Global Inter-media Dialogue 3

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:44:00 +0000

I'm now in Bali Island but not for the legend sea shore and historical views. It's the first time that I'm here joining the 3rd Global Inter-media Dialogue(GIMD), a conference backing by two distinction countries, Norway and Indonesia. Deputy Minister Wegard Harsvik shared me the story how this GIMD was founded three years ago: Indonesia was one of three countries(China, Indonesia and Vietnam) Norway conducted talks on human rights with. And eventually after those talks, Indonesia become more democratic and healthy on politics today. They win the friendship of Norway as well. So the two governments set up the conference quickly in month in 2006.

I enjoyed some of the sessions especially those about local issues and community practices, but more happily to see old friends( Ying Chan, Kavi Chongkittavorn, etc.) there. I was surprised with the coverage of this conference because the organizers did invite a broad range of journalists from almost around the world. Amazingly, Cuban journalist, Lic. Magda Resik Aguirre, almost flied around world to attend this conference. The first session I joined was about the minority coverage problem of current media where a guy called Said Ibrahimi came from Afghanistan added me more knowledge about this country on the situations of reporters, as well the problems in that not-far-away country. What should global journalists do with such issues? Be more participatory or be more professional watcher? How to keep ethics in extreme situations?

If we just think about such issues in traditional ways. I can't help because they are actually the all time issues bothering journalism the whole discipline. The common problem to journalism in any countries, of course, its prejudice and ethical correctness. In our session called "Global Happenings" most on China issue, I quickly shared the future journalism could be the best collaborative spectrum between amateur journalism and professional journalism by applying the new technologies especially those web 2.0 ones. The stories in China were actually telling not only the possibility of such blurring between amateur and professional journalism, but also the possibility to approach truth.

About the truth, actually it'll be forever issue in our society but a real challenge to current traditional media. Even we can see some stories from the mainstream media covering minorities timely, it may be easily eclipsed by the limited bandwidth and persistency of the media. However, since everyone of us has more channels today to get information, you can sense how important the future journalism will be with new media technologies. Further saying, if people can provide and well use the throughput of new information channels, they can find more supporting materials to support their co-perceiving the truth. Obviously, the traditional media and journalists should change themselves proactively to fit for the trend.

The last minute before I click "publish" of this post and go to the Bali beach, there's a new notification from Twitter telling me one of my friends Maria Trombly recommended a new article about journalism: The future of journalism. Though there are different perceptions on the future of journalism, the holy thing to me in Sharism age is that you can meet magic of coincidence with new technologies all the time. Isn't it part of future journalism?

Sharism Slide

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:45:00 +0000

Just re-posted to Slideshare, yet to have another video explanation on BigThink.com.

| View | Upload your own

Some pages on Slideshare were changed on color palettes and drawings positions. But seems slideshare is still the best place to share presentations.

Something about GFW behaved recently

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:31:00 +0000

It's really bizarre recently after a series of blocking and un-blocking by the censorship system in China(GFW):
- Youtube was blocked after 3/14 tibet riot
- Youtube was released two weeks later
- English BBC News released 25th,Mar.
- Wikipedia English site found unblocked on 1st, April (not April Fool), including https://secure.wikimedia.org
- Wikipedia https://secure.wikimedia.org blocked again two days ago on 6th, April, because Chinese version of Wikipedia can be accessed via this channel
- Flickr picture farm1, farm2 found unblocked yesterday (7th, April)
Etc.

How do you think if the Olympic Torches behave the same?

Micropipeline as unblockable infrastructure

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:02:00 +0000

As more and more people are now on various social applications(over 10 types of such Social Software), Micro-pipeline is also emerging to show how information can flow over different kinds of social application from people to people in a more efficient way than traditional media. We can predict that "Micropipeline" as a new concept will be studied more in the coming years to see how this infrastructure can be applied to form a larger scale of social fabric to make the world more flat and equalized.

For different kinds of social application, we can now link them easily by importing/exporting their RSS/Atom feeds. In this way, they can be connected like a pipeline system(Do you still remember the classic fun game "Pipeline"?). Meme with XML format can flow over different pipes to reach different users eventually . There are different kinds of pipeline building blocks in the system including pipes, Tee joints("T"), and elbow joints, etc. Since there are more and more such type of components can be chosen by users, the system becomes more complex than a traditional one-to-many system(like the urban waterworks). The many-to-many relationship between those building blocks can generate non-linear chain effect that maybe possible to amplify little voices into big bang. It's the new type of media, "Social Media".

I'm making an illustration on "Social Media" big picture by putting some typical "Micropipeline" applications on one map to show how information could flow from one person to mass population by routing those pipelines and possibly generate impact. Of course, the value of the original meme should be recognized along the path. Traditional media like "Reuters" is no more than a super node on such a big map. The picture is not finished yet, but I would love to share some draft works to get your comments to improve it.

Someday in near future, I think the connection between different pipeline application won't be just limited to RSS. They can eventually "talk" to each other in more flexible and semantic way. Some new kinds of authentication methodologies like OpenID could be applied in such scenario to ensure that information are authentic enough. And I'm sure XML-based Microformats will play key roles in future picture.

Micropipeline will be more important to some totalitarian countries like China to confront it's censorship system("Great Firewall", or GFW in short). Those seems-redundant building blocks(like Google Reader v.s. Bloglines) just more helpful to build fault tolerant media pipelines to serve people in such countries. E.g. It's found that Soup.io were blocked two weeks ago by GFW in China:

As feared, we've been blocked in China again.

Soup user kunshou has posted some new suggestions on how to circumvent the block (in Chinese). Should these fail, Tor remains your best bet.

This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs for our Chinese users – but as much as we'd like to, we can't just keep changing our IP address every day.Sorry! :( ---[via Censorship evades Soup, has stronger kung-fu]

Bloggers got very angry(Chinese) on such blockage with curses all the time. But they are now becoming smarter to build more complex personal pipelines to avoid of single point failure. They switched to FriendFeed.com as the alternative solution to burn their social feeds as life stream. And their subscribers can response as well to keep their information pipes flowing at normal level. The same trick applys to Yahoo Pipes! when people found Feedburner was blocked in China half year ago. If it's a mouse and cat game, the mouse seems faster and smarter now.

For the draft illustration shown above. I'm actually using Zooomr as the picture link here instead of Flickr since the later one has been blocked in China as well. However, I believe they can't block every picture sharing site around the world to kill themsevlves. So I think it's a great hack that we Chinese can survive in such a Social Media age. We can even change the country in a longer extent for sure.

No Sharism, No Democracy 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:10:00 +0000

Just watched the "Super Tuesday" gala via many ways, the Twitter+Google mashup is the coolest one. But after reading Richard Dreyfuss's comments on how to teach our kids on the concep of "Democracy" and how to foster the love , I realized that the real democracy is still a long way to go. That' is how to maximize the enlightment of "collective intelligence" to cover all human brains.

There are still silent majority in our world( even in those so-called democratic countries) to eclipse the value of democracy. But with the longtail of sharing with different kinds of social applications, human's intelligence is possible to be aggregated to upgrade the established democratic system. We can call it Democracy 2.0. We can all see the changes in the new presidency bids 2008 in US, as well in Taiwan and other more wired countries.

Twitter's "Super Tuesday" experiment is cool, yet to improve in two directions: firstly, more inclusive to enable people to express in such a micro-way; secondly, to aggregate such intelligence and merge into the future design of democratic system. Twitter is killer app because it amplifies the sharing mechanism from explicit sharing to subtle sharing. It works just like the membrane to exchange materials in between cells. Sharing of such nano-sized memes can be easily adopted by users to open their mind to connect them with the social voice space. Those with such tendency of sharing can understand the return of sharing step by step. It's a kind of spiritual practice I called "Sharism".

Sharism, then, plays very important role inside people's social tendency. In the presidency racing, people were actually reluctant to vote or express because of their weary of the procedures and results. In democracy 2.0, people were enlightened to share their opinions. And if they found their any opinions are collected and respected, they will be encouraged to participate further steps. So Sharism fosters a continuum of participation of the democratic system, even effective after the voting with its open-end power.

Without considering such spirit in democratic system redesign, I'm afraid, the more problems will emerge in the next decade over the current democratic system around the world. The emergence of second super power won't just be a utopia, but a driven force to change the world. The news about a Chinese former professor set up a new political organization called "Chinese Netizen Party" won't be just April Fool as well.

What's the social media means to professional journalism?

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:03:00 +0000

During the talk over "Social Media" as Luncheon Addresss(Slide) at the conference of "Changing Dynamics in the Asia Pacific: Power Politics, Economic Might, Media Challenges", I also presented the situation of the "lonely family" of Hu Jia.

There were bloggers tried to send powder milk the small girl last week, however, it's still impossible to break the cordon to enter and conduct. They didn't give up though. More tools will be expected to be used to make things smarter. You can find Hujia's house in a vivid way from Google Maps(same using Google Earth). More bloggers are called to join the action to update the map time by time. And furtherly the leaks can be found anyway to save the baby.

| View | Upload your own

I hope the audience really understand Sharism in such a context because it's really relevant to each of us. And most importantly, I've got a lot information from the local bloggers meetup last night and some insights from other speakers in different panels.

The Video Documentary from Hujia and Jinyan

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:45:00 +0000

Some friends has posted the video document "Prisoners in Freedom City", cameraed by Hujia and produced by his wife Jinyan, on Youtube. Although the story is well known on blogosphere even traditional media(not including Chinese ones). I have to say that it's very movable after watching over all seven episodes(they were seperated due to the limitation of Youtube, obviously). Many Chinese people are freer than before, however, when is the tipping point to a substantial change in this country. Olympic 2008? Seem impossible just from Hujia's case.

Bloggers are now talking how to send milk powder to Jinyan to save their one-month old daughter QianCi because all the food channels has been blocked by security police after Hujia's arrest. It is not a game, it's about life.

updates: Where the family located(on Google Map and Google Earth) and BBC4's interview after Hujia's arrest

More on "Human vs. Machine"

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 05:11:00 +0000

Tim O'Reily just compiled some ideas on "Huamn vs. Machine: The Great Challenge Of Our Time". It actually suggested that an emergent inflexion of web 2.0 to be re-invented to a higher stage. The next stage will be the well designed mashup of human computing and machine computing which I used "P2R Computing" to described it before. I think it's better to expand the idea to reflect Tim's one.

Google was being very successful in the last past 8 years. They found a basic fact of Internet content democracy and formed the super search algorithm "Page Rank" to enable thousands of machines to work in a parallel way to support large scale indexing and searching request. The creative design of Adsense model helps Google collect money from large scale eye balls along with the booming of search behaviors. Undoubtedly, Google can earn more from the "Big Number" effect and for more years.

However, what I'm sure is that Google merely itself can't bear is the global change of content structure since the new paradigm that Web 2.0 leads, whatever their investing in more machines, adjusting the Page Rank algorithm, or more activities to be more 2.0 alike. The problem to Big G is the internet content granularity has been dramatically downsized by both people and new kinds of technologies(like RSS and Atom). The connectivity between information will be not only described by physical links between web pages, but also a new layer of social filtering yet to be articulated by more new innovative social applications(like those RSS readaers, twiter.com, soup.io, etc.). Some recent found fake sites can present itself as a real content destination from Google's search results, however, they are actually generated by machine programs to make money for their authors. The downsizing of virtual hosting and domain costs makes such things easily be mass produced. So actually, Google's machine algorithm is now facing their distributed siblings from other hosts everywhere. Of course, people will be unsatisfied more and more.

Social Search, a new but long discussed concept is the right time to emerge in the coming two years(Am I optimistic?) Just a quick simple example first: When I search Google about "Human vs. Machine", I can find Tim's article, but obviously it's not at a relevant position in my mind. And I can't find any referential information to this search result. I switched to another mashup tool with the same query string and found more interesting results. I'm sure some of the links were really what I want and most importantly my own mind told me some are really relevant with some of the names I know and trust. Recently I compared many such just-in-case searches for in real context, for either blog composing or reference search, the "nearly social" search wins more than Google. Google may argue that skillful users can also realize social search based on their algorithm, but obviously Google didn't index well in some cases I met (though I found Google added one missing index days later). The fundamental problem is Google still slowly adopt social layer in their base service. The missing link, Social Ranking(SR) , should be be introduced into future search system.

The Social Rank(SR) concept, which can be a perception inherited from Page Rank, yet to be developed deliberately based on one's Social Portfolio(I dislike the term "Social Graph", either from semantic or public acceptance) and calculated in a large enough scale to ensure its accuracy. Your Social Portfolios on each social application sites(Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Slideshare, etc.) will be crawled frequently to compile your SR. The more content you generated on those social sites, the higher your SR could be(but not linearly correlated). The trust relationships to connect those "Social Portfolio" will be another key factor to be compiled into your public SR. The people with best Sharism virtue will be recognized in this way. Like Tim, Joi Ito, Stehphen Downes, Dave Winner, Rebecca Mackinnon, etc.

In my humble vision, people will get more information in a streaming way from their daily social context instead of today's individual keywords-driven machine searches(In some countries, the portal way still dominate, though). Their activities will be logged and fed to their trust circle. Your Social Portfolio with its inherent sensing capability will help you aggregate "right" information to avoid of a problem of "don't know what you don't know". The Micro-pipeline is in shaping and more applications will emerge to support such "information streaming" time by time. Like Soup.io's experiment.

The basic unit of the fluid in the micro-pipeline will be micro enough to support almost everyone's participation and easy aggregation and remixture. Both Atom and Micro-format are in this category. But it's questionable to apply larger granularity work as base content unit, like wiki. So Wikia's effort could be on a too complex direction at least from the requirement of social searach on mass participation perspective.

Eventually, Social Search will be an entropy game, Google won the first round because they found the algorithm to map the less complicated web 1.0. And who will win next round to resemble the web 2.0 variety?

Great Wall, unchanged

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 23:48:00 +0000

Just finished a fabulous "Museum" day in London. We started at morning to meet the speakers of the evening debated with a rough topic on "The New China: What does the First Emperor's legacy mean in a globalised world?". We met some really interesting guys to exchange some interesting ideas(including a recent eco-protestor who put mask on a warrior's face, which could be seen as an emergency if it's in China), actually I just feel the debate would be more like a panel discussion without flame wars.

We were taken by Jane Portal, curator of this over-half-year-long exhibition of "The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army", to make a short touring. I was exited that it's the first time I see clearly real Terracotta Warrior. Its simply amazing not only because of the whole exhibition format navigated in a creative logic, but also the works themselves. Actually, its very hard to imagine how people keep the craft skills in such a media-less age and mass produce so many warriors like modern factory. As a trained engineer, I was too much impressed by the process of engineering. Unfortunately, those techniques wasn't respected and reserved to keep China a innovative country in the later centuries.

Our debate, as one of the parallel program with the exhibition, attracted about 300 people. My blogger friend Cathy Ma was lucky to get a seat because of my speaker advantage. It's very hard talk for the speakers including Me. Jon Snow from BBC Channel 4 moderated the panel after Neil MacGregor (Director of the British Museum) gave a warm-up speech. Then four speakers including Jonathan Fenby (auhtor a the book Jiang Kai-shi) , Sun Shuyun (documentary producer ), Steve Tsang, and me started our talks over "legacy" based on the understanding from different background. I mentioned the "Great Firewall" behind China Internet users is just the legacy mindset of "control" by communist rulers. And the most wise choice for the ruling party is to remove it to prove their over-propagandaed harmonious society and peaceful rising. The collective intelligence from counting Internet users won't just wait for the non-progressive democratic regime if they don't like to change their mindset. Unfortunately, we didn't see such change even after the passing 17th Party Congress.

China Ambassador, Ms. Fu Ying, also joined tonight's event. She commented that the best way to understand legacy is to forget it. It's somewhat a quite safe comment for her role. I was told she is very nice and smart lady though Steve remind me to be cautious after I return China. I noted but somewhat feel easy with that. It's not the first time I speak publicly about Great Firewall in China. It's truth that everyone should knows and change it together. I'm happy to see there are more and more Chinese Internet users(especially those millions of bloggers) started to talk about it explicitly and try to find constructive solutions to persuade government to rethink about this stupid mindset. In a modern globalized China, we don't need such legacy, instead, we need inherit the blood of creativity in Terracotta Warriors.

I enjoyed the talks from other speakers too. They are all China experts rather insightful than me about the history of China. I didn't see the flame wars in the debate though. Some friends told me after the debate that I'm somewhat too optimistic to the future of China. I think I should be because the paradigm of the whole world is changing from 1.0(top-down) to 2.0(bottom-up) even the Great Wall mindset unchanged today in China.

The Guardian, cooperator of the debate, will have podcasts published online soon to get the full script and audio of the debate. Stay tuned. (update: The guardian podcasting has been published here and Jonathan's long review of the debate, "Continuity and change")

Conferencing spectrum: between 1.0 and 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:20:00 +0000

I was in Beijing in the passing three weeks joining a series of conferences: The 3rd Chinese Blogger Conference, Orange Labs Web 2.0 conference and China Foo(Foo Camp China). Now I'm in London preparing a non-technical talk at The British Museum, just as a relaxation.

As one of the organizer(we call volunteers) of Chinese Blogger Conference, I can't make very objective telling to the conference on whether its successful or not, but we did make some sparkling because people including the audiences made it together. The collaborations and collective intelligence are dramatic like the post-conference wiki-style report on Memedia.cn. We tried hard to make the conference a platform to demo some new ideas and technologies, including SNS, micro-blogging, tagging, personal portal and other mashups. Jiwai.de, a young copycat of Twitter.com, shined a lot at the conference because they provided a big screen to link people inside/outside the conference hall to publish their any ideas about the conference and sessions. We collected over 100 bloggers resonations and over thousand photos on either Flickr or Yupoo(no wonder we were very optimistic about the future of social media in China). Thus the cnbloggercon was very 2.0, though the conference hall we selected is very 1.0. So I rate the Chinese Blogger Conference is 1.8.

The web 2.0 conference by Orange Labs Beijing chose their office space as venue. It's very creative space with two-righ-angled areas(Like "L") between the aisle. However, the content and format are somewhat boring though I myself was one of the keynote speakers the first day. It's not easy for a tradition business to advance itself to web 2.0 pace, actually Orange Labs made a lot effort to ensure the success of the conference. I'm sure that most of the audience are very 1.0. I only saw few blog posts after the conference, neither from Orange Labs people themselves. Benjamin's post is quite good though I wish there were more. The conference is somewhat 1.0 with a 2.0 venue. Overall, I rate it 1.2 . :)

For China Foo, based on a very popular event in US, is also well known in Chinese geeks and entrepreneurs community. Plus O'Reily's brand name, many people told me they wanted to join the first Foo Camp China event. Unfortunately, many of them can't make it because of the time lag between Chinese Blogger Conference and China Foo(5 days gap between the two events). So I guess only those in Beijing can particitipate easily. And unluckily they chose a bad hotel without high quality Wifi installation. I can't make the full day participation because my flight was reschedule by London host to one day advance. But we don't need worry about people's passion on it, there were also many pictures posted online about this event. And whether As overall, I rate it 1.5 .

So we can see the conference world is pacing its way to 2.0 age, however, there are still many resistances attached to them in different context. Just like Rebbecca said, in those one close to 2.0, you will feel being spoiled, by contrast, you feel annoyed in those conferences still 1.0. I yet to study the differences of output in a accurate way, but the feeling is there. The next meeting I attend will be expected very 1.0, what's the feeling I will be?

10 Emergences May Lead Us to An Intelligent Future

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 10:15:00 +0000

Just finished my talking at Ci'Num conference, a event with very Frech context trying to predict the future of "our" society and response to the possible changes. The talk is very condensed due to time limitation. But I have shared my slide online for audience's future check-back.

What I want to share in the conference is telling people that the world is changing with many sutble and micro signals. We may feel them everyday, but we can't grasp them or control them in anyways. And if you are not experiencing those blogging, web 2.0 servies, you won't be able to feel those nano-sized changes happened everyday.

We can see more and more Chinese people started to involve in the emergence of "The World Think Together". Just a recent case as instance, there are already thousands of people gatherred on Facebook to support Burma people. And many Chinese people in this social networking service has been impacted. The interesting thing is that most of them are bloggers and I can predict that they will transfer the message to their audiences as relaying. That's the another emergence I talked "Social Media".

The format of the conference is good. They also invited some International people like me to join and try to expand the border and understanding. The problem is how can such a short period can really understand the complex world.

Sharism is not Communism, nor Socialism

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 05:13:00 +0000

In my talks on PICNIC'07 about Sharism, some people commented that it is actually the new bottle of old theory of Communism. I think he may not really understand the real meaning of Sharism though I myself also carefully introduce the new term. And it's a concept to be evolved by itself.

Sharism(分享主义 in Chinese) is about sharing, for sure. It means a tendency of sharing your works(everything) to be used by your social network(or public domain), but still keep your right and property based on your consensus. It's really not strange concept especiall after blogging and web 2.0 stuffsemerged for years. As well those new copyright movements, like Creative Commons. You can practise sharism anytime by communicating with others, writing blogs, posting photos, or organizing an offline meetup to generate some group discussions, etc. And step by step, you can feel the change course that you are becoming more open-minded.

An avoidable question raised along sharism. What's the incentive to people if they would like to share? The answer if very simple. You share one piece, you can get times of return. The current social norm may always suggest people that be careful of sharing, otherwise you will lose control of your own stuff, or maybe very dangrous to love prvicy? Is it true? Let me use a metaphor to tell you that actually sharing is in a new space that won't hurt your privcy, instead it shows new possibilities and upside to everyone.

As the figure shows above. There are a big gap between privacy and publicity today that many people may not realize. So actually, the knowledge spectrum could be broken to most of us. The gap,however, has big potential to become a valuable space for social creation and sharing. Many people, however, still have no idea how to bridging the gap because they are over-concerned about privacy. It's not strange because there are still many abuse on Internet that people can't afford to fight with those bad behaviors with individual power. However, it's also a paradox. The less you share, the less power you have. And the more you share, the possible you get social support and become seems-virtually but truely powerful. You can start from small practise, e.g. from a personal blog, harvest small. Then decide how to invest more to get larger return. The gap will transform into a social space belongs to yourself can eventually can help you to maximize your social capital.

Sharism is human nature long timeline of life. It should be accumulated everyday, instead of looking forward any favors from others. And it can be practised anytime anywhere without insulting others right. So its not a big untouchable utopoia like Communism, nor absued political hype of Socialism. It's actually very personalized mindset and practical spirit. Those really experienced blogging, web 2.0 and creative commons, can easily understand what's the real meaning of sharism. Even those people with suspicious and concerns to sharism can find the value of sharism if they try to publish their opinions online, try it! :)

PICNIC'07 Amsterdam

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:40:00 +0000

I'm now in Amsterdam attending PICNIC'07 and visiting some old friends. PICNIC'07 is really fancy event but it's the first time I'm linking with this fusion. Though it's still conference 1.0(means it's highly well organized). it's much different from those boring traditional conferences, on both format and content desgin.

The whole event is actually held in Westergasfabriek, a park orginally a warehouse used to store industrial gas. Liu Yan, Director of DaTong China Desk and my host for this event, told me that it took about two years to bury and cover those wasted stuffs of the old factory. Now the park is a cultural facility well used for creative conferences and activities and of course it's also a good place for community usages. (I just saw a big chicken idol jumpped over the conference hall, you can see such fun stuffs in this confernce appear anywhere)

I met Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter(as well Odeo and Xanga, etc.), for the first morning here. It's very interesting that his real name is Isaac, same to me. And we joked together how people rest of us always make mis-spelling on "Isaac"(not Issac"). I think Biz must be very suprise how I am addict to Twitter and was with ODEO.

One of my best friends, Kaiser Kuo, was also invited to speak at PICNIC. He is really qualified to several aspects of the event since he was a rock star, colunumist and digital strategy guru. Since he is so qualified, he was scheduled with several talks and one keynote. Ha, he is gifted and well used.

I will speak the next afternoon in a panel called "Creative Entrepreneurship in China". It would be the second time I talked about creation in China and the business opportunities. The last time was in Beijing on "TTI Vanguard" conference. The topic is actually around why there are more and more creations emerged in China but why there are still many failures and risks to entrepreneurship in China. I was interviewed recently by Economist on the copycats phenomena in China and where's the original innovations. But the article didnt' mention my concern on the harms of creations from commited censorhips in front of Chinese people everyday. For example, just for this post, I really hesitate whether I should post some images from my Flickr collections on PICNIC or not because I know my readers in China won't be able to see those pictures as Flickr was blocked there. Maybe I have enough time to talk about it tomorrow, though I will still emphasize the blosom of Chinese creations in these 2.0 age...

WEF meets GFW

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 07:34:00 +0000

Many foreigners attending World Economy Forum(Dalian) were cheering with Primeir Wen's remarks on "peaceful development". I don't want to argue it's right or wrong to many new comers to China and such platitudes speech. Because the "harmonioius society" theory from ruling party seems only best worked on censorship till now. Anyone attended WEF Dalian experienced actuall censorship when they want to access Flickr, Wordpress and BBC News, etc. Also some peopel found that Twitter is not stable in these days. They may not even know the recent mass crackdowns around the country to those IDCs and thousands of web site just because a new five year ruling party congress is coming.

Internet censorship system ever had a beautiful nick name GFW(Great Firewall) and now has a new Chinese kidding name Kongfu Net(Gong Fu Wang in Pinyin). The problem is now becoming more and more serious in China. But don't just tell the reason in a simple way(for Party Congress, etc.). Actually, it actually reveals the indepth social problems(food safte underneath water for years. "The more of ropes they throw out, the faster they hang themselves", another WEF blogger attendee said to me yesterday. I was shocked by the words, but totally believe it's true.

Interestingly, I found different behaviors of GFW at different places in Dalian. In WEF conference hall. I can never access Twitter site. However, it's possible in Hotel. And they share the same list of other banned sites(including Feedburner, Wikipedia Chinese, Wordpress, Flickr picture server, etc.) It could be caused by the uncompleted deployment to the distributed GFW blacklist to different ISPs and areas. The GFW blacklist is guessed a centralized database but synchorized to distributed gateway routers to different ISPs in different provinces. It's not so sure yet whether local authorities can access their respective gateway to edit the blacklist because we alwasy get report from users in different locations. But basically, we can be sure today that the centralized system is there.

Anyway, it's very interesting topic that GFW meets WEF. Its the real world of how China meets the world. How totalitarian meets open society. And how reality meets future. The interaction of China and world may face more and more such mindset conflictions in the coming decade, but we can believe the universal value of humanity can eventually win the future.

P2R computing(Cont.)

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 07:24:00 +0000

(We are now in UBC Cafe to continue SBF meeting. As Ilya's talking on APAN conference in Xi'an, I backchannelled to write about the other parts of P2R computing. )

P2R computing is a new framework based on P2P computing. But the nodes becomes mixture of people and robots. And the interactions between people and robots become the new links of the new computing model. Thus it's totally different from P2P computing. The P2P computing was actually Peer to Peer, not people to people. So it's actually missing the link with social computing. Actually P2R is a really social+machine computing model which can transfer users micro-instruction into automatic computing.

Based on P2R base idea, we can see a big scenario that everyone has a robot hosted on some distributed server farms. Those robtos comsumes both computing power and storage of server machines. Thus the Internet can become real computing platform. However, those robots are not like crawlers from today's search engine because they are still machine insects without human interactions. The personal robots, however, serve only to their owners. In this way, the robot and the owner become a joint social identity of the real person. The relationship between People and Robot, can generate different scenarios: People2People, People2Robot, and Robot2Robot, etc. So P2R Computing actually can cover today's P2P computing range, also extend to future social computing realm.

I will try to follow the meme and discuss with more friends to generate more detailed architecture in a public way. I would appreciate your comments to see if we share the same ideas in any emergent angles.

P2R computing

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 02:38:00 +0000

I was sleepless last night because of the meta memes and ideas of P2R(People to Robot) computing. I told my friend Ilay Eric Lee this morning that I'm afraid I can't drive fast enough because i was over exited the whole late half night. We are now in Zhujiajiao, a suburb town of Shanghai city with traditional China ancient water view. The Bum Cafe is very comfortable that we can enjoy the view and tea from the wooden frame window. So we can be more free talking about my memes last night.

The meme, is about People to Robot computing. I'm in long term addict to AI in last 10 years and followed the trace of some futurist like Ray Kurzweil about Singularity for a long time. The bridge between Singularity and today is machine computing. And more detailed, some intelligent agents running and serve people's requirements. The problem we are facing today is all the agent software(or generally termed as "robot") are not personalized for a specified individual. So I think there must be a new era for the interaction of People to Robot beyond today's P2P computing.

The idea is very simple: everyone of us will have a robot(or more) service running somewhere on Internet that helps you process any tasks with instant interactions. You can chat with the robot anytime and delegate tasks to robot to accomplish in a queue or get immediate responses for some questions. The concept won't be new to many people who ever played with IM robots. However, those robots are not for personalized missions, e.g. backup some files to server. The personlized missions will cover all human activities like Q&A, search, streaming entertainment and data backup, etc. If you delegate all those tasks to a robot, who can also represent you to communicate and collaborate with other people(or their robots as well), it will be very computing power consuming, for sure. So it can should be well designed on architecture to ensure both functionalities and privacy protections. (Now it's time to back Shanghai, the post is to be coninued...)

Digital Nomads Plan

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 02:48:00 +0000

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.

Skype login problem

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:44:00 +0000

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:

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.
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.

Transmediale calls for art work entries

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:16:00 +0000

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.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

*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.

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

*************************
conspire ...
opens 29 January - 3 February 2008
exhibition 29 January - 24 February 2008

stephen kovats
artistic director - transmediale
festival for art and digital culture berlin

transmediale - Klosterstr. 68 - 10179 Berlin
tel. +49 (0)30.24749-761 fax. +49 (0)30.24749-814
info@transmediale.de - http://www.transmediale.de

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

The transmediale (www.transmediale.de) is Germany's primary
international event for art and digital culture, a major festival
which looks to link art and technology with its cultural, social,
political and scientific contexts. It takes place every year at the
end of January in the newly restored 'House of World Cultures', and
iconic piece of Modernist architecture donated by the USA to (West-)
Berlin at the height of the Cold War in 1957 (www.hkw.de).

Gmail starts to sell storage

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 01:34:00 +0000

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.

Wikimania in Blogosphere

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 08:38:00 +0000

With Yahoo Pipes and Anothr.com, I have just burnt a feed to show the updates about Wikimania 2007 conference. The feed can be subscribed with Gtalk/Skype/MSN messenger once there are any updates from Blogosphere(merged the search result from Technorati and Google Blog Search).

A wonderful view from my Kanas Lake memory

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 04:04:00 +0000

Inspired by Jianshuo, I spent this year's "thinking week" early July in Kanas Lake, the top-left corner of China landscape. However, I really hesitated to take camera with me in annual "thinking week" because its reserved more for my inner meditation. Anyway, I took a camera with me this time because I was routed from Beijing to Kanas Lake after a business trip for my portfolio wealink.com. So there's a chance that I took several pictures though reluctantly. The pictures are not the classical scene of Kanas Lake like those on Jianshuo's blog, but a very special collection when I climbed up to Guanyu Pavilion.

Firstly, I found a rainbow in south-eastern sky(Mongolian border). The rainbow is changing with it's size dynamically. So I turn my sight to the opposite direction to find the source of the rainbow.

Yes, I found another group of clouds in northern sky(Russian border). They are showering to the lake! I can even hear the sound of rain when they hit the surface of lake. I can't help taking pictures of the amazing view. However, it seemed its too grand picture to fit into one picture. The great things can only be memorized. The feeling was not just enjoying, but a kind of bliss.

Kanas was not just simply magic of raining and rainbow though I never seen in urban life. When I happened to turn back to another side of the rainbow(south-western, the Kazakhstan border), I found the clouds painting on the grassland fastly. They ran very fast leaving different shapes of shadow on the ground. Interestingly, the speed of painting changed time by time that triggered your imagination there were someones manipulating the "pens" behind.

I don't know how long I stood there to turn 3 different directions. But I'm sure I was breathless for right a while. I'm not sure if there are anyones else ever seen such fabulous view before. Could be different but same feeling and reverence to the nature?

Wikimania conference, Taipei

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:06:00 +0000

I will be in Taiwan early August to attend Wikimania 2007 conference. It's the second time I will be in Wikimania(last time Aug, 2005, Frankfurt). But it's the first time I visit Taiwan. As there are still many constraints to mainland Chinese to visit Taiwan, I even don't want to try those complex processes but seeking a tricky way to make the visit. It is impossible to share the "trick" this moment before it is proved feasible(That's why it's tricky, ;D )

I will speak the 3rd day of this year's conference talking about "Knowledge Forming, Heredity, and Variation". I will try to illustrate how Wikipedia is evolving itself like the nature with it's own natural selection rules with gene(meme) heredity and variation process. And how knowledge can be improved in a vector adding way(not linear algebra). However, there are still many issues to limit the future development especially censorship in real world, e.g. GFW in China. Censorship strongly blasts the free creation of knowledge evolution same to the disasters in nature. Just in this week, many bloggers found that Zh.wikipedia.org can be accessed in China though still with "keywords" filtering. Anyway, if the reopening is permanent this time(users were cheated last year for temporary unblocking), I believe there will be huge creations in zh.wikpedia space. And will take further impact to the disrupting society in China.

What's more in this global symposium? Let's meet there and create it together, in a vector adding way.

Macedonia exploration started from blogosphere

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 01:10:00 +0000

I can not match the Chinese and English name of Macedonia until recently. I got times of impressions in these days about this country either from Friends' mentioning or some advertisements on media. Seems the small ex-Yugoslavia country has a strong ambition to attract foreign investment. So there are a series of policy incentives defined and publicized to market. Some taxation and facility advantages seems very attractive to offshore business configuration. I'm willing to visit this country once I found a right opportunity from my business. But what I want to start exploration is from blogosphere. Firstly I found( via twitter) my friend Joi's recent visit to this country to open CC mecedonia. Then I googled out some interesting blogs about Macedonia(also in English) . It's unavoidable that English is becoming a formal blogging language that people can easily plug into the global blog network. Also some non-English speaking people may feel easy to express in English. It could be a psychological topic to find why and may cause cultrual debate on whether their native languages is being eclipsed. Anway, I enjoy the global connectivity in a six(or five, or less) degree of separation. Ok, I will turn to Wikipedia to continue my Macedonia exploration from more angles...

Flickr's almost banned in China

noreply@blogger.com (im) — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 09:26:00 +0000

Chinese bloggers resonated a lot today on Flickr's disability in China. They talked over Twittersphere and blogosphere with angers. Currently, the flickr.com is not blocked but the image repository server(farm1.flickr.com and farm2.flickr.com). It means the blockage is not whole domain as target, but some subdomains which may be referred most by Chinese blogosphere recently on those "sensitive" contents. Generally, June is very sensitive month because of Tian'anmen crackdown 18 years ago. And more this year, there were a protest over PX chemistry project in xiamen, as well the the passing away of vice primier, Huang Ju. All these cases caused authority in nervous and headache because of the flood of voices online. Flickr, as one of the most favorite photo sharing service, was definitely the first target of being censored because there are many photos and pictures related to above cases. Right now, people can still access flickr web site but can't see any pictures there.

But things is not simple as censorship itself. Bloggers has raised more online protests with their rages. Today, more and more people in China knows what GFW is. They expressed a new flood of online protest after finding flickr image server was blocked. Some posts has directly blamed the Communist Party, with disapointment and even cursing it's crash. We may see more flood of reactions over this case. It's could be even a turning point that pushing the authority to change their Internet policies, either tougher or looser(impossible). It depends on the depth of emergent power shifting. Who knows. What we have realized that the date CPC crash will be very close after GFW crash(someday near 2015? only guess and wish) becasues they are very agile indeed.

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