RConversation

links for 2007-12-29

• CNNIC Releases 2007 Survey Report on China Weblog Market Number of Blog Writers Reaches 47 million Equaling One Fourth of Total Netizens
  "by the end of Nov. 2007, the number of blog spaces has reached 72.82 million in China, and with 47 million blog writers, it is reaching one fourth of the total netizens. This indicates the rapid growth of the blog market in China. "
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch blogs blogging media internet)
• Dog Owner Takes On China's Web Censors - washingtonpost.com
  "some of China's educated elite may be growing impatient with a one-party authoritarian system in which anonymous bureaucrats decide what movies, plays, novels or social commentaries are safe enough for public consumption."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch censorship law blogs blogging cnwebwatch)

links for 2007-12-20

• Official Google Blog: New privacy tips video series
  (tags: google privacy search youtube e-mail picasa photos education newmedia i&s)

Hong Kong's first Barcamp - a great success!

Hong Kong's web community is full of some really fabulous, energetic people. The first ever Barcamp Hong Kong on Saturday left no doubt about that! Ryanne (the photo above is from her camera) sums it up:

i found myself surrounded by people in firefox, linux and all kinds of web 2.0 shirts; people handing out moo cards, showing off their flickr/cc stickers, giving interactive sessions on ajax, facebook, open social, desktop apps, digital printing, web service scalability...whatever you can think of. free coffee, cookies, chips and sandwiches were provided. it's surprising to see so many talented and generous people in HK who came here to share their love. or just to learn...like why i was there.

Daisy estimates there were probably just under 100 people:

It seems to me that almost 40% were developers, 30% were from business organizations (project manager, start up owner), 10% were from NGOs and 20% were unknown (maybe bloggers just like me?). This is just my wide guess, I am sure that someone could give me a better answer.

In terms of nationality, 70% were HongKongers and 30% were Foreigner. However there must be Singaporean because I heard the accent. Language used during the presentations were English while I heard that offline discussions were mostly in Cantonese.

In keeping with the global Barcamp tradition, Saturday's meeting was run as an "unconference": No pre-organized panels or keynotes or invited lectures. First thing in the morning, participants are greeted by a whiteboard indicating timeslots and rooms. Anybody who wants to lead a discussion or give an impromptu presentation writes their subject on a post-it note and sticks it on the board. Similar topics are combined and consolidated, then away we go. With the mix of people we had, the result was a really nice mix of technical sessions, sessions about business, and more philosophical discussions.

I learned a lot from many people about the web startup scene in Hong Kong, the mobile web, online communities, search engine optimization, and many other things. But like most conferences the most important part was getting to know a great group of people, sitting around talking in the halls and sharing all kinds of ideas.

Since the meeting was hosted by Yahoo! Hong Kong, I felt compelled to lead a discussion on "user rights," the lessons all of us should learn from the Shi Tao case, and how should the web community constructively proceed if we care about protecting users' rights to privacy and free expression? (For the record the local Yahoo! folk were good sports about it.) It was exciting to see how many people came to the session and showed that they care about building responsible web businesses. There was an especially thought provoking discussion about where to host user data. One person said you should just host all user data in the U.S. so that governments like the Chinese government can't get at it. Others questioned whether this is a cop out for local businesses especially: shouldn't local companies push to maintain and defend spaces where the rights of users can be protected in their home jurisdictions? Don't they owe that to their users? There was also the question of whether users from here or anywhere else can really count on the U.S. government in the long run anyway - or any government for that matter if nobody is pushing back. Several people who work in web startups said they would really like to see common guidelines developed for the industry about how to deal with governments that pressure them to control user speech or make unreasonable user data demands. We also raised the need to do a better job at informing the public about how e-mail and user content-sharing services work, and with whom their data is shared. Several people said they hope to see more discussions like this in the Hong Kong web community. In response to that interest, I set up a follow-on wiki page here where you can find out more and sign up on a "Hong Kong user rights" google group. 

Interested in getting involved with Hong Kong's next Barcamp, or in learning more about what happened on Saturday? Check out the BarCamp HongKong wiki page and Facebook Group.

Also, for anybody who may be interested, I'll be presenting a paper titled "Yahoo!, Shi Tao, and the Lessons for Corporate Social Responsibility" on Tuesday at the International Conference on Technology and Social Responsibility being held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I will put the paper online when it's ready for public viewing.

 

(photo by Daisy Fung)

links for 2007-12-11

• » Wikia looking to topple Google, but will fail miserably | Googling Google | ZDNet.com
  "Perhaps Wikia will die before it even lives?" Ouch.
  (tags: google search wikia)
• Guardian Unlimited - Group urges US challenge Chinese censorship at WTO
  "A California free speech group whose board of directors includes Google and Yahoo said on Monday it had asked U.S. trade officials to challenge China's Internet restrictions as a violation of global trade rules."
  (tags: china wto chineseinternetresearch censorship freespeech internet business)

links for 2007-12-10

• BBC NEWS | Special Reports | World views on free press mixed
  "World opinion is divided on the importance of having a free press, according to a poll conducted for the BBC World Service."
  (tags: journalism freespeech)
• Pulling the Strings of China’s Internet -- December 2007
  David Bandurski on the Beijing Association for Online Media: "today it is clear that BAOM has become an active agent of the Chinese government’s initiatives to stifle discussion of political issues."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet censorship freespeech cnwebwatch)
• Enemies at The Firewall - TIME
  "Though the evidence remains mostly circumstantial, a picture is emerging of a coordinated effort by Chinese-military authorities to recruit hackers...to winkle out information from computer systems outside China and launch cyberattacks in future conflict
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet cyberwarfare hackers military espionage)
• EastSouthWestNorth: Daily Brief Comments December 1-10, 2007
  Yazhou Zhoukan via Roland: "Beijing's assessment of the November 18 district council elections is that the people of Hong Kong have gone through a material change in their thinking in that they do not want to see the Hong Kong political figures opposing t
  (tags: hongkong politics democracy elections)

links for 2007-12-08

• Six Techniques to Get More from the Web than Google Will Tell You
  "you miss opportunities to get valuable insights into IT topics if you rely only on search engines alone"
  (tags: search google newmedia education teaching)

links for 2007-12-07

• House vote on illegal images sweeps in Wi-Fi, Web sites | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.com
  "It's not entirely clear that the House Democratic leadership really meant this legislation to slap new restrictions on hundreds of thousands of Americans and small businesses who offer public wireless connections...."
  (tags: wifi wireless surveillance freespeech privacy porn politics u.s.a censorship law SAFE)
• Google Code Blog: Embed charts in webpages with one of our simplest APIs yet
  Google Chart API looks like a great new thing for web journalists!
  (tags: google tools design howto newmedia education)

"Nailhouse blogger" detained & interrogated, web crackdown on "ant farmer" story continues...

Zhou Shuguang, aka "Zola," reports that he is home safe in Changsha after being detained in Shenyang, interrogated, made to write detailed reports on everybody he met and everything since arriving in Shenyang to blog about the Yilishen "ant-farmer" protests, had his ID and money confiscated (correction: the ID was retunred), punched around the head and neck a little when he objected to being forced to return by air (and pay for his own ticket) rather than travel by train, and then escorted by two state security police on the plane back to Changsha. He has been told not to go far, that they hope he will focus on his vegetable-selling business, and to report to the local police if he needs to go anywhere. 

Also known as the "nailhouse blogger," Zhou has been celebrated in the media and around the blogosphere since he led the effort by bloggers to cover the story of a couple resisting eviction by real-estate developers in Chongqing despite government efforts to stop media coverage of the issue.  Since then he has come under fire for accepting money to blog about other people's eviction problems, among other things. He has also blogged from the anti-chemical plant demonstrations in Xiamen last March and even from the July 1st pro-democracy rally in Hong Kong.  At the Chinese Blogger Conference last month in Beijing, he declared his intention to stop blogging and return to his home in Changsha, and to his old job as a vegetable-seller. But its hard to stop once you get the blogging bug. As the Shenyang ant-farmer protests began to heat up in late November, and as a media blackout quickly followed, his fans urged him to go investigate what was going on up there. So he bought himself a hard seat train ticket to Shenyang and arranged to meet up with a local blogger on the other end.

Zhou arrived in Shenyang last Friday November 30th, and managed to publish two blog posts (here and here) before he was detained on December 3rd. Upon returning home he sent a message out on Twitter that he was ok, but that Twitter account appears to have been taken down. Zhou wrote an extremely detailed blog post about his entire trip and detention/interrogation experience. I hope somebody will translate it in full. In addition to going through his computer, cellphone, and other equipment and getting a full record of everybody he had been communicating with, security agents wanted to know his motivations for going to Shenyang to blog about a sensitive issue. Zhou said he had two motives: curiosity about a sensitive topic in the news, and desire to sell advertising. The cops also wanted an explanation about a blog post Zhou wrote at the beginning of the year titled "Against the communist party, against one-party dictatorship."  (Zhou's blog is hosted outside of China, because his original blog hosted inside of China was subject to censorship.)  The security agents in Shenyang kept him up all night - with a few short nap breaks - questioning him and making him write his reports and confessions. He describes in great detail what they gave him to eat and when.

Reading Zhou's detailed account, it's interesting to note what was negotiable and what wasn't as far as the security agents were concerned. They asked him to take down the two blog posts he had published while in Shenyang. He refused - insisting that they had to show him written proof of what laws the posts had violated. They were unable to give him such a document and eventually gave up insisting. As of this writing, those two blog posts still stand. Things got rough at the very end, however, when they said they were going to make him use all his remaining money to pay for his airplane ticket home to Changsha. He protested vigorously, insisting that he could only afford the train. At that point, he describes being punched in the neck a couple of times, and says he removed his glasses for fear they would be broken. He writes that at that point he remembered the case of Sun Zhigang - a young man who was arrested in Guangzhou for not carrying required ID, taken by police to a "custody and repatriation" center where migrants are detained, and ended up dead three days later - and decided not to argue any more.

Zhou's experience is likely to put a damper on the impulses of other Chinese bloggers who may feel inspired to engage in "citizen reporting" on sensitive subjects that the media has been told not to cover.  It comes, of course, in the midst of a crackdown on independent publications.

Censorship of Chinese blog-hosting services continues to tighten. Late last week the Chinese-language meta-blog Memedia got blocked. Authors think it's because of this post which includes a paragraph about the Yilishen ant farm protests. So last weekend I copied that paragraph and re-posted it on a bunch of different Chinese blog-hosting services. All the services run by domestic Chinese Web2.0 companies censored it in one way or another. Below are two examples.

When I copied the Memedia paragraph about Yilishen into a Tianya blog, it would not allow me to post, giving me an error message that said: "Your post contains sensitive words, please check it." (Click image at right to enlarge.)

One of the other services I tested was Sohu. (Click image at left to enlarge.) I was initially able to post the paragraph, but after about an hour, it disappeared from public view. Then when I went into the admin area to check whether it was still there, I found the post had been locked with an error message that begins: "Dear Sohu blogger-friend: Hello! We are very sorry to notify you that for certain reasons this blog post of yours is not suitable for open publication and has been locked." Then an explanation that you can still see your original text and pictures by logging in at the back end, and if you have further questions you can contact customer service at the following humber or email, etc.

Only one blog hosting service run by a Chinese company did not censor the post - either immediately or within a few hours. (I am not going to say who they are lest I bring trouble upon them, but they know who they are and they deserve a pat on the back.) None of the foreign-branded blog-hosting services targeted at Chinese users that I tested censored it however. That includes Windows Live, Yahoo China, Tom and MySpace China. It's important to note that Tianya, which censored in the fashion shown above, receives major investment from Google. I will need to do a lot more testing on a wide range of content before making sweeping conclusions about which blog-hosting services enable their Chinese users to speak most freely, and which services are most restrictive. But my initial impression from this test and from other experiments is that in general (with the exception possibly of one Chinese company) the foreign-branded services enable greater lattitude than their Chinese competitors. Will this result in more users migrating to the foreign-branded services? Enough to put pressure on Chinese domestic services to censor less? Hard to know yet. It may also be that politically-minded bloggers are not numerous enough to be commercially significant.

On the search-engine censorshp front, the Chinese word for "Yilishen" is definitely on the banned word list. Here's a search on Baidu (click image at right to enlarge):

...and on Google.cn (click image at left to enlarge).

...and finally, on Chinese Yahoo! (click to enlarge).

links for 2007-12-06

• China Media Project » “Tolerance evaporates”: Editors from two ill-fated journals try in vain to reason with Chinese authorities
  "accusations leveled against the editors by state police cross the border into the bizarre, suggesting Chinese leaders are growing increasingly paranoid about social and political unrest and the role information might have in organizing resistance."
  (tags: china censorship freespeech publishing humanrights chineseinternetresearch journalism)

links for 2007-12-05

• China Media Project » Blog Archive » State Council vice-minister reiterates control as top priority of Internet development in China
  Cai's speech "invoked Hu’s policy of media strengthening, or zuoqiang zuoda (做强做大), which calls for the creation of integrated media groups that are at once commercially powerful and mindful of party propaganda discipline."
  (tags: internet media business china chineseinternetresearch)
• …My heart’s in Accra » Cute Cat Theory: The China Corollary
  "Block access to the Web2.0 tools hosted outside of China and you frustrate activists, who would like to use those tools, but you don’t antagonize the average user, who is probably better served by tools written in Chinese for a Chinese audience."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet web2.0 censorship freespeech humanrights cyber-activism)
• Why China cracked down on my nonprofit | csmonitor.com
  “...President Hu Jintao has promised to create a "harmonious society." This will not be helped by security officials harassing a growing NGO community that embraces many of the country's most thoughtful, able, and caring citizens.“
  (tags: china censorship freespeech humanrights media journalism NGOs development)
• The dictatorship of talent - International Herald Tribune
  “The Communist Party is basically a gigantic Skull and Bones. It is one of the social networks its members use to build wealth together.“
  (tags: china politics elites CCP socialnetworking)
• Hong Kong election victory cheers democrats - International Herald Tribune
  "The result of the weekend election is a fillip to the democratic cause after democratic parties suffered one of their worst defeats at the hands of pro-Beijing parties in local council elections two weeks ago."
  (tags: hongkong politics elections legco)
• WSJ.com - Bloggers In China Start Testing Limits of 'Mental Firewall'
  "Inside China...some of the smartest thinkers about the Internet believe the biggest hurdle to free speech in China isn't technical, it's social."
  (tags: china internet chineseinternetresearch censorship freespeech humanrights)