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Sinica podcast: The death of the China blog

The latest Sinica podcast is now live. In this edition, Kaiser Kuo, Danwei editor Jeremy Goldkorn and I discuss the state of English language China blogging. The title and blurb are actually a bit alarmist. Our conclusion is that the sense of community around the China blogs has changed as the main discussions have moved [...]

China’s soft-power push: Where’s the Internet?

A good post from Bill Bishop, aka @niubi, arguably the most indispensable China-Twitterer (who I hope forgives me for pigeonholing him this way). Bill points out that much of the recent discussion of China’s soft power strategy has focused on traditional media, and wonders where the new media strategy is:

There are no domestic [...]

Imagethief movie minute: Wolverines, oil wells and balls of marine brass

For sheer surreality you gotta love Hollywood. And I’m not even talking about the films. Two PR-worthy Hollywood moments to remark upon today. First, the imminent arrival of the needless remake of cold war teen action flick Red Dawn has finally caught the attention of the Chinese press. Western media are reporting that the chest-thumping [...]

PowerPoint rangers and dumb-dumb bullets

It’s a few days old, but I loved this New York Times article about about the problems arising from the use of PowerPoint in military briefing in Afghanistan:

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke [...]

Better video of last month's NewsMorphosis conference

You may recall that I made something of an ill-starred trip to Hawaii last month to speak on a panel at the ThinkTech Hawaii NewsMorphosis event. I had previously posted video of all the panels at the event. Jay Fidell, who organized the event, has posted on Vimeo a video of just the panel I [...]

A handy cheat sheet for interpreting the Google China story

Should Google have been in China? Did they make the right move in pulling out? Will this influence the Chinese government? What does it mean for foreign businesses in China? Are they evil or not? Who knows? Not me. And none of these questions are going to be answered in this post.

But stick with me, [...]

Video from the NewsMorphosis conference

The week before last Imagethief was in Hawaii to participate in the NewsMorphosis panel organized by ThinkTech Hawaii and several other organizations. The last week or so since I got back have been a bit hectic, so I haven’t had a chance to write anything about the conference, or the activities around it.

The whole conference [...]

Free laptops for NPC delegates - it looked good on paper

Update: See David Bandurski’s comment below on the criticism in the media. It is not directed at Lenovo specifically. At least, not yet.

Let’s say you’re a company selling some kind of product. Let’s say your product is –let’s just pick something at random here– laptop computers. Globally, this is a heavily commoditized category jammed with [...]

Communication drives America's "China-scare" meme

There’s an interesting article in the Washington Post from former Beijing bureau chief (and author of the good book Chinese Lessons) John Pomfret and his colleague, Steven Mufson looking at the rising “red scare” meme in the US. The two journalists do their best to inject a needed dose of reality into a heated issue. [...]

Seriously? They blocked IMDB?

Note: This is cross-posted from the old Imagethief blog. The original post is here.

Imagethief is as annoyed by the Great Firewall (or Net Nanny or what-have-you) as anyone who lives in China and uses overseas social networks. One of the great joys of my pox-afflicted Christmas vacation was having one of my annual bursts of [...]