Meta

via Lifehacker

When sending a message, type the name of the recipient you want to appear in your Contacts and then place the email address inside <>. That will auto-add the name to your address book formatted.
For instance, rather than: stewart@example.com in the To: box, use Master Stewart Rutledge, the Wonderful <stewart@example.com>

I found there are some of my emails to my gmail account(isaac.mao) seems not normal in these two days. Some of my subscription messages didn't come, also there are some functional email messages didn't appear as normal(e.g. Toread.cc). I wonder any others had same feeling too.

update: Gmail subsytem notify me that they delayed my emails, but didn't tell the details. :(

After reading the good selling book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, I decided to explore an interesting sample in the book talking about an intersting story about a pop singer, Kenna. The story told us that Kenna was ever ranked high by many professionals in music industry, however, his songs can't be accepted by common social rating system. Malcolm wanted to use this story tell us that some blink feeling from professional may not be correct.

You know, I may not got to have a try to listen to Kenna's songs if I read the book two years before. But today, I'm so ready to have a try with many new web 2.0 services including those music services. I decided to create a Channel on Pandora.com to explore why Kenna's songs can't be adopted by popular mass. Actually, I like the tunes of this guy, however, the music really can't attact me too much. Instead, it even make me somewhat depressed. The fancy Pandora service helps me to find that I don't have such appetite and eventually help me switch to more open and high emotional songs in this channel.

Pandora and Blink, has such an interesting connection that everyone can try. It's also the power of web 2.0 services, which can bring real personalized taste into a mass social filtering system. Someday, Pandora maybe the most powerful rating system in the world on any musics, to predict and  do statistics.

Volunteer Yining created a cool web 2.0 application to support the registration of Chinese Blogger Conference. I'm late to register it in first group, but its not late to spread the totally-grassroots-organized conference. Maybe the best collective intelligence conference we ever heard. "It looks somewhat messy because you can't find the real executives for the conference, but eventually it works with our surprises", said a famous Chinese blogger commenting on last year's conference. So there are reasons expect higher to this year's one. Are you ready for this cool webitiviy? Just add this badge to you blog like me! (tag:cnbloggercon)

In a long journey backed from Almaty to Shanghai(via Delhi and Bankok), I was thinking of the big potential for blogging in Central Asian countries, now I can eventually tell who they are(Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), heh-heh.  I did Wikipedia them before I headed to KZ, but i can't really do perceptions on those countries until I talked with them face to face in last days.

Frankly speaking, the roundtable meeting about blogging was the least internetworked one ever in my recent years though other life facilities were as same as other countries. I didn't expect the expense of internet there are still a key issue to such a international conference. Blogging is still luxury fashion here. We can't always grant things to be everywhere. We should also try to think in context all the time.

But, just like I said in my last post, the landscape of blogging in these countries are realy open and promising. I can imagine the current attendees of the conference will become prominent bloggers in their countries soon by building their fames online. But first of first, the local government/grassroots should co-compete to improve their connectivity first. It's a time issue, I believe. Then with affordable and even free infrastructure, the blogosphere can boom like in China. So I can also see the potential of the blog related business and social changes in this area that worth venture capitalists to consider investment there. Anyway, any venture investment should be well evaluated before accomplishment, we still need many interactivities with local teams to examine their capabilities on enterpreneurship and dilligence. 

The advantages of those countries are also obvious. People there are facing big changes similar to China. They are eage to find new tools and hopes to change their social life. The democracy system is shaping itself better than in China, freedom of speech is almost ready(may differ within those countries). So they are really ready for adopting blogging and new web 2.0 concepts. They can also learn experiences and lessons from China(though they talked more about US and EU as sample) on censorship, language barriers and and internet ethics.  Whatever, they are in golden time to develop their own blogosphere.

That's why I'm thinking how can someone can promptly register some interesting domain names in those countries, like kzblog.org, youarefool.ru, etc.  :D

I'm in travelling in Kazakhstan majorly for "Roundtable on blogging development in Kazakhstan". The event is really neccessary to me to understand how blogosphere developed in this coutnry, as well other central Asian countries. Basically, it's very difficult to blog becuase the internet infrastucture is really poor here(though its said KZ is the best developed country in Central Asia area on IT intrastructure). So I'm now using the only two/three cables in conference room to upload these fotos and text(Of course, there is no Wifi).

Many topics and discussions focued on the relationship between journalism and blogging. It's, of course, not a new topic to those developed blogosphere, but it's still a time-to-prove thing in this area. I'm happy to see that more and more people here also realized the potential of blogging and started to become bloggers.

In these countries, whehter they are still "socialism" coutries or not, people still have many concerns and free thinking barriers to become open content sharer---blogger. They questionsed a lot why they need blog in their mind with different kind of hesitations.

Another big issue here is accessibiiliy. With very expensive broad band service, blogging is definitely a luxury thing to common people. So I think we are still lucky living in China. We can anyway have relatively low service plan from the monoply telecom though we are facing another access problem, GFW.

It's really interesting to study another blogosphere as an observer. I will continue to talk tomorrow and get more knowledge about this courtry, beautiful but low paces.

We ever used Hamachi for a longtime to collaborate online with some applications like Gobby. It's supposed to be secure by building private network within some circles. However, hamachi is UDP-based application, so the NAT admin can easily block the application by disabling UDP packets. Since I'm also a longtime skype user, I believe Skype's NAT-free capability can do something on software VPN. If we can leverage skype's p2p traverse functions and VPN features, can we have a stronger soft VPN solution?

Maybe its another over-expectation?

I had a dinner with Crusoe Mao, Chief Architect of Sony Playstation, in a Shanghai-based Chinese Tea Resturant. The meal is great because all the food are preserved by high-quality tea. It's assumed very healthy and we also enjoyed a lot on a new kind of green tea named "Anji Bai Cha".

Thus the topics expanded in such a good environment. We talked about GFW, as well Google's strategy in China. Crusoe, though a very techie person, shared some really insightful ideas can be referenced by Google decision makers to solve the painful situation in China?not only the currnet business part, but the bold vision of future.

Everyone knows that there is a sharp competitors for Google in China, called Baidu. The 2.5 billion market cap company now "tops among all operators in terms of search traffic with 46.5% market share"(iResearch). Google lost the market share not for business strategy but for user experience. Google do a great job search over Internet including for Chinese content. However, many google fans has to switch to Baidu when they frequently met web page reset by the GFW(Great Firewall). Though Google is trying to deploy more and more presence in China by building up local sales/marketing and R&D team, the effort can't be so obvious under the shadow of censorship.

Will compromise a better solution to survive in China, Google? Maybe, and more possibly maybe not. Google search didn't comply to keywords filtering requirement in China before they compromise last year. Anyway, the controversal compromise can't really take effect because it even enraged loyal user group in China, which ever protested online when Google service was blocked by government year 2002 for the first time. The protest eventually 'force' government to release the block after several days. If Google do comply to the opaque censorship(till now, there is no any public information tell people who takes the responsibiliy of censorship). Google, as well other web site, can self-censor first to please government, while losing the respect from their loyal end users. They should rethink of the strategy while they are still losing market share.

Crusoe's idea is simple. Don't comply, but more penetration. Once someone lose their principle, they will lose everything as bottom line easily. He thought the best strategy of Google is to acquire more Chinese top web sites with their existing capital power and inject google services with those sites. It's possible, from my rough calculation, google can try to acquire top 10 innovative web sites in China(not including those sucks portal sites) spending no more than 2BUS$. But Google has to be low profile to do that to make sure less attention by government and those "angry youth" who are easily be tiggered nationialism like Carlyle's failure on Xugong case.

With such move, instead of trying to cook localized products like Mr. Kaifu Lee wants to do. Crusoe's idea is very direct, "Kaifu don't need waste time to invent products Chinese may like, instead, he can take more time to evalute and invest more local promising internet startups."

Really fancy ideas from Crusoe, but I do agree and enjoy it for hours last night, in our tea-baked healthy food.