T-Salon

A wonderful, wonderful initiative by Global Voices at this important time as Americans elects a new president this coming fall that will have tremendous implications in many facets of life from environment, international trade and global economy to world peace. I expect lots of interesting perspectives will emerge out of this new initiative that will make a refreshing read on top of views convey by American media.

Today, Global Voices is launching a new website with Reuters that
opens a window on the global conversation about the 2008 presidential
election in the USA.

It's called Voices Without Votes.



There are few subjects that spark the imagination of bloggers
worldwide - and United States foreign policy is one of them.

Global Voices challenges people to listen to people beyond their own
borders. We translate back and forth from blogospheres in the Middle
East, Asia, Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe in hopes that
people may come to understand and care for one another across borders.

We also encourage international media to talk to and report on the
concerns of ordinary citizens around the world. Hopefully, looking at
US politics more closely through a kaleidoscope of world blogs will be
a compelling and thought-provoking experience. Send us links to blogs
you would like us to link to, including your own.

Our Middle East and North Africa Editor, Amira Al Hussaini is going to
be editing the website with help from other Global Voices editors and
volunteers. Check in regularly at Voices Without Votes until Americans
finally hit the polls and elect a president in November 2008.

Meanwhile, the world is still talking! Are you listening?

Labels: intercultural, internet, politics

Photo by ooof

"Jiwai.de (the "Chinese Twitter") and the big screen dynamic BBS are hits at this meeting." Via blognationChina, who is doing live conference micro-blogging in Twitter.

This is one of the most interesting and surprising thing I find about the conference. The freewheeling spirit in all these public "back channel" chatters adds so much more fun to the conference.

Update: Messages posted on Day 1 are archived here and Day 2 here.
See also Thomas Crampton's Will China Twitter for more about this twitterish-like phenomena at cnbloggercon and in China.

Anyone who is interested in saying a hello or sending a message to the audience viaat the conference can simply do so by adding wo@jiwai.de in GTalk or msn008@jiwai.de in MSN Messenger and then send an instant message jiwai in the following structure: @cbc +[space]+[your message]

Labels: beijing, China, cnbloggercon, conference, internet

img_0339. Bruce and Zola distributing conference proceedings over multiple internet channels.
Originally uploaded by ZhangYining

"I wish I was at Chinese BloggerCon," Robert Scoble wrote.

"Next year I want to do a BloggerCon here at the same time and build a video bridge so we could talk about the same issues. Heck, let’s do it."

I like the idea. Yes, let's try to do this next year and we can have more cross-cultural conversations in two continent over the internet.

Labels: beijing, China, cnbloggercon, conference, internet

This year's Chinese Blogger Conference will take place in Beijing as well as virtually on the internet this coming weekend.

As in previous years, there are a wide variety of topics that would appeal to anyone interested in the latest trends and application of new media in Chinese media, education, business, etc. sectors.

Here are my picks (in no particular order) from this year's conference program:

Zhang Lei's talk on How does Social Collaboration Change the Practice of Translation? (社会协作力量如何改变翻译格局)

Art 1.5: "Digital" Art (艺术1.5:"电子"艺术).

NGOs in the Internet Era: Understanding and Realizing the Impact and
Value of Information Technology / Web 2.0 on Social Work (互联网时代的NGO——了解和实现IT/WEB2.0对于社会性工作的影响和价值)

Grassroots Media and Professional Media (草根媒体与专业媒体)

Micro-blogging and Its Potential (微Blogging和潜力)

Watch this space and space for live transcript which you may also subscribe to for live streaming transcripts and conference tidbits over any major instant messaging services.

Update: Conference transcript (in Chinese) will be broadcast over on IRC channel at irc://chat.freenode.net/#cnbloggercon

See also:
3rd Annual Chinese Blogger Conference - Fact Sheet for a quick overview in English about the conference.
Cnbloggercon on Netvibes to find out the latest photos, conference news, blog posts from the conference.

Labels: bejing, China, cnbloggercon, internet

This is insanity and paranoia to the greatest extreme.

Via Wang Jianshuo:

"The "very important meeting" is going to be held soon. To prepare a "good environment" for the meeting, massive websites in China were shutdown. This time, much different from the previous actions, it is the whole data center instead of websites or servers that were shutdown.

Let me take few famous IDCs (Internet Data Center) as examples. Zitian, an IDC in Luoyang was shutdown completely, and all the 500 servers were unplugged from Internet, and tens of thousands of websites hosted there were inaccessible on Aug 24. Among them is the largest traffic tracking site 51.la, and this infected a very big portion of Internet websites in China.

Soon, on Aug 28, Lanmang, the other IDC in Shantou faced the same situation. Again, tens of thousands of websites were complete inaccessible. An unconfirmed news said the data center closed in Shantou has 3000 servers, and they are all closed. Lanmang has to hire lots of trunks to put all these servers and distribute the servers into many other data centers across China."

[...]

It seems the pressure from top really makes people take it seriously. These days, all kinds of people are busy.

* Telecom companies are busy unplugging Internet cable for data centers one by one.
* Hosting companies that were already shutdown are either busy find out solutions for the closed sites, or handle waves of customer complains, or both.
* Those hosting company or sites which were lucky enough not have been shutdown are busy shutdown "interactive sites" themselves, to avoid the whole data center run into bigger problem.
* Bigger websites are preparing contingency plans about what they will do when they were shutdown.
* All kinds of small site webmasters, or independent bloggers are busy signing up hosting package from abroad (I would be interested to know how many more orders bluehost, dreamhost, or ipowerweb got from China these days)
* Bloggers hosting their blog on BSP can only keep their finger across and pray for their little blog.

[Read the entire post.]

Labels: censorship, China, internet

This is what I have heard from various IM conversations with friends in China tonight: "Chinese authorities have asked internet websites to switch off all social (interactive) functions, including BBS, comment and blogs ahead of the 17th National Party Congress."

Is the plan to turn the Chinese internet into this in the upcoming weeks?

Labels: censorship, China, internet

If you are reading this in China, chances are you won't be able to see this interesting image where Erning says as "The [Flickr] interestingness page becomes more interesting."

That's because Flickr is filtered in China by the "Great Firewall" very likely because many Chinese users have uploaded photos from a recent protest against a poisonously chemical plantin Xiamen.

"Currently, the flickr.com is not blocked but the image repository server(farm1.flickr.com and farm2.flickr.com) [is]. It means the blockage is not whole domain as target, but some subdomains which may be referred most by Chinese blogosphere recently on those "sensitive" contents...Right now, people can still access flickr web site but can't see any pictures there," Isaac noted.

So unless the site blockage is lifted, I am very well losing a very effective channel to share my life and communicate with my friends in China given pictures are better than a thousand words.

Perhaps the saddest part is what Keso wrote:

"In the global Internet, the better the website, the more likely it will get GFWed. This is the sorrow of all Internet users in this country. In the past it has been Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Wordpress.com, Vix.com... Now it's Flick's turn ...... 

I just have one character to tell those bastards: Fuck!"

.

Labels: censorship, China, Flickr, internet