The Book of Faces

The Facebook networking application is getting really hot. I joined some time ago at the invitation of an ex-colleague. It's certainly nice to keep in touch with old friends all over the world. You get notified when they add new photos or favorite music. You can send them a message or poke them from within the Facebook page. You can show off a lot of private information: contact details, places you have visited, photos, books you have read, your favorite music. You name it and there is probably a way to put it in your profile.

It's a pity you can only join one country network. All the expats out there would love to join two or even more networks, because it allows you to send friends requests to people you don't know in other countries. The World Friends application is not up to scratch, because you get too many random requests from people you don't even want to be friends with, like a fat (nothing against fat people, my beer belly is also further developing) lady from California, Presbyterian, conservative, with the Bible listed as her favorite book. Ouch, not my piece of cake. I'd prefer to be friends with a Mongolian girl with a Genghis Khan necklace. But Facebook doesn't make it easy to find them.

Anyway, so many people are joining up these days, Facebook will develop further and it could still be a good help to find long-lost friends or find new ones.

One must however be careful not to spend too much time on Facebook. One more application to check several times a day, while we already have to keep an eye on e-mail, websites, blog,... And there are still only 24 hours in a day!

Facebook is also increasingly used to launch local or even worldwide protests. Maybe someday it will become not only a friendly tool, but a revolutionary tool.

Blogspot blocked

Since starting this blog on October 1, 2006, I have always been able to view my own blog from Beijing. But on Tuesday the Danwei website reported that Blogspot was blocked in China. I could hardly believe it because it hadn't been blocked since I started writing the blog. But, sure enough, on Tuesday Blogspot was blocked. It remains to be seen when it is going to be available again.

The funny thing is, www.blogger.com is still available, so it is still possible to post from Beijing, although you cannot see the result. Considering that several circumventor sites are still working, it is rather useless for the Chinese cdensors to play this blocking game. Wikipedia is also still blocked. I am currently in Shanghai on a reporting trip, and also from Shanghai Blogspot and Wikipedia are blocked.

Maybe someone said something offensive on Blogspot, but why would the whole site be blocked? The reasons why the censors block or unblock a site are still a mystery.

Google Docs cooperation

Next week I am starting to write a book with a colleague in the Netherlands. The prospect of e-mailing numerous drafts back and forth isn't really appealing. Corrections and amendments will have to be made. This is difficult enough even if you can sit physically together over a couple of beers, let alone thousands of kilometers apart.

Enter Google Docs. During the past weekend I experimented a bit with the web-based software. It looks promising. Two or more people can work together on a document and changes will be immediately reflected. It's still a bit new, so there certainly will be a learning curve. The use of any new software program needs some practice. But Google Docs looks good. You don't even have to make those back-ups because the document resides on Google's servers.

If in the future more applications become web-based, this will be the end of software as we know it. Who will want to spend hundreds of euros for Microsoft Office? Even the free OpenOffice may become obsolete. Word processors of course do have more bells and whistles that Google Docs lacks. Then again, if you even can write a book in Google Docs, what more do you need? But as Mao used to say, if you want to know how a pear tastes, you have to take a bite.

Nokia's Apartheid

Good ol' Finnish Nokia is blundering. My first digital mobile phone was a Nokia and I have stayed faithful to the brand. That is from 1997 (if my memory is correct). I just got my 4th Nokia cellphone thanks to Pierre, who hand delivered an E61 model from Belgium, which is not available in China yet (and maybe never will be, if you believe the Nokia sales people).

It's a top-notch cellphone, with lots of applications. With just a few clicks and no configuration hassle whatsoever, I browsed the web and send e-mails. The full-scale keyboard makes writing an e-mail a charm. Nice indeed.

Well, there's always a but. My phone, being bought in Belgium, came with a Dutch/English language pack. Living in China, I also want to be able to read SMSs in Chinese (writing Mandarin would be a plus, but is not essential). Guess what? Adding or changing languages is against Nokia's rules and regulations! Even asking the question how you could add a language is against the rules on Nokia's discussion website.

This is Nokia Apartheid. If you buy a cellphone in Flanders, you can only use Dutch and English. If you buy one in China, you only get a couple of East Asian languages (plus English). So what about Dutch-English-Chinese? Or Urdu-Swahili-Dzongka?

We live in a globalized world. Any combination of languages should be possible and somebody somewhere will need it. Adding an additional language is easy on Sony-Ericsson and Motorola phones. Why not on a Nokia?

My advice to Nokia: stop this nonsense or lose customers!

100!

Time flies fast. I started this blog on China's National Day, October 1, last year. This is already my 100th entry. Up to now, the blog was still in beta. From 0.1 alpha to 0.9 beta. It was born on my website chinacorrespondent.com, but I didn't like the interface and so I switched to Blogspot. Content was added: favorite websites, books, restaurants... To each entry a picture was added, text flow-around to the right was put straight.

Comments were sparse, but anyway it was still beta... The blog is still not 100% as I want it. The green color, left, top and right has to turn into a revolutionary red. The blog has to move back to the site. That will happen before the release of version 2.0 and the 200th daily entry.

Writing an entry every day is not always easy, and sometimes one or two entries appear a day (or two) late. But after 100 entries it's forward – “stay the course” – to 200 on April 18.

And it's time to make a little publicity.

So stay tuned for more Views from the China Pagoda. Cheers!

Stone Age communication

A week after an earthquake damaged fiber-optic cables south of Taiwan, sending e-mails and browsing the web in Beijing (and many other places in the Far East) is still a hassle.

It's not exactly the Stone Age, although some Chinese bloggers felt that way. "No Internet. No life", wrote the China Daily. And kicking your computer wouldn't solve anything...

Complete inaccessibility of the Internet would be worse, but then again you could go to the beach, lock yourself up in a room with a shelf full of books or explore the nightlife in town till early morning. But the web is still accessible, so at least one knows what's going on in the world. Still, it's a frustrating experience. You never know in advance which websites will be OK, which will we slow as a turtle, and which will never show up on the screen.

Sending e-mails with an attachment is equally an exercise in frustration: try and fail, try and fail and maybe, with a lot of luck, on the twentieth or the fiftieth try, it will go through... Reports indicate traffic will only return to normal by January 15. At least we know now how dependent we have become on the Internet, surfing, blogging, chatting, skyping, googling, wikipedia-ing, flickring, youtubing,... What a way to start the new year!

Mandriva 2007

Another year, another passage. I am switching operating systems on my PC. After I bought a Lenovo desktop in September 2005, I installed Linspire 5-0, rather by default because installation of other flavors of Linux failed for one reason or another, Fedora Core, SUSE, Ubuntu all failed. Overall I am satisfied with Linspire. It served me well and the only thing that ever broke occasionally was the Click 'n Run (CNR) software installation facility, but after a bit of tinkering I managed to get it working again.

CNR was a paying service and became free this year, but it also became less useful. The latest addition to the CNR warehouse dates from August. Many new programs and upgrades have become available in the meantime. A second reason to leave Linspire behind and move on is that it still does not have a 64-bit OS. I can't wait any longer to take advantage of my 64-bit PC. Mandriva 2007 got very favorable reviews on the DistroWatch website, so I decided to give it a try. Becoming a member of the Mandriva Club doesn't come cheap but it gives you the possibility to download the Powerpack and take advantage of club offers.

As I will be reformatting my hard disk, i will also install a few other Linux flavors to experiment with: Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10, PcLinuxOS 0.93a and the experimental Elive 0.5 RL2.

With Internet traffic slowing to a crawl due to the cable break south of Taiwan and the holiday week between Christmas and New Year there is no better time to install a new operating system.

It's a breakdown!

This definitely shouldn't have happened. Internet traffic is seriously disrupted after an earthquake south of Taiwan damaged undersea fiber optic cables. The CNN website and many other websites in the U.S. and Europe were not accessible for most of the day or even not at all. Sites in China were accessible, because to reach them traffic is not routed through undersea cables.

The Internet came into existence to prevent just such a breakdown in (military) communications. When one link breaks down, traffic would be routed through other links and communications would not be interrupted. In theory. What happened today proves that the Internet is still vulnerable. On a virtual level there are a hundred routes from A to B, but if 99 out the 100 routes go through one fat cable on the physical level and that fatty goes down, the result is a communications breakdown.

A cable cut as a result of an earthquake or enemy action can paralyze Internet traffic around the world. Something has to be done about it. Who would have thought this could still happen in the dying days of 2006?

'You' beat Ahmadinejad

Time Magazine choose 'You' as Person of the Year, relegating Iranian President Ahmadinejad to an honorable second place. (Time: You)

I also would have chosen Ahmadinejad, because in the original list there was no 'You' only YouTube, which is a different matter altogether. While YouTube is part of the You revolution on the Internet, it's only one part, the video clip part.

Expression and collaboration on the Net is much wider than video clips: book reviews on Amazon, photos on Flickr, file sharing with BitTorrent, profiles on MySpace, blogs on BlogSpot, knowledge on Wikipedia, Linux on DistroWatch, podcasts, citizen journalists all over... 'You' are taking over control in the Information Age.

Yes, You made your mark on the world. Not statesmen and war criminals make this world turn around, the people do and that's you. The Net is empowering the people. Millions of people exchanging information, collaborating, getting to know each other, making friends, and yes, making love not war.

As Time noted "We are looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started." A new digital democracy is bubbling up. Warts and all. 

I think Time made a good choice. And yes, also a good second choice: Ahmadinejad.

What a difference!

There are now 100 million websites, up from 18,000 in August 1995, a phenomenal growth in just 11 years time.

It is almost impossible to remember the pre-Web days. When you had to go to the hotel lobby shop to get a newspaper. When you had to go to a bookshop to buy books and for books on China you had to go to Hong Kong. When you had to pay for international long-distance calls. When you couldn’t google anybody. When nobody knew what a blog was. When you had to buy your PC operating system in a carton box. When you had to write letters to mom.

All this changed in 1995. I still remember that August clearly. I believe it was on the 25th. Three breakthroughs in one day! I installed Windows 95 on my PC (yes, those were the days before I broke all my Windows). I bought my first laser printer, an HP Laserjet 4L. He’s getting old, but is still in working order. We brought him to Zhongguancun yesterday for a clean-up. I hope I can still use him a few more years. And yes on that day in August 1995 for the first time I connected my PC to the Internet. It was memorable day.

Today I read De Standaard and De Tijd online before people in Belgium even get out of bed. In fact, I can peruse almost all the newspapers of the world sitting in my home-office. I have convenient access to the biggest bookshop in the world, Amazon.com, where I have ordered hundreds of books in the past decade. Calls to Belgium are much cheaper through VOIP or Skype. With Google and Wikipedia I have a whole treasure trove of information at my fingertips. I have started my own website and blog. And I am a proud user of Linux (after breaking all my Windows). I downloaded my current operating system, Linspire 5.1 through the Internet. I can play around with hundreds of other versions of Linux. Maybe I’ll give Mandriva 2007 a try. No need to run to the store. I can just download it. Writing letters to mom is history, we exchange e-mails. In fact all my work as a China correspondent in the past 8 years has been delivered by e-mail.

Yes, indeed, what a difference 11 years make.