news.imagethief.com

If you don't know the story, you can read up on the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal (and again in the Journal here, with more focus on the backlash for Skype). In a nutshell, the story is that the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which focuses on Internet, free-speech and censorship issues, released evidence that TOM-Skype, the joint ...

Most PR people will tell you that pitching bloggers is a bit different than pitching mainstream journalists (although now that many mainstream journalists have blogs the line is blurring). If you pitch a mainstream journalist badly, say by misjudging his interests or poorly researching his beat and articles, he'll ignore you, or perhaps hang up on ...

Have a read of this post from the Wall Street Journal's China Journal blog on some of the communciation issues Coke is having around its attempted takeover of the Huiyuan juice company in China:More damaging may be the allegations that Coke is trying to silence critics of the deal in China, which were published in this Chinese language article ...

Two or three weeks ago the New Yorker carried a good article by Evan Osnos on the phenomenon of China's ''angry youth'' (fenqing). Much of the article was a profile of one young man in particular. In truth, he sounds more passionate than angry. It's worth reading the whole thing, but there was one section I found particularly interesting:When ...

Imagethief is a registered Democrat. I am such both because I feel it is my civic duty to vote, and because I was hectored relentlessly by a large woman with a clipboard when I went to go visit my old grad school in San Francisco a year and a half ago. Never sign any clipboard being waved by a loud, angry woman. I can't stress that strongly ...

After you swallow a fair dose of the Chinapocalypse coverage that tends to ricochet through western media it can be nice to have a little antidote. John Pomfret, the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post and a long-time China correspondent, has written an opinion piece that attempts to cut through some of the common, alarmist (from a ...

Imagethief was interested to read in the New York Times today an article about the wrangling going on over the  United States Air Force's new monster procurement deal for aerial refueling tankers, one of the biggest defense programs ever. A little back story: There are two consortia bidding for the deal. One is led by perennial American ...

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today on some things that American technology companies are doing in addition to donations to help out with quake relief. Google, Microsoft and IBM are all using their technology in various ways to help out:Acting largely on its own initiative, the mostly China-based Google team built an Internet ...

From a report on attacks on the Green Zone in Baghdad. I remember this term being thrown about by the President earlier in the GWOT, but I hadn't seen it for a while:The violence is a continuation of hostilities between American and Iraqi troops and Shiite militants, labeled ''criminals'' and ''evildoers'' in U.S. military releases. ***  ...

Update: See Shanghaiist's update on this situation. Less serious than it first appeared, although not benign.  A couple of years ago a good friend of Imagethief's was accosted on Gongti Beilu by a drunk Chinese man who was looking to pick a fight with a Japanese person. He must have been drinking the really hard stuff because my friend is a ...