Watching China

Kris, my co-worker at Bryght, and Robert are back in China as part of China Access 2008. Be sure to look at Kris' photos as well as Robert's, which they are posting to the China Access 2008 pool on Flickr. They helped organize BarCamp Shanghai (see also barcampshanghai.org for the attendees list and sessions). They (wisely) crossposted announcements at Bryght, Raincity Studios, and Daily Vancouver's 2010 Olympic coverage (Kris, among others, post stories and announcements related to their Torino 2006, Beijing 2008 and Vancouver 2010 adventures to that site). I'm looking forward to the photos and ideas that come from BarCamp Shanghai, which I won't be attending. Maybe I'll go to the second one, though, or possibly when Beijing technology buffs organize one for the capital.

A quick shoutout to Micah Sittig, who's weblog I had been reading for a while now, and who is listed as a BarCamp Shanghai organizer. He posted some great photos from China's first wiki conference, so I look forward to his documenting the event as well.

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There will be a bloggercon in Shanghai on Nov. 5-6. Check out the site at: http://blog.cnblog.org/bloggercon/archives/2005/07/call_for_propos.html They are currently accepting proposals for discussion. Sorry for not knowing html for the link!!!

Rogers Candenhead points to People's Daily RSS feeds, and notes a Wikipedia page on the state-run newspaper. I'm syndicating all of the news feeds (and some of the people specific feeds) on a newly-created People's Daily aggregator. It's pretty cool that they have RSS feeds for individual leaders, but nothing for the influential leaders who retired in the past few years, like Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji. Both the last two links are to Watching China aggregator pages for references in the news and weblogs to both former leaders, so it would have been nice to have an official Chinese government RSS feed of the two. There is a feed for Hu Jintao, which I've added to the already existing aggregator for him.

Call this a LazyWeb request: I'm looking for Chinese-language podcasts, specifically Mandarin. A personal goal for the next year is to improve my Mandarin skills back to the level they were in 2002, when I stopped studying the language formally. Part of the reason I'm not studying is the lack of a good intermediate-level text for learning the language in Vancouver book stores. Also part of the reason is I have nobody to speak the language with or even really anybody to hear speak it. If there's someone who's doing lessons or a daily useful phrase or conversation in podcast format, I'd love to hear about it.

Just a little info on what podcasting's all about: it's recording a show, edited or not, on to a computer then posting it to a weblog, with an RSS feed of the location of the MP3 file, so that it goes directly to a pile of files to listen to (sometimes it can go from Internet to computer to a portable listening device without user intervention). In the future, I'd like to be good enough that I'm posting my own podcasts in Mandarin to Watching China. I'm nervous about hearing my own voice, and nervous about being recorded in almost every way, but hey, how better to overcome one's fears than to face them head-on?

So I'm really looking for two things:

• recommendations for intermediate-level texts on learning the language, preferably not written and published in Beijing. Yup, I'm biased against textbooks produced in the country where the language is the mother tongue. Go figure. The requirements are that they use pinyin and simplified characters, and that, on a more subjective level, it emphasizes grammer and is clearly-written and comprehensive.
• people who are producing podcasts in Mandarin. It doesn't have to be intermediate-level: just an excuse for me to listen to someone talk in Chinese for 10-20 minutes about whatever they're thinking. If it's good enough, I'll break down and buy an iPod. I've been resisting because I don't want to become one of those people who walks around in a daze all day because they're listening to music. But, I realized, I walk around in a daze without headphones on, so why not listen to a language I have a little background in?

Ingrid Marson is reporting that China is amongst the leaders in creating an IPv6 network:

China's National Development Reform Commission has set aside 1.4bn yuan ($169 million) to support six next-generation Internet networks, according to People's Daily , China's main daily newspaper. Half of it will be used on projects linked to the university network, with the remaining money given to five telecom operators.

China is not the only Asian country with a strong interest in IPv6. Japan has already implemented an IPv6 production network, which is used by every service provider in the country. South Korea is working with the EU to develop applications and services using IPv6.China launches largest IPv6 network

Tyler Hamilton comments on the article:

This is just another example of how China is going to be setting the pace of economic growth and technological innovation in the coming years. Its fast and relentless economic growth is allowing it to quickly leapfrog the United States in a number of areas, be it next-generation wireless networks (3G, Wi-Fi Mesh, etc.), Internet technology (IPv6) or energy production systems (nuclear, fuel cells, wind/solar).All China all the time

Xiao Qian writes an interesting article on the history of Chinese bloggers and blogging within the country, which covers quite a bit of ground, including the origins and suppression of politically sensitive weblogs. There's also coverage of China's most famous sex weblog:

With explicit details and sometimes even publishing real names, Mu Zimei’s sex diary was a hit. By mid-November 2003, more than 160,000 people had logged on to her site and the number was growing by 6000 a day. While her explicit writing and lifestyle challenged traditional morals, causing heated debate in the Chinese media, Mu Zimei also made bo ke a familiar word for hundreds of millions of people.The 'blog' revolution sweeps across China

It also discusses something I was not aware of: the Chinese authorities closed down a site that used collaborative filtering (i.e. its readers were the moderators, voting up what they felt was the good stuff), and even discussion of the event was suppressed.

I like Isaac Mao's attitude towards blogging in China--that it's not what you blog about that matters, but that you blog--although it is probably dictated by political necessity. I also like the coverage the article gives to moblogging--that is, blogging using mobile devices such as cell phones. Moblogging promisses to be a big part of the blogging phenomenon, because it means people can take photos and post them within minutes, and events within China may first appear on a site like Flickr before it hits the press.

When I first saw the one Chinese idiom a day site, which features the pinyin, traditional and simplified characters, along with an English translation, my first thought was "is there an RSS feed?". I looked at the archives of the site, and because I'm an expert in Movable Type, I recognized the URL structure as being produced by the CMS. Since MT has a default place where it places its RSS and Atom feeds, I typed in the URLs and was pleasantly surprised to see that there is indeed an RSS feed and an Atom feed.

I am syndicating the site here, and will write up a tutorial on how to include daily idioms on your own site using a PHP library. The tutorial will be similar to syndicating del.icio.us links, though I will modify it for content and for the audience.

Rajesh Jain links to a subscribers-only Barron's article on what Chinese telecoms can do to compete against the Personal Handyphone Service, described as "limited-range wireless service at a fraction of the cost of cellular":

To compete against PHS, China's mobile operators need a technology that's cheaper than cellular. Urban Wi-Fi networks would allow them to offer voice and Internet services at a comparable price to PHS, says Colin Macnab, the marketing vice president of Atheros. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Atheros has competed successfully against Intel and Texas Instruments with chips that are cheaper, yet more powerful. With a reception range of more than 800 meters, Atheros Wi-Fi chips can reach twice the distance of competing products. Wi-Fi makers are also adding power management features, to conserve battery life in devices like a handheld phone. So Wi-Fi voice technology has attracted the attention of China's phone firms, Macnab suggests.