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

All day I have been trying to order my blog. The idea is that I will
have categories added, so my trivial posts will have a second chance
besides the archives. Unfortunately the solution hasn’t come yet so
till then I blog on with only the eternal archives as a reference. The
future will hopefully bring some solutions.

What is the purpose of my blog? It’s a question I have been asking
myself lately. Do I want to share all my personal trivial snippets with
the rest of the world. No, not really. Do I want to be become a leading
commentary on events in China. Again, not really. I like to
notice and share what’s going on in this part of the world but I don’t
intend to rant. And why am I exposing others now to my internal
thinking process. Basically, because writing it down instead of letting
it go round and round in my head, it hopefully helps me to get things
clearer. A good blog needs self discipline I notice. Not innate to me
but I can learn. At least one post a day. A good blog needs focused
content and within reason be original. A good blog needs to be about my
own interest. My interests are news, especially articles that one way
or another show the absurdity of reality, information in general and
observing my surroundings. Has this writing helped. I wonder. A bit,
and it’s at least a post.

Nothing about China nor Shanghai, just something funny if you think about it. I just ran into a thread about a guy selling some leftovers (hosting clients) from the days he had a hosting company. He put them up for auction on Ebay and he describes them as clients who “will likely stick for long with whoever takes them.” It made me think about some leftover puppies and made me also realize I might be auctioned away one day. By the way, the auction is over. See also Selling 44 webhosting clients.

A lot has been written about the apparent blocking of google news. The China Herald pointed out that it might be that:

“The internet filters have caused a damaging slowdown on the internet traffic in general and perhaps by closing some of the generators of potentially sensitive traffic that bottleneck is temporarily ‘solved’.”

His assumption might be right. During the day I noticed it’s hard to get into the news part, late in the evening there is no problem.

But besides the nuisance of not being able to read the news through Google, an additional pitfall is the fact that at times Adsense also seems to be affected during the day. As a consequence the likelihood of making any advertizing money is frustrated by the fact that filters obstruct normal online business. For a blog like this adsense is more like an add-on but the number of websites that (partly) generate money through advertizing is numerous. China is always boasting to be IT ready and has ambitions to at least take some business from India and elsewhere. Filtering and slowing down the internet is a sine qua non to achieve the opposite.

For some hours I got the feeling adsense was blocked.

I had a friend check out the site in Thailand and there everything worked out fine. Now adsense is back again but somehow this worries me. Not because of the huge amounts of income I am missing, as there is no huge anyway.

Even more because this would imply that it might be that the great firewall tries to control advertizing as well. Next to that internet is as slow as a snail in Shanghai. Sad to see that the top biz city in China can’t guarantee a stable network.

In the Pudong Starbucks on the bank of the river you have a great view on the ships sailing by and amazingly it’s quiet and peaceful. For 12 Yuan you have a coffee of the day and if you have to go to the loo just tell the waitress. She will give you a small piece of paper, cut out of a magazine it seems. Without a blink the WC-guy will accept it. You can of course also bring your own scissors and magazine.

I place some more text..

Not in the mood to make it too brilliant so we are just doing it like this.

By the way, one really good link for Dutch people for finding information about Shanghai is:http://shanghai.startkabel.nl