About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

Not enough on the previous go?  I thought so, but hey, writing a million-word post is probably not the best thing out there. The average attention span for the average human being is more along the lines of — something like two minutes.

And that’s why we need to start chopping things into chunks.

Now on with the show… a look at the rest of the year 2008… (or what we’ve had so far…)

A Freer Internet With Less Walls

You know the funniest stuff about the whole Internet thing in China as the Olympics drew close? We started hear less and less from the Great Firewall!

太阳从西边升起… (tai yang cong xi bian sheng qi; Chinese for “And the Sun will rise from the West”) …this was, in essence, the mood on the Chinese Internet. Auntie Beeb news — wall gone.

The blocks were soon lifted on the Chinese Wikipedia, ET Today (from ETTV Media Taiwan), and even on the — get this — Kuomintang’s website! All of a sudden, the blocks were gone.

But not in full. Falun Gong-related sites were still blocked. And websites that were shut down in mainland China domestically were gone from the public eye. But for a lot of us, the unblocking of the BBC and the Chinese Wikipedia were already big things. (They still remain unblocked to this very day as we write this.)

#080808: @flypig & Co Start A Classic

Nothing is more of a classic — or was more of a classic — than the #080808 invention just before the Beijing Olympics. While it was a bit too “obvious” that @flypig came up with the invention, others did come up with the very number as well, and thus to call @flypig the “sole inventor” is surely a tad on the unfair side.

The Chinese Twittersphere went completely crazy with #080808. #080808 found itself in many a tweet and, indeed, in many a Twitter icon. If “Chinese reunification” were to be attempted, #080808 would be the first unifier, as tweeters from both side of the Taiwan Straits went mad #080808-ing.

@flypig and Co’s invention were good enough to land themselves airtime in the New York Times. This is the Chinese Twittersphere in full force, and what a job they did.

Post-Olympics & Paralympics, What’s Next?

So the Games came and went. What’s next at the Olympics and Paralympics end? Here’s a more recent recap of what’s big on the Chinese Twittersphere:

• Chrome: When Google Chrome came out, the Chinese Twittersphere almost immediately reacted. Some of us went crazy downloading Chrome (while those on Macs presumably had to sit out and wait). Views were mixed — however, one of the more un-good piece of news was that Chrome for China was still unavailable (it was pretty much a case of an English-language-only case of the browser).

• New Twitter interface: @flypig famously remarked that this was nothing too new — “I’m convinced the new Twitter interface is merely a case of changing the soup, not changing the medicine.” On a more personal note, yours truly is just getting used to the fact that tabs are on the right — you see, almost everything he uses has tabs on the top.

• Sanlu: Sanlu got itself a whole load of trouble when its milk got tainted with poison. The Chinese Twittersphere took Sanlu to task, and when it was heard that all (or nearly all) Chinese milk producers were hit, talks of boycotts and “don’t-buy-Sanlu” rhetoric were all the rage. Jokes about Sanlu were also part of the fever. Finally, news proclaming Sanyuan’s takeover of the now-tainted Sanlu prompted calls to boycott Sanyuan, hitherto the only “clean” brand.

Closing Notes from @DavidFeng: Watch the Balance

Being a mass tweeter, I often spend too much time in Twitter — it’s only as of late that I’m moving back to my blog Raccolta Online, which served like a propaganda ghost town prior to the mass personal blogging beginning earlier this month.

I’m also appearing on Facebook more and more frequently. Those are good moves. Web 2.0 should not only be about Twitter and/or Facebook. There should be more to this.

Watch the balance is my word of the day. By all means, tweet like mad — but if you’re just having accounts on Facebook and other Web 2.0 sites “for the heck of it”, you’re missing out on a lot.

You may have noticed a recent reduction in my otherwise uncontrollable tweeting. Think of it this way: after dumping a huge chunk of butter on the bread, I’m finally spreading it thin throughout the whole thing. Facebook… blogs… it’s good to do multi Web 2.0 sites.

Just maybe not too much…