About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

Almost missed it this year, were it not for the nice mention by Duncan Riley of Inquisitr in his Blog Day 2008 list.

Blog Day is a meme that seeks to introduce readers to other blogs that they wouldn’t otherwise run into.  Here are my 5 non-China related blogs for Blog Day:

1. Les Explorers - Les Explorers is authored by Claude Benard (on Twitter) who covers the world of travel technology and new trends in travel.  Claude is based in Marseilles, France, but his coverage on Les Explorers is truly global!
2. SheGeeks - The tagline is “Feeding your Social Media and Web Addictions” and that just about describes SheGeeks.  Author Corvida (on Twitter, FriendFeed) is already well known within the social media blogger scene (and now writes for ReadWriteWeb) but probably still not that well known among CNReviews readers.
3. What A Trip - Travel blogger Nancy Brown (on Twitter) is doing some great travel blogging and travel writing at the What A Trip blog.  Her focus is Northern California but she covers Africa to Vanuatu on her blog!  She’s been very supportive my company UpTake’s efforts to provide meta-search for hotels, things-to-do, and other travel products.
4. wardrobe 911 - Are you fashion challenged?  Image consultant Teresa Morisco (on Twitter) has a blog that helps people, mostly women, “solve life’s fashion emergencies.” Disclosure: I have no equity interest in wardrobe 911 but I have paid Teresa to clean out my wardrobe and go shopping with me! Can’t tell? Imagine what I looked like before!
5. Art Observed - We recently wrote about the artwork at the new Beijing US Embassy and was linked to from Art Observed.  I don’t know the bloggers but checked out the blog and saw an inviting glimpse of the contemporary art world that I seldom see.  I hope to see more on my upcoming trip to New York.

Well there you have it.  You can find out more about the Blog Day meme here. (Technorati tag: BlogDay2008)

Off-topic post alert (but what is really on-topic for CNReviews these days heh)

I’m at WordCamp SF today, and just saw a presentation by Stephen Spencer, founder and CEO of Netconcepts. I think he is one of the best SEOs in the business, take my word for it! He addresses issues like: internal link structure, title tags, URLs, anchor text, RSS feeds. Since some of our CNReviews readers are also bloggers I thought I’d have your permission to share these SEO best practices. If you are not a blogger, sorry for the distraction, and feel free to just move right along to the next post, or go to our Olympic Games online streaming guide and watch the Olympics! Confession: CNReviews is doing better at SEO than defining editorial focus, so much of this advice will go unheeded on our own blog as focus on defining where we want to go editorially.

Stephen Spencer at WordCamp 2008 San Francisco

Biggest Wordpress SEO Mistakes

Stephen first summarized the top mistakes that bloggers make:

1. Leaving title tags to be auto-generated by WordPress default installation (from the post name)
2. Wasting “crawl equity” or “link juice” by letting pages get indexed that don’t deserve to be. This means that it more pages indexed isn’t better than less pages indexed.
3. Creating duplicate crawlable content for Google by having multiple “homes” for your blog (e.g. this can come about due to migrating your blog, canonicalization e.g. www vs no www, etc.).
4. Not using unique “Optional Excerpt” to minimize duplicate content (didn’t understand this)
5. Not using rel=nofollow to do PageRank “sculpting” (although its not always clear when to nofollow)
6. Date-based archives can be a bad way to organize content for Google
7. Flakiness/diversity of keywords on your category/tag pages
8. Suboptimal URLs (too long, too many words, too many directories), and this can affect clickthrough at Google
9. Just having one RSS feed, and not optimizing your feeds.
10. Hosting blog/feed URLs on a domain you don’t own (e.g. Feedburner, Wordpress.com) In any case, its a bad idea because of the Net Nanny in China.
11. Internal linking with the wrong or suboptimal anchor text

Stephen then went into key fixes. Note that the details are in his presentation (link below) and in a well written post on SearchEngineLand (link below). These are my quick live-blogging notes:

1. Rejig internal linking structure through:

Stephen started with low hanging fruit–just optimizing your internal link structure so that you create the right themes, highlight your best posts, and get ranked on what you want to rank on.

• tag clouds and tag conjunction pages (e.g. UTW Theme Compatibility Thing plugin)
• Related posts (e.g. “Yet another related posts” plugin)
• Top 10 posts (e.g. “Popularity contest” pluigin)

Gave several example of using popular posts, tag cloud, technorati tags, related posts to optimize for internal linking structure.

2. Optimize Title Tags:

Stephen also talked about the most powerful SEO factor: the title tag. He also has a plug-in that he created to make it easy to modify (and even mass-edit) title-tags, H1-tags, and post-slugs. Here are his quick tips:

• Move blog name toward the end of the title
• Tag name should go in title on a tag page
• Customize with additional keywords for display only on our home page
• Override title tags with custome one (”SEO Title Tag” plugin)

Stephen Spencer created this “SEO Title Tag” plugin to customize title tags. There is also a mass-edit admin feature to the plugin. He recommends a “thin slicing” approach to making quick decisions on title tags, just use your judgement. Mass-edit admin allows you to quickly modify all the title tags of your old posts!

3. Optimize URLs

Stephen also allows recommends updating post slugs to make it short. Long URLs don’t get clicked on! This is a concern for us at CNReviews because our current URL structure is really long, mostly because we set it up to be equal to the post-title, something that now we know is ok but not optimal!

4. Optimize Anchor Text

Stephens next tip: For advanced SEO addicts, you can go chase down your inbound links and ask people to change their anchor text to you. For example if people are linking to you with the term “post” or “here” you can ask them to change the anchor text to something you want to rank on, like “Beijing Olympics.” Frankly, this seems like overkill to me.

• Make the post’s title a link to the permalink pages
• Use SEOMoz backlink anchor text tool or BLA (Seobook) to look for opportunities to revise anchor text with friendly link sources.

5. “Sculpt” Your PageRank using nofollow

Stephen then talked about PageRank “sculpting.” Stephen: “My preference is to have rel=nofollow…

• links in trackbacks, comments
• link would be reciprocal (not sure why this is)
• links to date-based archives, assuming you have category/tag hierarchy (noindexing/disallowing is not enough)

We currently follow but noindex category pages, and same with tag pages. Not sure if this is the right decision but we were concerned about duplicate content when we did this.

6. Minimize Duplicate Content

I personally think this is something that every blogger should be paranoid about. Stephen provides some tips about this:

• Code your Main Index template to display “Optional Excerpts” on everything but permalink pages
• For each post, write unique content (i.e. paraphrase) don’t just use the first couple paragraphs (i.e. don’t use the <!–more–> tag!)
• Meta robots noindex & rel=nofollow are your friends. Do this for date-based archives, “OR” tag conjunction pages, printer-friendly versions.

7. Improve the Keyword Focus

Interesting comments from Stephen about increasing the keyword focus on your category and tag pages. This is an interesting area that CN Reviews should look at in the future.

• Heading tags
• Emphasis tags within posts (bold, strong, etc.)
• “Sticky” posts - always appear at the top of the page. A way to add keyword-rich intro copy to a category page or tag page
• e.g. “WP-Sticky” or “Adhesive” plugin

8. Optimize Your RSS Feeds

His big point was to create multiple RSS feeds so your readers will subscribe. This is not really an SEO tip except that more readers will lead to more links. There are other tips that I didn’t fully capture because I haven’t really done any RSS feed optimization before.

• Use category RSS feeds
• Use full text, not summaries
• select 20+ items not just 10
• More in the presentation (below)

OK, so we at CN Reviews have a lot of work to do. But frankly we’ll probably just keep a lot of this advice in the back of our mind and focus on what our editorial focus should be for the future.

Resources:

Stephen provides all this information in presentation below.

Get goodies by emailing seo (at) netconcepts … com

Contact the author: stephan (at) netconcepts … com

Get the full presentation here: http://www.netconcepts.com/learn/seo-mistakes.ppt

Read summary article here: http://searchengineland.com/070823-082758.php

I have been following Yeeyan (译言) - a community for people to translate articles in foreign languages (mostly English) into Chinese language volunteerly, since Aug. 2006 when it was called “言多必得”. I personally like the old name which means”you will certainly get something if you express more”. It is form a Chinese idiom “言多必失” means the opposite: you will certain leak some secretes if you keep talking. The current name is more straightforward: “translation” and “language“.

In a presentation by Zhang Lei(张雷), one of Yeeyan’s founders in CnBloggerCon 2007 in Beijing, Zhang Lei compared the online resources about “Breast Cancer” in Chinese (乳腺癌) and English. In the example of Sohu Health Channel, there are less than 30 articles about the general knowledge and treatment. But in a single website of http://www.breastcancer.org/, there are more than 8,000 pages. Statistics show that 1/7 of women will suffer from breast cancer in the world.

• Baidu: 乳腺癌: 8,210,000
• Google: breast cancer :38,800,000

According to Lei, the huge gap of quality contents between Chinese language and English was one of the motivation that Ding Ding (丁丁), Zhao Jiamin(赵嘉敏) and himself found Yeeyan. These three founders from Silicon Valley saw the opportunity in “High Quality Chinese Contents” on the web with the inspiration to encourage Chinese to “discovery, translate and read the best of the Web“.

Yeeyan is a bridge of KNOWLEDGE in Chinese and other languages. I found 140 results about “earthquake” (地震) on Yeeyan 9 days after the earthquake, and more than 100 translators joined a translation group. These articles include the reports by western medias (such as CNN, Newsweek, BBC, etc), knowledge about earthquake forecast, rescue, disease prevention. For example, one translator finished <Epidemics after Natural Disasters> by World Health Organization 4 day after the earthquake. Webtizens have helped to spread the word about these great resources on what to do scientifically after the disaster. (see here, here, here and here)

Zhang Lei even contacted Dr.Barbera Joseph from George Washington University and consulted him about crisis and disaster management. Here is the abstract of his post on Yeeyan blog:

请译言的读者、译者、合作伙伴、媒体广为转载本文！
今天，我与美国乔治华盛顿大学灾难、危机、风险管理学院（ICDRM）主任约瑟夫·巴贝拉博士（Barbera, Joseph）通了电话，听取了他对 四川地震紧急应对状况的看法。巴贝拉博士提出下述几点呼吁：
*第一：目前最关键的问题，是救援的决策者**决定**何时停止**对被掩埋者的搜救工作。* 巴贝拉博士紧急呼吁，*搜救工作至少应坚持到震后14天！*他提供了这样一份研究报告：《地震垮塌房屋受困幸存者时间与存活分析》（译言正在紧急翻译)…

Thank you! Yeeyan and all volunteers who have built a bridge in knowledge in face of such crisis.

I have also Interview Zhang Lei on phone about two weeks’ ago. Here is what I learned from him about the team, product and plan.

Q: Why did you and your other two founders get this idea?

Lei: We are very interested in translation. And when we are able to read some many great and fresh contents online, we want to share them with more people in China.We were the first translators of Yeeyan.

Q: What’s your background?

Lei: I am a Tsinghua 96 alum. After I got my Master Degree on Operation Research (OR) in US I worked for Oracle in Silicon valley. Yeeyan is not my first start-up. We tried to launch fantansy sports product during 2006World Cup. As you know, it is very common that first startup fails. Yeeyan is our second baby.

Q: Could you briefly share with us the milestones Yeeyan has achieved today?

Lei:

Jul 2006: 言多必得 found; it was a platform for volunteer translators to publish articles.

Dec 2006: Yeeyan launched. It is a more open platform with more support for translation. For example, users can copy and paste the original contents into an editor, and can run machine translator before editing. Users can tag the article and join different group,such as business, literature, current issues.

Mar. 2007: Yee Pro Beta launched. It is a wikimedia platform also translators to work together for larger projects.

Q: Why do you want to turn Yeeyan into a wiki? Isn’t wiki difficult to use for most users?

Lei: We believe in the social collaboration(SC), and wiki is a great tool for SC. In the past year, we have learned that translation is addictive. It is also very time consuming. In a wiki platform, we will enable more users to work together for big projects. We want more volunteers to join us, even though they don’t have time to finish a long article, but just editing a paragraph whenever possible. A wiki platform creates the possibility.

Wikipedia is successful. I have written a very detailed guide on how to use wiki on editing. I don’t think the technical aspect is a problem.

Q: What’s the status after you launched Beta?

Lei: There are 4 completed projects (including “Long Tail” which has been completed before) and 14 on going projects. It is pretty amazing.

Q: What are the difficulties you have in the past 18 months?

Lei: In Chinese websphere, except of Baidu Zhidao(百度知道), there are not many communities generating high quality contents. Good news is that we don’t need to translate ourselves now. lol. The community is generating 30+ pieces a day. The one big challenge we are facing is that we don’t know much big the UGC market is in China/Chinese.

Q: I know you have quite some Techcrunch translations. What are the most popular contents ?

Lei: A lot. Yes, technology, entrepreneur, business, these are what we ourselves are interested in. Arts and literatuer, current issues are also very popular. Curently, we have 5000+ articles contributed by 1500+ active translators.

Q: How do you guarantee the quality of the translating works? What about copy right issue？

Lei: We have a feature called “眉批”, a sticky note like feature with which readers can always comment on the translating for correction or improvement or whatever. Readers can also rate the work.

We think a published piece of content online is meant to be distributed and shared, especially blog posts. We encourage translators to inform the authors before publishing. And we will take down the contents if the authors disaprove. So far, we get permission from some prominent bloggers such as Guy Kawasaki, Fred Wilson (A VC)and haven’t received any ”complaints” from the authors.

Q: What about your other team members? Are you full time?
Lei: The other two founders are Ding Ding (丁丁) and Zhao Jiamin (赵嘉敏). At early stage, we three did technology, product and marketing together. Now, Ding Ding is more focusing on product, Jiamin is on contents/editing and I am repsonsible for media and marketing. Jiamin and I are full time for Yeeyan. Jianmin is now in Beijing leading a team.

Q: Are you in need for any financial funding?

Lei: We are talking very closely with a few VCs.

-End

More coverages of Yeeyan from the web and media:

• YeeYan Translates Blogs Posts Into Chinese - ReadWriteWeb
• A window to the world (China Daily)
• web2.0时代背景下的网络翻译与创业 (Chinese)
• Interview of Zhao Jiamin (Life Weekly,三联周刊) (Chinese)

The current projects on Yee Pro.

A Yeeyan fans meet-up in Beijing early this year.

The China Business Network (TCBN) is sponsoring an invite-only cocktail party this Friday May 23 at the JWMarriott (北京JW万豪酒店, Beijing JW wàn háo jiǔdiàn) in Beijing. CNReviews is also a co-sponsor of the event. Space is limited to 150 people. If you want an invite, see the bottom of the post.

Originally the event centered around tech and VC attendees of the Asian Venture Capital Journal Conference and the CHINICT Conference in Beijing this week. But after the Sichuan earthquake, Christine Lu, Founder of The China Business Network decided to donate all proceeds to earthquake relief. From Christine:

The Library Project has created a program, “Project: Earthquake Relief”, to help rebuild the educational system that was affected as a result of the earthquake. It is projected that hundreds of elementary schools have been damaged in the Sichuan and Shaanxi Provinces. The Library (more…)

Being an UpTake (formerly a Kango) for more than 400 days, I am proud to share with you that UpTake officially opens its Beta doors to everyone TODAY! Uptake is ”

a new vacation search site that has amassed the travel industry’s largest database of hotels and attractions (more than 400,000 in US) and analyzed more than 20 million online opinions from other travelers.

In the age that the “wisdom of crowds” are generated faster than ever, Uptake offers to collect and filter word-of-mouth from the web to make vacation planning easier. UpTake also got press at ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, SemanticWeb, SearchEngineLand, Les Explorers and the UpTake blog itself. It is only for United States for now. But Winser Zhao of SinoHotelReservation also wrote about us.
To describe the Uptake services using the geek’s vocabulary, it: uses a travel ontology and natural language analysis to extract meta-tags from the collective intelligence it has collected and returns unbiased, personalized recommendations based on travelers’ facts and feelings.” So how much do you understand from this description? Uptake is a global company with an R&D team in Beijing and Moscow. Based in Shanghai, I have been focusing on web marketing and analytics, and work closely with a web developer in Indonesia. Here are some learning from working in for a global company in China.

Beijing vs. Shanghai?

There are many theories and researches on infrastructure, culture, cost structure etc. to decide where to build an offshore R&D center. But I like the way a Shanghai-based Rob McCormick of Mustang Ventures says to “go back to your hometown” (to build your team if you have to outsource). You see, two core technical team members in UpTake are originally from Beijing. In reality, Shanghai doesn’t have a “Silicon Valley” while Beijing has Zhongguanchun. And people (around me) all agree that Shanghai doesn’t have as good as Beijing of an “academic environment” for research & development. So Beijing is better.

But don’t people in “Silicon Valley” Zhongguanchun “jump trough” (跳槽, job-hopping) a lot?

Recruitment site (zhaopin.com) paid two celebrities Xu Jinglei (徐静蕾) and Huang Jianxiang (黄健翔) to “advocate” people to “jump trough” on TV, subway and newspaper. And with the new Labor Contract Law, it is more costly for a company to lose employees especially after getting them trained. An ongoing trend is that a company would try to “dig” (挖) talents from competitors by offering 1.x salary. So, people in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing are all as equally likely to engage in job-hopping.

I have heard executives in China saying Chinese employees would leave the jobs for very small increasing of salary. But from my observation, more and more people are thinking from a “career path” standpoint rather than “cash”. So the trick to keep employees is to understand what they value most in their career plan. For example, international training, travel and working experience are very important to my peers.

RMB (China Yuan) is appreciating v.s. US dollar, will it still be cost efficient?

Elliott has been watching this issue (see his posts on RMB appreciation) for a while. RMB has appreciated around 9% since May 2007. China is facing possible inflation in 2008 or 2009. April 2008 CPI increased 8.5% (near decade-high level). Shanghai Labor Protection Office (上海劳动保障局) issued a guide on “increasing employees salary” saying “enterprise can increase employees’ salaries 11% in 2008″ in late April. I don’t know how this guideline will affect the salary. But people are expecting to “get a raise” if the price of rices, vegetable oil and pork are keep going up like this.

In addition, Dan Harris from China Law Blog said that “Increased enforcement by Chinese regulators of means that compliance is more important than before”. One major compliance is employee social insurance and allowance. It is important to count these ”hidden” operations costs when budgeting. The regulation on this varies from city to city. In Shanghai, an enterprise pays less for a people who don’t have Shanghai Hukou (户口), but in Beijing, the Hukou doesn’t effect the cost. Be prepared to pay 40% of 5k monthly salary, or 20% -15% of monthly salary 10k- 50k (percentages are rough estimations). I guest I don’t have an answer for this question.

Culture Difference?

In a professional working environment, culture differences highlighted in David’s Mind the Gap posts are less influential than in daily life. Another difference I learned from Shanghai expat Kai Pan is that Chinese like to hang out with friends in a small KTV room (Elliott has very valuable advice on KTV team building), but westerners like to hang out and meet random people in a big room (such as a bar). But if the offshore team are engaging with oversea customers or consumer-oriental products, they need to get trained on the customers’ culture. For example, Uptakers in China are probably the top 99.5% people who are familiar with US geography in this country.

That’s my humble takes on working in an offshore team of a global company in China. What’s your learning of working in China?

Again. welcome to Uptake to plan your next vacation! (Sorry, U.S. hotels and attractions only.)

Occassionally, CnR is approached by individuals and companies with various business propositions and opportunities that may be of interest to our readers. We cannot, however, make any guarantees and, as with any business activity, interested parties are advised to do their own due diligence. If you have a business opportunity you would like to promote on CnR, please e-mail the details here.

Each year, 20-50 million metric tonnes of “electronic waste” (eWaste) are discarded by businesses and consumers worldwide. An eWaste recycling company in Guangzhou, China wants to source large quantities of eWaste (old computers, electronics, household appliances, etc.) from outside China to be shipped over to China for processing and recycling.

They’re looking for people who are familiar with and/or reside in their respective home countries that can help them locate and purchase such stockpiles of electronic waste from municipal, regional, national, public, or private electronic waste collection centers, junkyards, etc.

Your level of involvement depends on you.

Upon finding such stockpiles, you would initially be responsible for gathering and communicating information to ascertain and negotiate the value of the waste with the company. You can then choose to either invest in purchasing the waste yourself from the source and resell it to the company for a profit OR you can negotiate a finder’s fee and the company will send their own people out to deal directly with the source.

The company currently purchases its waste from a Chinese waste importer and would prefer to import the waste themselves directly from abroad.

Should you be interested and would like to be put in touch with the company’s representative, please contact me directly here.

Zhang Liming (张黎明) from Beijing Morning Post (北京晨报) has a report titled as “Tencent learned from Korean Model to Hire a 3000-people Human Flesh Search Army” (腾讯参照韩国模式招三千人肉搜索军团) on April. 10, 2008 on Sina Tech. The author learned the news from industry insiders and quoted quite some comments from CEO Huateng Ma (马化腾) of Tencent Inc.- the largest and most used Internet service portal in China with annual revenue of $520 MM in 2007, about this big bet action. Here is the summarized translation of the report.

Tencent Inc. (QQ.com) is building a 3,000-person search result editor team. The employees will be/are hired as engineers but in fact, their job nature is to edit search results of its search engine called SOSO (搜搜, means “search search” in Chinese) soso.com (which was launched in Dec. 2005).

CEO Huateng Ma (马化腾) didn’t comment on the size of the editor team directly, but compared with the practice in Korean search engine industry: “a 700-person search result editor team in Korea is very common.”

Ma continued to explain why “it is common”: “for example, 20 users might search one same key term, and what they need might be the same information in two paragraphs. But nobody locks the two paragraphs (on the top of search result thus enables a more efficient search for majority of users). So actually people want editing of search results.”

“Tencent is experimenting with ‘human+search’ model. In domestic market, Baidu Zhidao (百度知道) is a similar model, but its editor team is not strong enough.”

When continuing to compare SOSO with other human-powered search engines in Korea, Ma admitted that “one key reason that Korean local search engines beat Google and Yahoo to win the local market is that there are relatively less pages in Korean Internet (for Google and Yahoo to crawl). So I don’t know if human-powered search engine will be successful or not in China. I have a question mark for this model. But Tencent has a portal (qq.com), the edited search results are valuable to the portal anyway (so it worth a try).”

Other posts about Tencent (QQ.com) and SoSo here:

• Techcrunch: Soso.com partnered with Google
• Kaiser Kuo from Ogilvyy Digital Watch: Coin of the Realm, revisited
• Paul M. Denlinger from China Vortex: Understanding China’s Youth Through Tencent’s QQ: A New Must-Read Report

UPDATE Elliott: 4/14 made minor edits

Caught this GOOD Magazine feature by Thomas P.M. Barnett via China Law Blog and felt violently compelled to share this with as many people as possible. Sure, it doesn’t cover everything, but it should be a required reading for a basic foundation of non-idiocy for everyone (especially Americans) when it comes to understanding the relevance and importance of China. 

Put down your rifle (no offense, Mr. Heston), pick out another cold one, and get your read on:

10. Because Nixon went to China and your world was born.

9. Because China may be an ancient civilization, but it’s a young society that’s growing up very quickly-and unevenly.

8. Because China’s transformation echoes much of America’s past: not only the good, but plenty of the bad, and the ugly too.

7. Because China’s rapid and deep integration into manufacturing means that Chinese products permeate your life-at some risk.

6. Because China’s demand for resources is altering global markets in ways both profound and perverse.

5. Because the panda “huggers” versus “sluggers” debate is a lot of hot air-until Washington scares Beijing into raising your mortgage interest rate five points overnight.

4. Because as China builds out its infrastructure, it can set a good or a bad example to developing economies struggling to deal with fragile environments.

3. Because China is globalization’s general contractor: always happy to take the job and your money, but hard to get on the phone once you discover problems.

2. Because China will not be our biggest future enemy but our most important ally.

1. Because we’re less than five years from a new generation of Chinese leaders with whom a far stronger relationship may well be built.

I’m particularly amused that the list ends with something that could be construed as a point of hope.  

UPDATE: Part 2 of 2 posts on China Proxy Server Tips. Part 1 by Min Guo is here.

I hate to make a second post for this but given that I cannot simply edit my additions into Min’s post, I decided I’d have to throw up another post for the benefit of readers like Sue who are having trouble with the Great FireWall (GFW).

Note: In order for Min’s Option II to work, you’d have to be able to get the RSS feed link, which can be hard if you can’t get to the blog in the first place. Of course, you can have a friend get it for you, but that requires you discovering the blog first. Moreover, certain feeds burned through Feedburner have difficulty getting into China, which is why you’ll see some blogs using Feedsky, a Chinese equivalent to Feedburner.

Option III: Anonymouse.org

Probably one of the more famous casual proxies, Anonymouse has the added benefit of being available in German and English. Well, that’s actually pretty unimportant, but I guess the Germans never know when Germany is going to block popular Chinese portal sites like sina.com. Using Anonymouse is about as simple as inputing the URL address for the website you wish to visit. In return for their service, they’ll pop up a window and overlay an ad on the targeted webpage (both of which you can close easily). Anonymouse isn’t hardcore enough to get through everything, but it works most of the time.

Option IV: T0r Pr0j3ct (note: l33t used to mask sensitive keywords)

I’ll quote Black and White Cat for Option IV and V:

Since the block is a strong one and Youtube has also been harmonized, now is perhaps the time to mention two of the serious proxies that get through to everything, including BBC news video, can handle Youtube and enable you to watch Google videos.

1) The first is maddeningly slow (though one enthusiast assures me it works quickly on his computer) but you need it if you want to download the faster second option. Tor works in Firefox. Once you’ve installed the program on your computer, you will see a red notice at the bottom right of your brower saying “Tor Disabled.” To turn the proxy on, click once on that notice and it will turn into a green “Tor Enabled.” You can now read or watch anything you want, but slowly. Tor also offers high-quality anonymity and privacy, but only if you read, understand and act on the instructions. For most of us that is not necessary since we simply want to get past the blocks.

Option V: Ult——h (sensitive keyword)

2) The second, faster option only works in Internet Explorer. I’m not going to name it in full because it is blocked at the keyword level in China. I’ll refer to it here as U. If you want it, it’s the first result for this search (look for the word Download on the U page). Don’t even bother Googling it on the mainland unless you are using a powerful proxy like T0r. Unlike T0r, U is an executable file that you save onto your computer, but do not have to install. If you decide you do not want it anymore, delete the file. As with option #1, you can read anything or watch anything, though it often messes up Youtube - if that happens, close down IE and U and try again.

If you choose Option V, you should be aware that it is a creation of FLG and financed by the US government. Bear that in mind when deciding whether you want it on any particular computer. Both these proxies function only in one browser. So if you use Tor in Firefox, you can carry on browsing in Internet Explorer while you are waiting for the page/file to download.

There you have it.

Anyone have any opinions about all these methods? BTW, please be discreet about using sensitive keywords in comments so CNReviews doesn’t get harmonized! It is already slow enough as it is in China. — Elliott

Note: Contributing Editor David Feng will be posting a more detailed follow up post on the 1st Beijing TweetMeet, coming soon to CN Reviews.

Anyone who pooh-poohs the social impact on Twitter should be put on notice by the two Twitter Firsts that happened last night.

Twitter History: First Marriage Proposal

Mashable just broke some news that we may have witnessed the first wedding proposal over Twitter from @maxkiesler (website) to @emilychang (eHub).

His proposal: To @emilychang - After fifteen years of blissful happiness I would like to ask for your hand in marriage? 03:13 AM March 20, 2008 from web

Her response: @maxkiesler - yes, i do! 03:14 AM March 20, 2008 from web in reply to maxkiesler

Congratulations to both @emilychang and @maxkiesler!

Another Twitter First: Beijing TweetMeet

I discovered this Twitter first through another Twitter first: The 1st Beijing TweetMeet, held Friday 3/21/2008! My friend and fellow CN Reviews blogger @DavidFeng posted the link to Mashable and that’s how I discovered this, even though Mashable is on my Google Reader.

The more complete TweetStream is below, but here is @DavidFeng’s take:

This is the first-ever Tweetup in Beijing. Ladies and gents, you are witnessing Twit-stery (Twitter history). ….

For those of you who have never been at a Tweetup, the whole thing feels surreal. People are literally GLUED to their laptops, tweeting!…

We are twittering like mad. We are actually thinking if the server is about to go down chez Twitter ‘cos of the Beijing TweetMeet!…

Question: How did Twitter generate such emotional attachment from its users, so that people would meet up to Tweet together and that other people would get engaged over Twitter?

Just one month ago, I didn’t “get” Twitter. Now I see it in MMORPG terms.

Just 1 month ago, I “didn’t get” twitter and thought of it solely as microblogging. But the fact that a small group of Twitter fanatics met at the Beijing Bookworm (Building 4, Sanlitun South Road near Gongti North Road in Chaoyang District of Beijing) this Fri evening to Tweet to each other highlights how Twitter can be much more than a blogging platform. It can become a nexus of personal relationships and social exchange that makes it similar to Social Networks like Facebook or MMORPGs like World of Warcraft.

To non bloggers and non Twitterers (Tweeters? Twits?), microblogging and blogging can seem like information exchange and a process of social discovery of information. But in fact, it is not just that…it is space and place for social exchange. Microblogging far underestimates the power of Twitter. In fact, Twitter is a specialized form of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) but one in which the “role” is tightly bound to your real identity (in most cases).

Amy Jo Kim of Shufflebrain has a brilliant exposition of game dynamics. As an expert in game design, she identifies 5 factors that make games addictive. Here’s how I think it applies to Twitter:

• Collecting - # of followers, # of “friends” that you follow
• Points - # of updates or tweets
• Feedback - people follow you back! And you get an email with an exclamation point! It’s flattering when @JasonCalacanis is following me on Twitter! (before I followed him)
• Implicit Exchanges - Implicit exchange represents the positive feedback you receive as you “follow” more people and see more of who they are through their tweets. You implicitly exchange with your followers when you tweet and share what’s going on with you.
• Explicit Exchanges - Direct messages are explicit exchanges. But @twitteruser messages directed to someone else but visible to everyone’s followers, is also an explicit exchange recognized by the entire community. You are on stage, in the commons, sharing your life with everyone in the village commons.
• Character Customization - Yes you can reskin your Twitter profile page. But more importantly, you can customize your character and your persona by modifying the composition and mix of your Tweets.
• Interface Customization - Web? IM? Gtalk? Twitbin? Tweetbar? Twitterfox? Twirl? Twitterific? Directory here at the Twitter Fan Wiki. Enuf said.

If you are not already familiar with her work, you must go flip through her Game Developer Conference 2007 slides available at her website. Her blog is here.

And now back to the Tweet-by-tweet coverage of the Beijing TweetMeet

I don’t know all the people at the Beijing TweetMeet. But from the TweetStream of @DavidFeng, this is what I captured (in reverse chronological order):

• @sioksiok OK, OK… You will see me with TWO laptops next time! about 1 hour ago from web in reply to sioksiok
• OK, that was my MacBook. Now tweeting on my iPod touch… about 1 hour ago from web
• OK guys, my MacBook’s battery dies in 5 minutes. No sweat - that’s why I’ve the iPod touch!… about 1 hour ago from web
• @davidavdavid The Beijing Bookworm, we are 8 strong live… about 2 hours ago from web in reply to davidavdavid
• @webleon You want my iPod touch to tweet with? Sheetake, I should have brought my PowerBook G4 17-inch along!… about 2 hours ago from web in reply to webleon
• I think I can easily hit that magical 2,500 mark in terms of updates this weekend. Unless an Act of God happens in the Twitter world… about 2 hours ago from web
• @BlogAndGrow QQ = China’s biggest IM service. This thing is MASSIVE. about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to BlogAndGrow
• @BlogAndGlow I think so! about 2 hours ago from twitterrific
  OK guys I am floating this proposal around - a KTV fest for all Beijing Twitterers. Tweet back if you’re in for this! about 2 hours ago from web
• @BlogAndGlow Welcome to read Chinglish. about 2 hours ago from twitterrific
• @elliottng OK, how many Web 2.0 services are you on?… about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to elliottng Icon_star_empty
  This is scary: QQ + Twitter + CN = http://www.taotao.com/ about 2 hours ago from web
• Tweeting AND eating… a David Feng tradition… now shared with all fellow Twitter-ers… about 2 hours ago from web
  Late dinner - Spaghetti for me… ricey-kind of stuff chez
• @sioksiok… about 2 hours ago from web Icon_star_empty
  OK ???: ??????… http://fanfou.com/DavidFeng about 2 hours ago from web
• @isaac @thecarol ????! about 2 hours ago from web in reply to isaac
• @sioksiok ?, There are no secrets in the Twitter world… about 2 hours ago from web in reply to sioksiok
• @kaiserkuo One of your fans (and Twitter-ers) greets you. Musically… (hint hint) about 2 hours ago from web in reply to kaiserkuo
• @thecarol NOW we are ready for you! TweetMeet ?? featuring… about 2 hours ago from web in reply to thecarol
• @elliottng Zhichunli ;-P about 2 hours ago from web in reply to elliottng
• @WebLeOn about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to webleon
• @elliottng THIS is the hair that I’m — well, after for better or worse… about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to elliottng
  I just got a haircut, so if you’re seeing me look a bit funny, that’s… the hair. about 2 hours ago from twitterrific
• @thecarol @webleon No sweat! ???! (We all make mistakes…) about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to thecarol
• @WebLeOn @thecarol They probably mean @DavidFeng about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to webleon
• @WebLeOn @carol They probably mean @DavidFeng about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to webleon
• @isaac Greetings from us from Beijing. You in Shanghai right now? about 2 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to isaac
• OK folks, first pics from the Beijing TweetMeet reality: http://www.flickr.com/photo… about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Salve* @chengfen (* Latin greetings) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• This is the first-ever Tweetup in Beijing. Ladies and gents, you are witnessing Twit-stery (Twitter history). about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• I think everyone’s Twitter list at the meetup just went that bit more stratospheric. The ISS is next in terms of altitude. about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Allegra* @zhengle (* Rhaeto-Rumansh greeting) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Cute baby pics at the Tweetup! about 3 hours ago from web
  With horror, fellow Twitter-ers at the Tweetup discover that yours truly speaks 10 languages. Gasp! about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• We are talking about Swiss nationality at the TweetMeet since I’m a Swiss national with Chinese ethnicity… about 3 hours ago from web
• We are twittering like mad. We are actually thinking if the server is about to go down chez Twitter ‘cos of the Beijing TweetMeet!… about 3 hours ago from web
• Bonsoir* @webleon (* French greetings) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Buonasera* @nickcheng (* Italian greetings) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• For those of you who have never been at a Tweetup, the whole thing feels surreal. People are literally GLUED to their laptops, tweeting! about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Link for tonight: AllTop: http://twitter.alltop.com/ about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• (Guess who is the 1/2 Mac / PC user…) about 3 hours ago from web
• 4.5 PC people, 2.5 Mac people. This is an INSULT for the Mac citizenry, having a BeiMac meet just tomorrow! LOL about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• (Bad keyboard!) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
  Grüezi* @PhilipJohnson8 (* Swiss-German greetings) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Grüezi* @PhiipJohnson8 (* Swiss-German greetings) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• @sioksiok and @davidfeng hosting the first Beijing Tweetup… enjoy about 3 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to sioksiok
• OK Ladies and Gents! Live Tweetcast! Live Tweetcast! Beijing Tweetup! Live Tweetcast! about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
  3 more people with the fellow Twitter-ers in Beijing. about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Venue: The Bookworm, Nansanlitun Road. See: http://www.beijingbookworm…. about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• People are getting married via Twitter! http://tinyurl.com/36tcys about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Bilingual tweetup, English and Chinese about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• Grüezi* @JoMangee (* Swiss-German greeting) about 3 hours ago from twitterrific
• I am seated at the long table at the front entrance. about 4 hours ago from twitterrific
• Am at Bookworm… @sioksiok and others? about 4 hours ago from twitterrific
• Heading to the Bookworm. God pray for no traffic jams! about 4 hours ago from twitterrific
• Äh… Twitter meetup… silly me… about 4 hours ago from web
  Facebook meetup in about 35 minutes. Will be on the road soon for the big meet-up. about 4 hours ago

If you read carefully, @DavidFeng is threatening to combine his two addictions: Twitter and KTV! I will have to come out to Beijing for that combination. I will have to break out my Wang Qing Shui (忘情水) rendition for that event.

So Twitter, the MMORPG, has kept me from my day job at Kango of helping people plan family vacations to San Diego, Santa Barbara family hotels, and other such places. OK, David Feng will follow up with a full report once he recovers from a long night of Tweeting and networking with other Twitterers.