadwatch.org)

[tag]Google[/tag] does no evil. It doesn’t want to comply with the [tag]American Justice[/tag] Department to hand over a couple of weeks of searches. Let’s show the world we have principles, let’s show our users that we really value their privacy and we only use it for ourselves.

But that’s the US. [tag]China[/tag] is a different story.

“In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on [tag]Google.cn[/tag] in response to local law, regulation or policy,” Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s senior policy counsel, said in a statement.

Yes, we do no evil, we comply with local laws voluntarily after we realized that money is the most important thing for us and principles are there for corporate show.

I understand that for doing business in China one has to conform. The thing that ticks me of the most is that the same company that blocks certain information at the same time pretends to have better ethics than the rest.

In a way, by openly admitting they have chosen this way, this seems to be the right moment to ditch that archaic slogan of “Do no evil” and replace it with “Do more money”.

At least that is honest and everyone can understand.

Source: Reuters

Added: It seems that part of the strategy of GG is to make it hard to access the gmail.com version in China, it’s ridiculously slow.

I wanted to check the website of [tag]Pudong Airport[/tag]. That [tag]Chinese[/tag] [tag]High-tech[/tag], Scientific and International example of progress in [tag]China[/tag].

If you search on [tag]Google[/tag] for [tag]shanghai airport[/tag] it’s the number one result.

Clicking on that result ends up on a white page. Nothing, nada, zilch for at least the last 2 days. Do they actually give a shit there are people looking for information about flights that arrive and take-off in [tag]Shanghai[/tag].

I like people with smart ideas. Although they make me envious as I wish I had come up with them myself, I like the creativity of them a lot. Some time ago, September 2005, a guy from the [tag]UK[/tag] started a website selling 1 million pixels. [tag]One dollar[/tag] a [tag]pixel[/tag] and he has achieved his goal and became a millionair. Many copycats tried/try the same but none of them will be as succesful as the original concept.

I just ran into a website that has put another twist to this concept. Not a copycat but an original follow-up to the concept. It’s called 1000tags.com and instead of pixels it is selling tags, a hip name for keywords. You can buy them and if you write about the website you can get listed for your preferred tag for free. Great link-bait. Give away something for free and the fool (me) will gladly go for it.

So how is all this [tag]markting[/tag] blurb related to chinasnippets, you may wonder. Well, nothing and a bit. I like the tag [tag]China[/tag] therefore I write this and I may end up getting more visitors to read my mostly poorly written posts:)