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CNBlog.org just released a new project called "Digital Nomads"，a non-profit service supporting Chinese people(but not limited) to set up their independent blogs. The project, also supported by Social Brain Foundation, is especially designed for people's free speech and will serve those grassroots journalists as the topmost mission. "Digital Nomads" the name came from my speech in Accton Taiwan by the invitation of one of my best friends Joy Tang.

The service is actually inherited from early ideas of "Adopt a Chinese Blog" program by cnblog. As more and more blog hosting services in China started to cooperate with government censorship, many independant voices were actually blocked and slowed. Though there are some brave people started to fight with those "self-censorship"(from businesses) in relative weak legal context, seems the most direct way is to support bloggers to become real independant from those censorships in technical ways. So there comes the project idea and right volunteers teaming up.

As it's a project supported by SBF, Digital Nomads project won't be a for-profit one. Instead, it only requires the supportees to pay their doman name and basic hosting fees to cover the cost. The service will be more than that with the voluteers efforts to promote the blogs and incorporate advanced technologies to help bloggers empowered(like OpenID, Microformat, etc.). Also the team will help bloggers to well use media creation tools to make their blogs richer in content. We would like to see how the project develops itself to demonstrate how important free speech is and how powerful the distributed grassroots voice sphere would be.

If you would like to help promote the project in other areas(not limited to Chinese speaker people), I'd like to transfer the message to the team and try any possibilities to support too.

Labels: Blogosphere, China, DigitalNomads, GFW

Many Chinese Skypers reported login problem with Skype this afternoon from Twitter sphere. Though not all people met the problem, we are sure that there are some problems with Skype logon services. "Flypig" told that "(I found) only 870,000 online users when I tried with proxy". Carol, my friend in Taiwan, also can't login Skype so I think it's not the problem of China censorship(though its always possible, hehe). After searching blogosphere, it seems that the VoIP service is under global turbulence. Hopefully, it can be found an recovered soon.

update:

1. From Skype Heartbeat site, we found such message:
   
   Some of you may be having problems logging in to Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue and hopes to have this resolved quickly. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.
   
   
2. From "The Resigister":
   

   Skype's peer-to-peer technology appears to be to blame for a large-scale network outage, with users around the world experiencing connection problems.

   The scale of the SNAFU isn't known, but users are reporting problems connecting to the Skype network, or being disconnected within moments of connecting.

Labels: down, GFW, Skype

One of my best friends, Stephen Kovats, who ever coordinated unstable media in _V2, is now directing TRANSMEDIALE in Berlin. He calls for Chinese art works to enter Transmediale Award 2008.
I just copied their submission rules here and will translate it onto my Chinese blog. I would like to see any Chinese artist to participate this international contest. Whether they can win, it's a great opportunity to get more exposures of contemporary Chinese arts.
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*Invite your Entries to the Transmediale Award 2008*

:: Deadline: 7 September 2007
:: Award Ceremony: 2 February 2008

As one of the leading international festivals for art and digital
culture, transmediale presents and pursues the advancement of
artistic positions reflecting on the socio-cultural, political and
economic impact of new technologies. As such, transmediale
understands media technologies as cultural techniques that need to be
embraced in order to comprehend, critique, and shape global
societies. transmediale.08 seeks out the speculative realms of
conspiratorial practice to question, subvert, undermine and bypass
the unspoken rules, hidden codes of conduct and assumed truths
entrenched within our information driven communication cultures and
ideological belief structures. In the form of a creative act of
intense and directed collaboration (reflecting on the Latin root of
the word, con spirare, to breath together...), we call upon the
artistic and cultural media technological community to
'Conspire ... !' with us in this event.

Please find the complete call and submission form for download at:
http://transmediale.de/08/pdf/tmctm08_call

Together, transmediale and club transmediale invite the submission of
works and projects for the festival 2008. Submissions for both
festivals participate in the transmediale Award 2008, for which the
jury, comprised of Nicole Gingras, Olga Goriunova, Nat Muller, Wonil
Rhee and Florian Wüst will award prizes totalling ca. 10 000 EUR.
Abstracts and papers for a proposed Vilém Flusser Theory Award are
also being invited.

transmediale is a project of the Kulturprojekte Berlin in cooperation
with Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
transmediale is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.
club transmediale is funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.


******************************

Labels: Art, Transmediale

I was in a ebb and flow this morning by Google. The first message came from Twitter that a friend said Gmail is testing some 9G storage by random selection of testers. I was happy to see that becasue I was annoyed by deleting many emails in these days to keep my Gmail quota under 99% to ensure normal email sending function. Each time I go to trash box, Gmail touted me that "No conversations in the Trash. Who needs to delete when you have over 2000 MB of storage?!". I would say, "Hey, Google, are you becoming out of fashion that 2000MB is only 2GB, the world is calculating in Giga unit now". Now seems they are confessing to change?

However, it's not the end of hoax from Google. I opened my Gmail after reading the message. A big two-line banner appeared on top of the pane.


It a big drop of feeling to me. I have to buy extra quota from the boasting "never-deleting" gmail? It's really a deal, to Google, not to me. I would like to buy GDrive spaces if they tell me in advance it's not a free service. However, I hate such business tricks that link one's trust with business benefit. I won't suggest our portfolio businesses to do such "Evil" things in the future.

Now should I seriously question the decentness of Google's future behaviors.

Labels: Gmail, Google