• Twitter scratches my readwriteweb itch at the expense of blogging
• I’ve been busy setting up a learning portal at school combining Moodle and blogs
• We’ve been getting ready for the birth of our baby Jake. He is due to be born in May.
• School continues to be busy
• I’ve been struggling with a course to learn Java as a precursor to teaching IB Computer Science
• I lack focus and passion for blog posts. Is the blog for me or other people? The posts I have written with the most impact have given useful information based on things I have seen or experienced such as my post on buying a house.

I’ve noticed that more people read my Tweets than my blog posts. Twitter is more immediate and interactive, but it reduces life into a series of soundbites. I miss the process of research and long form writing that I used to pursue when I had more momentum blogging. Perhaps the birth of Jake will give me more of a focus.

Micah Sittig rightly raised a concern that the Learning2.008 conference is expensive at $350 a head for non Acamis members. The reason for this is that it costs a lot to fly out world class presenters to Shanghai and the audience will be international school educators. I’ve been brainstorming ideas for a nearly free local alternative that will be accessible to bloggers outside international school circles. My wife has a great space at Taikang Lu called Projection216 that could host a monthly culture and tech gathering that has a diy vibe. I’m open to suggestions. See my brainstorm.

To those who are unfamiliar, John C Dvorak is a well known tech writer, blogger (http://www.dvorak.org/blog), podcaster and curmudgeon who hosts Cranky Geeks and NoAgenda. No Agenda is an hour long dialogue between John C Dvorak and foul mouthed Internet millionaire, Adam Curry. The podcast is an hour long rambling rant with a great deal of swearing, paranoia and conspiracy theories about nothing in particular. The most recent episode from April 19th had John C Dvorak spouting his observations about China (Link: http://www.mevio.com/shows/?mode=profile&show=noagenda).

Here are some highlights:

• China is getting contracts for civil engineering projects in Africa, which it is using to sell computers and equipment at knockdown prices to locals through the grey market
• Malaysian Chinese businessmen are all triads and ruthless deal makers who are much more cut throat than their counterparts in Taiwan
• White people visiting China are treated much better than overseas Chinese
• Chinese artists cannot paint clouds properly, because the air is so polluted
• Everything in Shanghai is really cheap compared to Hong Kong, especially Coca Cola
• Mao suits and memorabilia are very difficult to find these days
• North Americans should visit Shanghai for a weekend to enjoy the restaurants and architecture by flying from Vancouver

To his credit, Dvorak says that the western media knows very little about everyday life in China and that you should come here to get a better understanding. He also confessed to hamming up the negative comments on his blog to elicit a range of responses, which he uses to broaden his understanding. Call him a wind up merchant or a class A devil’s advocate. I recommend that Dvorak reads Duncan Hewitt’s excellent account of modern China called Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China. Unlike Dvorak, Hewitt has lived in China for over 20 years, speaks good Chinese and used to be the BBC correspondent so he knows what he is talking about.

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Tags: Dvorak, NoAgenda, China, Hewitt, Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China

• The person who gets something done first has more impact than whoever does it the best.  Better videos of the ‘Frozen in Shanghai’ event appeared on Shanghaiist on Monday. See this link.
• On the Internet you are only as famous as the people who embed or link to your video. CnBeta is a Chinese website that embedded my video and got me over 7000 hits. See this other link.
• People prefer videos to reading text. All those long posts I’ve written have never got me any readers, but a rough 5 minute cellphone movie gets thousands of views from native Chinese speakers. A sticky video has more impact than a 500 word essay.

Personal Stuff
We started the year renting a flat in Jianguo Lu and we spent all of our weekends after Chinese New Year looking at places to buy in the Luwan and Huangpu districts. Eventually we found our dream home near Nanpu Bridge, but we had to deal with bankers being stupid about transferring money and the general house buying marathon. It didn’t stop there. Even though we bought our appartment in July, we didn’t move in until November after a team of workmen gutted and renovated the place making it the nicest house we have ever
lived in. Shanghai feels more like home than ever. I am enjoying getting around by walking, on bicycle and the wonderful new metro service that opened two days ago.

We adopted Chog the cat in the spring and he is enjoying the heated floor in our new appartment. It is an amazing feeling to have a cat greet you when you arrive home after a tiring day at work.

Jenny also moved her studio from Shanxi Nan Lu to Taikang Lu. More information about the new studio will be posted here in the next day or so.

Relevant Posts
Buying a House In 13 Steps
State of the Renovation

Learning
Education is my livelihood and I got turned on by the possibility of student created digital content and learning communities as engines for learning. This is still very much a concept and is something that I want to take much further in 2008 given that you need lots of bandwidth to make these things happen. The IBO Information Literacy and Shanghai’s Learning 2Cn really inspired me that learning can be fun, exciting and international.

Relevant Posts
Blogging For Schools
How Many Computers Does It Take To Turn On A Teacher?
Are You A Digital Immigrant Or Digital Native?

The Internet
This has been another great year for Internet tools including Twitter, Google Calendar, GMail, Google Reader, Firefox, Firefox extensions, the Flock browser, RememberTheMilk, Fring, Facebook, Shozu and blogging. It has also been a frustrating year, because the Internet offers the possibility to cater all my information, communication and entertainment needs in one big cloud. The truth is that DRM, censorship and bandwidth continue to be obstacles that prevent normal Internet users in China and elsewhere from getting everything that the Internet can offer. I don’t know how many hours have been wasted by slow Internet connections, blocked sites and timeout errors. I hope we have a much better year for connectivity in 2008 and that different services become far more inter operable.

My favourite website of the year has definitely been Lifehacker for excellent technology and productivity tips. Leo Laporte’s TWIT network continues to produce high quality shows, but I have also been enjoying Tekzilla from Revision 3. There is still a gap in the market for a child friendly Internet tech video show.

Gadgets and Desktop Software
I became an obsessive Windows Mobile user, because it kept me blogging and connected on long bus journeys, although it often crashes at inopportune moments making me curse it as much I enjoy it. I had a look at the Iphone and admired it, although I am not prepared to invest in one given that I spent a fortune on buying and renovating a house. I would love to buy a tripped out MacBook to run Windows, Mac and Linux on the same box, but I will keep that in check while I save up spending money for our planned European vacation. In the meantime, I bought my wife a fantastic Asus Eeepc for 3000 RMB and gave my old Dell more mileage by running Ubuntu Feisty and Gutsy Gibbons on it. Ubuntu has served me well as a robust open source OS serving my everyday computing needs, although I screwed up an upgrade, which lost me a little data (and lots of time). I ended the year by setting up a robust and ridiculously cheap offline backup solution using Jungledisk and Amazon’s S3.

Relevant Posts
Lifehacker on Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile Must Have Apps

Music and Film
I continue to enjoy my Emusic monthly subscription. $10 a month entitles me to 30 unprotected MP3 songs and it works on Ubuntu. Highlights of the year have included Fridge’s “Eph Reissue” and I am a Robot and Proud’s “The Electricity in Your House Wants To Sing”. We have access to more films than we could ever, which we enjoy on our new big screen projector that has turned our living room into a cinema. We have recently enjoyed “Rescue Dawn”, “Zoo”, “Shortbus”. Films is going to become an even bigger part of our life as we start to show our favourite crazy movies to friends in Jenny’s studio on a weekly basis. I regret not writing more film and music reviews, although it has been a busy year and I feel my blog lacks a focus.

I wish anyone who reads this has had a great year and can look forward with enthusiasm to an even better 2008.

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Tags: Shanghai, culture, blogs

It would be good to find out about Chinese technology trends from a local point of view and I am not talking about the platitudinal state sponsored media or general English language news blogs. I would like to read a well informed local English language technology blog that is on par with the best coverage from Techcrunch. It seems I may have found something good to put into my RSS reader. This morning, I came across a Chinese column in The Register by David Feng, which mentioned that Chinese net users have recently embraced their own version of Twitter called Jiwai.de. Here is an extract:

Meet the local Twitter, Jiwai.de. Hosted fully inside mainland China, fast, and all in Chinese, it’s Twitter for 172 million. It’s probably no wonder that it’s been all the rage. It’s both local (remember China’s really a huge intranet at that) and it’s in the local lingo.

And then there’s the interface. Does Jiwai.de look like Twitter? It doesn’t, actually. Much of Twitter is in sky-blue. Jiwai.de is more orange-y. And it has tabs – the stuff you don’t see on Twitter.

Jiwai.de or Twitter? | Reg Developer

It turns out that David has been syndicating some posts from the Chinese Blognation site, which seems to be just what I was looking for. Blognation has sites covering technology and Web 2.0 stories in thirteen countries, although recent internal strife means that the future of the blognation network is uncertain if not unlikely. ( See this announcement by Blognation’s boss, Sam Sethi). I hope that David Feng can continue to blog full time about Chinese technology issues even if Blognation does not survive.

While we are in this space, there is another worthy English language technology blog that deserves to be added to your blog feed. It is called The China Web2.0 Review. Both sites are in Technorati’s Top 100,000 and the Chinese Blognation site has content that has been picked up by the Register so it gives me some confidence that the sites have some authority. Beyond spotting obvious mistakes and checking the response to stories, it is pretty difficult for a non Chinese speaker to audit these sites for errors. I like Techcrunch for keeping me informed about all sorts of new services from Ning to Flock, but their track record on China is pretty shaky. I lost confidence in Techcrunch’s Chinese coverage when they falsely informed their readers that Google had been blocked by the GFW. (See this post) China Blognation and China Web2.0 Review are both written by native Chinese speakers who are based in this country so they should be in a better position to avoid such basic errors.

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Tags: China, Internet, blogs, media, technology

You may have noticed that we’ve been getting our secondary students to set up blogs or weblogs as part of their ICT classes. I want to get as many people in the BISS learning community blogging as possible. I have been writing Catshanghai for the past year while I enjoy reading and participating in other people blogs on a daily basis. I’d like to shed a little light on the practice of blogging, why I think it is an amazing communication tool and share a few tips that I have picked up along the way.

Blogging is just a way of publishing new information on a website. That information is often text, but it can also include photographs, sound recordings, videos and even interactive animations or games. Previously, you needed to be very good at writing webcode or using complex software such as Dreamweaver to make webpages and websites. Blogging tools make it much simpler and quicker for normal people to write and maintain their websites, because you can add text or pictures just like you would in a Word document or PowerPoint show. It is becoming easier all the time.

Two weeks ago, I talked about the increasing power of the Internet to give ordinary people a voice for the first time. Blogs are a great example of this, because you can reach an audience of thousands or even millions as long as you have the imagination and passion to say something worthwhile that other people want to look at. Getting an audience is just half of the story. The medium becomes really powerful when the readers start participating by writing comments back. Such conversations can then develop into meaningful relationships and communities between people who are located anywhere. My favourite examples of blogs that behave this way are Lifehacker and Techcrunch.

From a learning point of view, it is really powerful to imagine students sharing ideas and solving problems by finding an expert and getting the answers to their questions. Alan November goes further and suggests that learners will be far more motivated if they make their own content that is published to a wider audience on the Internet. A podcast show that is going to be publicly available through the Itunes store is going to have more meaning to a student than an essay in an exercise book that is only ever read by two people.We’re starting to make steps along this path by setting up our own blogging website. Students have been receiving Email invitations from me to setup accounts on this website where they can keep their own blogs. It is already on the Internet for BISS students to look at and comment on each others’ blog posts. I am starting to get students to write diaries of what they have been doing in their ICT lessons, but I would be really happy if the student blogs were used to write about anything that they are interested in. We need to make sure that everybody knows how to blog safely before we open it up to anyone on the Internet wanting to see our blog posts and give comments.

What do I mean by safe blogging? There are scary stories about teenagers being befriended on the Internet by unsavoury adults pretending to be teenagers. Fortunately, such incidents are less common than headlines would lead you to believe. A more common problem is cyberbullying where children and adults receive threatening or humiliating messages in Emails, instant messages, blog posts and Internet videos. Fortunately, there are some sensible precautions that students can follow to keep their Internet use trouble free.

1. Think carefully before you write anything, because when it is written other people can find out what you have been writing.
2. Only write or publish information that you would be happy for your parents, friends and teachers to read, see or listen to.
3. Avoid using the Internet to bully others or spread false rumours.
4. Do not use the Internet to give out information about yourself, including telephone numbers, addresses or even photographs.
5. If you come across a harmful message, tell your parents or teachers immediately.
6. Go back and make sure your blogs and Internet sites do not give out personal information.

Parents can support safe Internet use by keeping an eye on the websites that their children are looking at, which I am sure they already do.

With these safety tips in mind, I’m really excited about the meaningful conversations that are starting to open up as our students (and maybe some of our teachers and parents) start blogging with each other.

I love these pictures!

See this link.

Contrast this with Will Richardson’s recent impressions of Shanghai.

And then there is the old part of Shanghai, the “real” China, the part where a restaurant may be a couple of chairs and a table on a street corner where people can sit after buying some type of meat or fish on a stick that’s been barbecued on a makeshift grill built on to the back of a 30-year-old bicycle. A place where people dry their clothes and their linens on lines or fences or poles…anything that works. A place where you can buy these large, loud crickets housed in clay pots or small, bamboo cages and then enter them into some type of insect cage match for sport. A place where in almost every dimly lit storefront or window you can see people selling and bartering during the day, and lazing about, smoking cigarettes, playing cards or board games at night. A place where elderly couples stroll slowly along the sidewalks while half-crazed scooter drivers and cyclists weave in and out among them. A place where, according to Jeff, blocks of people may be “removed” overnight, their homes razed with amazing speed to make room for new big, Western buildings. A place where you can fill yourself up on really good dumplings for a dollar or less.

I was really impressed by Will Richardson when he came to Shanghai at the Learning2Cn Conference. His comments made me realise that writing for a group blog is not always good for your own writing, because you end up losing your voice in the quest for the lowest common denominator. He said that writing a blog is very personal and the best examples of the genre have a clear identity and voice. If you are not true to yourself when you sit down to write a post then the it is not as good and people will see through it anyway. Omitting the “I” does not guarantee that your writing is honest and water tight. I think I wrote my best posts when I was only writing for myself rather than for any external audience.

Looking at the photographs and reading Will’s blog post helped me wake up to this special situation that I find myself in China. When you have been here for a while, it is easy to take all the mad observations for granted. I do not blink anymore when I see overladen bicycles, homicidal taxis or young children defecating on the pavement. I think that’s a problem, because everything should feel fresh and new all the time whether you have lived in a place for a week or for three years. It is always good to see your place from an outsider’s point of view even if you’ve become relatively numb and seasoned.

I reckon I should get a copy of Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind to stop me from going on auto pilot as I continue to rack up years in Shanghai.

Yes, we have a new resident in our house. He is a young spunky cat that we have named Chog, short for Chinese mog. Do you get it? He had been living on the landing outside Jenny’s shop for a few months, basically neglected and he was about to be given away when we stepped in and gave him a nice home with us.

Chog likes to explore every nook and cranny of the house even the shower. He enjoys playing ball and eating crunchy biscuits. He oscillates from being very affectionate to being a little devil who attacks your legs especially at 9pm, which turns out to be his witching hour. He has adopted my computer chair as his home and scratchpad, which means I have less time to compute and blog. He is also a real cat from Shanghai.

We love cats in this house!

I have decided to setup a separate blog with a ‘serious’ technology focus and keep all the fun Shanghai personal blog stuff here. That way, I can herd up all the geeks into the geekspace and all the non geeks can come here without being polluted by too much tech speak. That doesn’t mean I will write twice as much, but I will have more of a focus and put this in the right place. Maybe people will even read my writing from time to time.

Keep posted for more details about my new ‘serious’ technology blog.