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

Just spent 15 minutes of my life deleting one by one 200 lovely comment spam messages. Comment spam, for those of you who have not been exposed to it yet, are comments in the form of very annoying advertising messages. Comments that add nothing besides letting the websurfer now where to go for gambling etc. If only they would compensate me for the trouble by posting a cleverly written advertorial comment or maybe even clicking an add it might be bearable. But just this blatant crap have made me decide to turn off the comment section until I have implemented some serious anti-comment spam filters.

Update: I just counted again as I get an email for every “comment’ that is placed.. 393 is the current result, 393 times clicking “delete”

Nicholas Kristof from the NY Times writes today about “Death by a Thousand Blogs”.

He starts of with “ The Chinese Communist Party survived a brutal civil war with the Nationalists, battles with American forces in Korea and massive pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. But now it may finally have met its match – the Internet. ” and it’s an interesting article.

That said, never underestimate.

Just ran into this website. It’s a webiste where you can get some free
space for blogging an dthe fun thing is that they have categorized the
existing blogs into countries/cities. Just go here and you can read the musings from whoever about whatever city in China

I read about the Google Webaccelerator but didn’t give it too much thought. Mostly what stopped me from using it was the fact that it is one more step in giving up my private dna. Fons of the China Herald blog wrote about the possibilities of the new gadget in relation to the firewall. As the accelerator is in effect a huge proxy it could be helpful to circumvent China’s Great Wall. I installed it and as far as my experiences go it seems the Great Wall has has started to close some gaps. Searching for the words “bbc news” gave me first some errors, as well in Firefox as in IE. Then after restarting I got some Google results on those search terms. Clicking on the BBC news link Firefox gave me the following message.

“The connection was refused when attempting to contact the proxy server you have configured. Please check your proxy settings and try again”

Well, it’s these kind of messages that make me uninstall the software and wait till I get more proof that it either works or that ii is not worth the hassle to use it.

Lately I have run into some other possible smart ways of being blocked, so called “partial web page blocking”. I have the feeling that on certain sites I can read 95 % but some articles are bloody well blocked because they contain some terms that apparently are red flagged. If I know more I will let you know.

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.