It’s been a last time since I’ve blogged. In an effort to cut down on the verbiage and make it easy to update I’m going to make this easy by just posting links to some weird/funny/astounding/useful/unmissable sites.

After a comment on the previous webcomic blog I just had to add a few more webcomics which I had come across which have eaten away many hours:

I’d like to apologize now for your loss of productivity.

Must….. Find…… Time….. To…… Do….. Shit……
Post…….Something…On….Blog

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything but I just wanted to share some incredibly interesting things I have found through Digg lately:

Bam Kapow is a website devoted to everything comicbook, superhero and fighting game-related. On the news side it covers a lot of info about what’s going on in the superhero movie industry business (who’s been spotted where, what movies are upcomming etc etc)

The part I enjoy the most perhaps is the fan art material, mashup of two very different movies (like the Pulp Fiction meets 1960’s Batman effort) or these ones below:

The Joker Doing Hamlet

A Stop-Action Movie Of The Best Superhero/Supervillan Showdown Ever

If you’ve been on Digg for five minutes, hell if you’ve been around the internet twice you’ll know what Cracked is. It’s filled with those highly addictive lists and videos on popular culture topics like music and it will suck up a day faster than you can say “ooh I wonder what they put in that list”.

How would you define yourself…. would you say you’re a digital native or a digital immigrant?

The always ‘reliable’ but easily accessible source, Wikipedia has pointed to a collaboration between Harvard’s research group, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen which hopes to understand and support children as they grow up in the digital age. The digital natives wiki is unsurprisingly heavy on Web 2.0 technology.

According to this group (via Wikipedia) in the digital world of today there are two different types of people… the digital immigrants and digital natives. Right now their definition of both is:

Digital Native

“A person who has grown up with digital technology such as computers, the Internet, mobile phones and MP3.”Source

Digital Immigrant

“An individual who grew up without digital technology and adopted it later…Digital immigrants are said to have a “thick accent” when operating in the digital world in distinctly pre-digital ways, when, for instance, he might “dial” someone on the telephone to ask if his e-mail was received.”Source

It’s an interesting project which you can contribute to through Facebook, Twitter or any number of Web 2.0 services.

A couple of tools which the natives are probably using right now (there’s at least one new immigrant using them) are Ubiquity, Launchy and Remember The Milk.

• Launchy
  An open source keystroke program organiser that will eliminate a lot of the time you waste searching through pull-down menus and folders for the exact file/program you want.(Just be sure to add all the necessary paths (like c:\programs) to the catalog and there’s a time-out at any time just do a right-click and select the ‘rebuild catalog’ option)
• Ubiquity
  Ubiquity is a bit like Launchy on angel dust, works in a similar way but does so much more. Ubiquity is a Firefox plug in which allows you to highlight text, translate, change languages in a web page, put pictures and maps into emails and so much more. To say Ubiquity is lush is a serious understatement. Some people have gone as far as to call it “Web 3.0″ even though it’s still in the alpha stage. I’ve put in a video if you don’t believe me….
  Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
• Remember The Milk
  While Remember The Milk is not nearly as mind-blowing as Ubiquity it is definitely handy. It’s a reminder function that plugs into almost anything including GMail, Google Calender, Google Maps, Twitter, Blackberries, iPhones and mobile phones running off Windows Mobile software. The developers have even put the API up for grabs so that people much much smarter than me can set it up for other devices and applications.

About a month ago I covered the emergence of the 50 cent brigade, now known in China as the 5 mao brigade.

In true international print media fashion it seems now the Asia Times has discovered this army in a fairly comprehensive article

There you go, it’s almost as bad as Reuters coverage of the Olympic routing Chinese businesses were getting, but not quite.

Would the person who doesn’t know who Paris Hilton is please raise your hand….

Ever since Paris Hilton broke onto the scene in 1990 as a model in Donald Trump’s agency (who’s well known for such quality pieces of entertainment like ‘The Apprentice’) she’s been the ‘darling’ of the news media.

They like to talk about her they like to show pictures and movie clips of her and do anything but hear her talk

That level of attention has got to have some form of effect… it did, it caught the attention of the spam merchants.

The results is a cornucopia of linkbait titles that are a joy of juxtaposition. I’d like to share the visual experience with you:

For your viewing pleasure, McCain Picks Paris Hilton As Running Mate

Sometimes looking for independent and personal views of what’s happening in China can be difficult. Here are some blogs that are a must read that I’ve stumbled across:

Lost Laowai: A Beijing based blog which has several writers. It also has a forum for those interested in commenting and writers tend to focus on the social cultural and political aspect of living in China.

China Smack: A blog which focuses on all the funny, gross, scary and sexy stuff that goes on in the China blogosphere. So far some of the things featured in the blog include a boy caught masturbating underneath a girl’s dormitory, a woman who killed a kitten with her high heels and a couple of lesbians caught fooling around on the Shanghai subway late one night. The blog includes translations of what Chinese netizens are saying on forum sites about the various things that are featured on the blog.

Danwei’s favorite English-language blogs for 2008: Danwei, once discovered is very much the grand old dame of blogs in China, it has been around since 2002 and now it’s creators have their fingers in a lot of pies including Sexy Beijing TV amongst other things.

Every year they put together a list of their favorite blogs on China which they source from and enjoy reading. This is the English list for 2008 and this is the Chinese list.

Thomas Crampton: The blog from a freelance reporter based in Hong Kong who frequently travels to mainland China. He first broke the news of China’s 50 cent bloggers which I covered in a previous blog.

Asia Sentinel:Asia Sentinel is more of an online magazine than a blog but it’s a good place to go if you want to catch up with what’s going on in South East Asia. Each of the countries have their own separate page and the site’s owners usually have a correspondent in each of the countries.

Chination Report: A blog written by a Chinese student who’s currently studying abroad.

All Roads Lead To China: Yet another blog with a forum attached. It’s focused more on business than the blogs listed above it.

The China Sourcing Blog: Another business based blog covering sourcing and logistics (funnily enough). That doesn’t stop it from breaking some very interesting stories though.

The Yuan Also Rises: Yet another China business blog. This blog is not updated nearly as frequently as the others on the list.

Who knew so few words needed so much code

Do you know the problem with web comics?

They’re too bloody good.

Now I’ve got that out of my system it is partly true… my new folly is web comics, damn them damn their hides.

Here are a list that are sure to get you hooked, put a curve into your spine and make us loose the war. now if anyone needs me I’ll be over in the corner playing with Rippy the razor.

WARNING:
These web comics are highly addictive and should not be approached if you have no free time.

• Ctrl Alt Del
• ‘D.M Of The Rings’
• Darths and Droids
• Penny Arcade
• Something Positive

Attention, both of the two people (if I’m lucky) who read this blog Australian Amnesty needs your help:

If you’ve spent any time in China then you’ll know all about the great firewall and how it effects online life in China and people doing research on events in China etc (blocked websites, treacle-slow Internet speeds, removed content etc etc).

Amnesty is trying to bring down the firewall, a Herculean task any way you look at it (I think I’d rather kill the hydra or clean the stables then take on the great wall) by letting the world know what’s up and what’s down.

They’re asking for help, so anyone entering China can help by clicking on the button below:

Talk of the ‘Fuwa curse’ has already got any site mentioning the words fuwa and curse together in Chinese banned in China but not much has been done about the ‘uncultured foreign posts’ (which also includes this delightful cartoon from Beijing blogger peacefulrise.

A couple of Photoshop mistakes made, and picked up by the official print propaganda machine news source Xinhua (and shown off by the Shanghaiist) have also managed to miss the cut so far.

It’s been a while since I’ve added anything but things have been hectic

Anyway I’m going to try out a little something which I’m hoping to make a regular thing…turning spam into poetry

The very oblique nature of spam means good spam has something of an poetic nature and in the vein of Chef Brian from the web comic Ctrl Alt Del I give you….

THE SPAMNIK(It’s like Chef Brian with less drawings and more bongos)

Monkey Appreciation Day

The public appreciate monkeys–our poor cousins
What sexual differences are there in monkeys? Have you kept them tame?

Want to be ready for sexxx in a six sec
Cunning, or natural penetration, it is the equinoctials unwarrantable liberty for us to change a word in the world
This is the eternal eye accepted the words ’so be it!
In minding not to have peace, there is growth

Cause the opera to end in disaster
Rich dared a cut in a tree, which made the people fly on all sides.
Two men grinned and dragged the agent of Piranhas
Men cantered from the palace courtyard and turned

As i choose in this house
And was married such things as blue primroses and blue geraniums

Please feel free to send me any interesting spam you get and I’ll add it to my file

Does anyone remember earlier this year, round about the time the Olympic Torch started doing the rounds, when the world seemed to be divided into three camps:

1. Bloggers who were pro-China and anti the rest of the world (particularly Budhists, cruncy hippies and anybody from France)
2. Bloggers who were pro-Tibet and anti China(who strangely enough were cruncy hippies and not adverse to buying Tibetan flags from factories in Shenzhen)
3. Everybody else wondering what the hell was going on.

While the Chinese education system is a thing of wonder when it comes to ‘educating’ children on the ‘correct’ point of view and the propaganda power of the Chinese media in full force is a wonderful thing to behold the truth of the matter is that the propaganda department has taken a step up in the digital age.

Not content with just building the most effective firewall out there (No, you crunchy hippies, Google had nothing to do with it, in fact the firewall is one of the reasons that Baidu has done so well in the battle of the search engines)

But I digress. The reason for this blog is to share the development of the 50 cent army.




No, I’m not talking about 50 cent’s Chinese fanbase but a growing mercenary army (made up of off-duty journalists and other desk jockeys, students and anybody else with a connection to a computer) who are paid 5 mao (the RMB version of 50 cents) per post to ‘direct’ comments the correct way inside of China.

Thanks to Danwei there’s a couple of posts. Here’s the first and here’s the second.

Kinda explains a few things doesn’t it.

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