Catshanghai

A colleague just sent me the following anecdote, which is a great case study about why foreigners in China should never leave their home without their passports until the week after the closing ceremony. Photocopies do not count.
My husband was held 3 hours in a police station 2 weeks ago outside of Shanghai although he [...]

Yesterday we were celebrating the virtues of Twitter as a news flash tool for natural disasters.
The subsequent revelation that tens of thousands of people have died is making some of us uneasy that our self congratulatory tweets and blog posts were somewhat inappropriate.
Kaiser Kuo of Digital Watch wrote a very thoughtful, but ambivalent post about [...]

Reports are emerging on international news sites that the death toll from yesterday’s Sichuan earthquake is 10 000 and rising.
Al Jazeera’s English site reported that there was extensive damage in the epicentre of Wenchuan County and surrounding areas.
The toll is expected to rise sharply as authorities and rescue teams make contact with the worst-hit areas [...]

According to Danwei there was a 7.8 earthquake in Sichuan this afternoon near Chengdu, but news of the event was broken by Twitter. The Telegraph has just reported that more than 100 people have been injured, and that 4 children died when a school collapsed in Chongqing. (Monday 7:58pm).
Robert Scoble also blogged that Twitter scooped [...]

Embedded Video
From June 1st, Chinese people will have to pay to get plastic bags or bring their own. This is a great idea, but how easy will it be to enforce?
Thanks for the link Shanghaiist.
Blogged with Flock

There is a new story spreading around the Internet that video sharing sites are about to become inaccessible from China. Here is an extract from The Guardian:
It was the internet story of 2007, the website that brought you sneezing pandas, laughing babies, an epic battle on the African savannah and a guest appearance by Tony [...]

I spend many hours every week listening to and watching various technology podcasts from Twit, ZD, Revision 3 and CNET. They are all written and presented by former TechTV employees so it little wonder that they are almost exclusively focused on Silicon Valley and North American issues? Occasionally, Europe will get a brief mention and [...]

LONDON (Reuters) - A retired Scottish school teacher was recovering on Monday after spending nearly four days trapped inside a men’s toilet with no food or mobile phone. David Leggat was locked inside the bathroom at a lawn bowling club near the Scottish city of Aberdeen after the door jammed and the handle on the [...]

Accordng to the BBC, a third of UK bloggers are expressing ideas or giving information that could cause trouble for their companies.

Human resources company Croner, which commissioned the study, warned that such bloggers could be sacked from their job for gross misconduct.
Croner surveyed 2,000 people who keep a personal internet blog or diary and 39% [...]

Getting a decent newspaper in Shanghai can be challenging. Sorry Shanghai Daily. No disrespect is intended. Most internatonal newspapers have decent free online versions allowing you to view their content using a web browser, but you always need to be on the Internet and the reading experience is still not as good as picking up [...]