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. more ›

Greetings, music fans. Below you will find, in Shanghaiist's humble opinion, all the music you should have been listening to in the first half of 2005. And if you haven't been able to check these albums out yet, you still have plenty of time to load them on to your mp3 player of choice before 2006. Five Shanghaiist contributors submitted five albums each for a total and 25 -- and they wrote exactly 25 words about each one (exactly, only if you are very lenient with your rules of hyphenation). And yes, we are aware that these "Best of the Year (so far)" lists should really happen at the end of June and not at the end of July. But we're a start-up blog in China -- you expect us to be organized? more ›