Results tagged “blogger”

Did hell freeze over? Because somebody was actually able to win a censorship case against the Chinese net police... in China! Hu Xingdou, an economics professor who discusses politically sensitive topics on his blog, unsurprisingly had it shut down for “hosting illegal content” by his ISP Beijing Xin Net. Surprisingly, he decided to fight back, suing them in April. Even more surprisingly, a judge in Beijing has now ruled that Beijing Xin Net was wrong to close his blog. The Daxing district court said the company had failed to prove that it had contacted Hu about the “illegal content” before shutting down his little part of the web, and therefore owed him the 1,370RMB fee he had paid for two years of services. Okay, so it's not exactly a victory for free speech, but it's at least a step towards not being shut down willy nilly anymore. Source: Ars Technica

Photos from powerprints, beatdrifter, and David Feng.

So in the meanwhile, Youtube remains blocked. Shanghai blogger John Pasden of Sinosplice informs us that Youtube wasn't the only unlucky fella. Revver.com and Dailymotion.com also appear to be hit. And of course Google Video was never accessible in China to begin with, so that's a no-count.

Pigs are back in the headlines once again, and with a vengeance. Here is an interesting juxtapose of three pig-related news stories found via the informative China Digital Times.

Our round-up of some of last week's highlights from China's English-language blogosphere:

Photo by chinapix taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

A summary of what's in Shanghai's magazines

This weekend Shanghai will be host to its first ever barCamp, the ad hoc tech lifestyle “un-conference” where every attendee is encouraged to participate either as a speaker, organizer, or active listener. The action kicks off at 6 pm on Saturday night with a pre-un-conference social at T-Sens, and continues Sunday with the main event at the Toodou offices along the Suzhou Creek. If you bring a prepared talk, arrive promptly at 8:30 am for breakfast and the planning of the day’s schedule. If you arrive late, be prepared for the possibility of speaking to an empty room in the middle of the night: barCamp is touted as a 24 hour event. So far, topics mentioned have included web programming, open source business, urban photography and navigating the Shanghai bus system.

Shanghaiist only recently mastered the ins and outs of computer-based blogging and we'll be damned if there aren't already newer, hipper things come to replace it. Video blogging, or "vidblogging" as it's sometimes known, is pretty cool, and we've seen people using video-sharing sites to this end or else just embedding their videos into their blogs. China Mobile is now trying to get into mobile blogging, also known as "moblogging," where your mobile phone becomes the tool with which you update and submit content to your blog. This site explains the concept well, and Blogger, which is no longer grounded by the Internet nanny, has a moblogging service which allows you to submit photos, video, and text to a moblog they host. The moblog can either be stand-alone or else be embedded into a pre-existing blog by cutting and pasting the appropriate javascript.

Photo by the shanghaieye taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

Miss World, Miss USA, Miss Hong Kong, and now here comes Miss Blogger PRC! Earlier this month, BlogChina, a poupular -- you guessed it -- Chinese blog site held a nationwide beauty contest for female bloggers. Both the public and a panel of celebrity judges took part in deciding the outcome. In addition to the usual “hotness” factor, contestants’ writing/blogging talent also played a significant role, supposedly. One look at the final awards had us convinced that was indeed the case: Cash prizes between 10,000 and 20,000 RMB were given to the “Most Beautiful”, the “Sexiest”, the “Most Popular”, the “Most Fashionable”, and last which may or may not be the least, the “Most Talented”. Where Shanghaiist just had a few chuckles, some of the more self-righteous web crawlers felt compelled to opine. One male blogger, “Idai” had this to say:

Image from yeungstuff.com.

Several days ago, we told you about Chinese blogger Anti getting muzzled for his recent reports about the Beijing News imbroglio. Now, China blog watcher Rebecca MacKinnon reports that it wasn't the Chinese censors that put the kibosh on Anti's MSN Spaces blog -- it was the friendly folks at Microsoft. MacKinnon's post is well worth a read. Blogger and Microsoft employee Robert Scoble is pissed at his company and has offered Anti an uncensored forum to guest blog on his site. (Anti, by the way, seems to have resuscitated his Blog-City blog, which, like all Blog-City blogs, is blocked in China.) It's not a good PR day in the blogosphere for Microsoft -- even the right-wingers are bashing Bill Gates for cuddling up with the "commies." We at Shanghaiist, proud Apple users, doubt Mr. Bill has ever even heard of Mr. Anti. But perhaps this latest development will help shed some mainstream light on the prickly issue of Western companies aiding and abetting China's internet police.

So it seems that Shanghaiist is not the only weblogger in Shanghai.

China's internet thugs are are it again, this time attempting to block popular internet telephony services, namely Shanghaiist favorite Skype:

According to ChinaTechNews.com, Zhang Baoquan, president of real estate giant the Jindian Group has said his company will invest RMB 3 billion ($362 million) in the "coming years" to open 200,000 digital EVD theaters in China. Shanghai will be the testing grounds with eight to 25 -- kind of a big range -- EVD theaters. The China Film Corporation and Huaxia Film will also be involved, the three-sentence "story" said. Other published reports showed that something called the Polly Culture Group is part of the plan, as well.