View Larger Map Remember when Google's English-language map of Shanghai was, save for some groovy satellite pics, pretty much blank? Remember that? You should. It was like a week ago. Anyway, thanks to a tip on our Contribute Page, we learn that the map has gotten a makeover. To do this, looks like Google has teamed with MapABC, that same firm that does Google's Chinese maps and the same firm City Weekend is experimenting with......

With over 30,000 dead, another tens of thousands missing, and 200,000 injured, coupled with a broken down mobile/land line and transportation system, many people are on a frantic search for each other, and Google mobilised 100 of its employees to help create a custom search engine entirely dedicated to helping people find their friends and loved ones. Other nifty tools found on this feature-rich page include Google Maps integrated with the latest earthquake and relief......

Just in case you missed it. Via CNN, everyone's favorite cable news network. Since we need to go walk the dogs before it starts raining again, we'll leave you with someone else's commentary (in 140 characters or less): it is a pretty amazing feat. not sure how the brits will top it for the london games..swim it across the channel? More from Google News. Direct link to video here, although you might have trouble accessing......

Direct link here. Click around — there are some neat features (if you are into geeky maps and fire). NOTE: We couldn't get the embed code for the map to work, so you'll have to settle for a screenshot. Haven't had much luck embedding maps from Google China recently — anyone have any insight? Figured it out. But the map is a little wide for the space we have available. Screen cap after the......

Chinese reports have been saying that around May 1, Google China unveiled its Onebox search function, which allows you to find movies and movie times. If you've used Google in the US, you are probably familiar with this function, it's the thing that sits atop the regular search results, as you can see in the pictures. The main key words are the movie, the name of the theater, and the city that you live in.......

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Is_Chinese_search_engine_Baidu_endorsing_Barack_Obama'; Or is Barack just fishing for the Asian American vote? (Get it? He's throwing a net? Nets are sometimes used in fishing? Ah, f*ck it. It's late.) Anyway, when we first saw this, just minutes ago (thanks, Sage) we went, "Huh?" Odd, no? Check Baidu out for yourself. Pacific Epoch tries to explain: Baidu has chosen US presidential candidate Barack Obama as the sixth face to grace its homepage logo. Following......

Shanghai Securities newspaper came out with an article that claimed that they had a contact that says that tax authorities are investigating Google China for tax evasion. Moreover, they are not just looking at the company's taxes, but individual income taxes as well — including those of Lee Kai-Fu, Google's man in China, who is rumored to owe more than 5 million RMB in unpaid taxes. The report says that there is a several month......

Photo from danwashburn Way back in '04, when we were young(ish) and brazen, we declared that Da Marco on Yandang Lu had the best pizza in Shanghai. "I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life," is what we said. It was easier to be so sure-minded about pizza back then, because there were very few reasonable options Shanghai. Are there more now? We think so. But perhaps, after nearly six years, our......

While reading up on the latest lawsuits brought against Baidu by the world's top music labels, we were alerted to this old Baidu advertisement that stars Hong Kong funnyman Stephen Chow (周星馳) as Ming Dynasty poet Tang Bohu (唐伯虎). In the 1min 50 sec long spot, Tang Bohu endeavours to charm over a girl with a Caucasian man who says nothing apart from “我知道” (I understand) in all the wrong tones. The Caucasian represents Google,......

Japanese investigators have found 'no abnormality' at the dumpling factory in Hebei Province at the centre of a food safety scare in Japan after hundreds of people suffered from pesticide poisoning from eating the dumplings. Traces of pesticide were found on the outside of the dumplings and not in the fillings, leading investigators to point to "deliberate poisoning, rather than accidental contamination". This idea, however, has been rejected by Chinese experts.The world's most powerful music......

RELEASE OF PICTURES OF HONG KONG STARS IN THE NUDE IN VARIOUS COMPROMISING SITUATIONS SETS TONGUES WAGGING ACROSS ASIA WARNING: Images after the jump are NOT safe for work (unless you happen to be a blogger working from home) Hong Kong celebrities Edison Chen (陈冠希), Bobo Chan (陈文媛), Gillian Chung (钟欣桐) and Cecilia Cheung (张柏芝) are currently embroiled in an embarrassing sex photo scandal that has whipped up a storm in the territory and the......

Take a walk down Panyu (Fanyu) Lu from the Film Art Centre and you will soon pass by the SH508 restaurant. It occupies a slaughtered renovated colonial mansion adorned with a huge neon sign. Unknown to the proprietors, reviewers and most of the customers, this is actually the former family home of British writer J.G. Ballard. Ballard is famous in the mainstream for two works. Crash laid out a disturbingly explicit ‘psychoscape’ in which the......

BBC's Shanghai correspondent Quentin Sommerville goes to the Pingyang neighbourhood south of Shanghai and finds that the anti-Maglev protests have not quite abated. In his report [VPN required], he makes the following observation:Rarely have protests in China been so well organised, or the protesters so well-dressed. The Maglev protests are really a case study in acts of civil disobedience with Chinese characteristics. Knowing that their protests would never be approved by the authorities, demonstrators decided......

Thanks to the commenters on that last post, especially the one that alerted us to videos of the protests/marches that were on the Taiwan Youtube site. There were two that we found, embedded below. The first one is just a short clip of people walking around during the day. The second is from Xujiahui in the evening, with more chanting, from the evening of January 6. Oh yeah, and to the commenter who mentioned that......

Just as the rest of the world is getting swept away in a social networking frenzy, googling for keywords such as "Badoo", "Facebook", "Ebuddy", "Hi5" and even "Second Life", Chinese googlers it seems are a completely different species. In 2007, four out of the top ten keywords among Chinese googlers were wealth-related, searching for keywords such as "stock", "China Merchants Bank", "Industrial and Commercial Bank of China" and "China Construction Bank". Bank of China is......

Nature News cites an EU report that finds that the real value of a Chinese scientist's wages is the lowest among the 38 countries surveyed. Yes, Chinese scientists make even less than Indian scientists. (h/t to Global Voices )CNNIC announces that China now has 72.82 million blogs and 47 million bloggers. That's one quarter of all Chinese netizens.The Little Red Blog bets against Baidu and roots for Google in the year 2008.Washington Post asks......

Yet. For those who like to keep up to date on Shanghai-English-language-website news — yes, all three of you — head on over to Urbanatomy.com. That's the future home of a new website from the folks at That's Shanghai. And if Urbanatomy.com is as half as good as thatssh.com ... someone seriously needs to be fired over there, because thatssh.com is really quite awful. But they know that — hence the new site. But why......

Chinese video-sharing site Youku.com has raised another US$25 million in funding while our favourite airline ticketing company Qunar.com has received US$10 million in a fresh round of funding.Chinese social networking service Xiaonei.com has followed in the footsteps of Facebook and opened up its services to non-college students. The only thing standing in its way, we think, is its name as Xiaonei ("校内") literally means "at school“.Google has launched an SMS search function that now makes......

Baidu has released its video search report, and Kaiser Kuo of the Ogilvy China Digital Watch translates and summarises some of the key findings. Interestingly, “adult-related” search terms account for 34.14% of daily search volume, followed by celebrity-related (14.74%), TV serial related (12.48%), and animation-related (12.21%) searches. Google is reportedly under investigation in China for tax evasion, says Paul Midler of The China Game.Chinese Skype users now exceed 25% of the global total.While venture capital......

Maybe. China Mobile’s CEO Wang Jianzhou confirmed that his company has been in discussion with Apple to bring the wildly popular handset to China, “because our customers like this kind of fashionable product,” said Wang. But, negotiations have stalled over Apple’s subscription revenue sharing business model. In Europe and the US, Apple receives a portion of iPhone users’ data/voice revenue from their wireless carriers. China Mobile, with its 350 million user base and de facto......

Baidu rolled a new feature as of yesterday—a person of the month, which you can see in their logo. They say that they pick the person based on searches done in their engine, so it's a bit like Google Trends meets Time Person of the Year on a monthly basis. This month it's Xu Sanduo (许三多), a character from a popular TV series called Soldier Sortie(士兵突击), which has become one of the more popular shows......

China urges UN support for Olympic Truce in 2008 [Bangkok Post] China asked the UN General Assembly Wednesday to adopt a resolution supporting the Olympic Truce, a time-honoured practice from ancient Greece to respect the sportive events that will take place in Beijing next year.French foreign minister in China with sensitive issues on agenda [AFP] France's foreign minister Bernard Kouchner held talks with China's leaders Wednesday to pave the way for President Nicolas Sarkozy's visit......

In this day and age, you can define "torture" however you want to, and for a long time, we considered the practice of inputting Chinese characters on a Mac to fulfill our definition. OS X has a built-in simplified Chinese input that does the job, but doesn't really hold a candle to any of the Windows XP input methods—and when Sogou came out with their input method, and Google copied it, we considered that battle......

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. But the mainstream media don't seem to be bothered with the Youtube block. If you don't believe me, just compare for yourself by clicking here and here. For......

On finding out about the Youtube block, these were the first reactions of Chinese blogger Ken Wong:昨晚YouTube发布了香港分站也即繁体中文站时，我还可以正常访问所有YouTube站点，而今天一大早起来，就发现已经全部撞墙了（广州电信ADSL）。看了一下昨晚读者朋友们的反馈，他们也和我一样。暂时还不知道该说什么好，或者一个字就够了：扌喿！ Yesterday when Youtube released its Hong Kong / Traditional Chinese version, I could still access Youtube normally, but this morning when I woke up, I found that it had been bummed (I'm on Guangzhou Telecom ADSL). Comments on yesterday's post from readers suggest they experienced the same thing. I don't really know how to respond to this, except......

As many of you would know by now, Youtube has been blocked in China. Looks like we got happy too soon about the unblocking of Blogspot.Danwei asks if the block has come as a result of the ongoing 17th Party Congress. Well, Marc van der Chijs, founder of the Shanghai-based Tudou.com, doesn't think so: The reason? Probably not directly the ongoing 17th National Congress in Beijing, then they would have blocked the site last week......

News tidbits from the public transportation world: Maglev hours are being extended to match the operating hours of the Metro Line 2, opening at 6:45am and closing at 9:30pm. In 2005 the high-speed train extended its hours in a bid to snag more passengers; this time the move comes as it rides a new wave of popularity. Shanghai's Dazhong Taxi is following the city of Beijing's footsteps and declaring all of its taxis to be......

Alibaba.com, China’s largest B2B commerce site is going public in Hong Kong in a few weeks. With the current frenzied market back drop, and Alibaba’s tremendous earning power (Goldman Sachs’ analyst pegs the site will earn a net profit of USD $83.8 million this year, up 186 percent from last year), the IPO will no doubt be a roaring success. Sounds great, so where can we get some allocation? Well, that’s the thing, there will......

Via China Net Investor, this interview of the founders of Shanghai-based dot.com Tudou.com, Gary Wang and Marc van der Chijs, serves up one very juicy tidbit of information — that Tudou.com is already streaming more minutes of video content every month than YouTube (15 billion minutes per month versus 3.5 billion)! Then in a self-deprecatory turn, Wang turns around to say that those numbers are never really accurate. Those numbers should really be cause for......

Boingboing China Google Video China Friendster in traditional Chinese......