Today in China

Everybody on the net heard about the Street View feature of Google Maps. Well, it’s available in Beijing!!!

Well, not really…And I suppose it will still take a very loooong time before we get it from Google. But fortunately, there is an alternative. City8.com provide a very similar feature.

Here is for example a Street View of Beer Mania! Note that the picture must have been taken after 6 in the morning because there is nobody on the terrasse…

Click on the picture to go directly to City8 Street View

Google unofficially introduced a new feature in the Image Search Engine… the Facial Recognition!

Try this, go to the Google Image Search Engine and search for China. You will get maps of China, images of the Great Wall as well as some pictures with Chinese people.

Now, add “&imgtype=face” to the url. You will receive only mostly receive imagesof people!

Similarly, adding “&imgtype=news” will trigger a search of images related to Google News items only.

Source:
Ars Technica, 2007-05-30

With the new Search without boundaries Google features, you may search the Chinese language web in your own language!

For this, open the ‘Search Results’ of Google Translate. Now, let’s define that we want to search Simplified Chinese pages but in English.

We search for ‘beijing olympics’ and Google automatically proposes ‘北京奥运’ as a translation that will be used to search the web in Chinese. However, if the translation doesn’t seem appropriate for you, you may still edit it and provide a better one.

Below, you’ll then get Chinese Simplified search results and a (machine) translation of these search results into English. Choose the result you are interested in and continue browsing from there with all the Chinese pages automatically machine-translated for you by Google.

So, what searches do you want to do on the Chinese Web which opens suddenly in front of your eyes?

I’m back from vacation after a nice Paris-Beijing flight… I’ve been upgraded to Business Class…

Then, the traffic from the airport to my appartment was pretty decent and now, guess what? I’m stuck on a connection speed that reminds me the time of the first dialup modems!

And the reason - for the ones who are still wondering - is the major 7.2 and 6.7 earthquakes that happened on December 26th 20 kilometers South of Taiwan. The following cables have been broken: Sina-US cable, Asia-Pacific Cable 1, Asia-Pacific Cable 2, FLAG Cable, Asia-Euro Cable and FNAL cable. This strongly affects us in China but also people from Taiwan, Japan, Korea.

I hope they will fix it ASAP or it will probably cause a major economic crisis in China. Just imagine all the Gold Farmers that are unable to connect to overseas World of Warcraft servers in Asia!!!

Update
According to the authorities it will be at least another two weeks before the Internet connections go back to normal.

Source:
Boing Boing, 2006 12 27

Wang Yue Si, 23 years old, left China for Japan 2 years ago. Last April, he started to resell gold and magical items from MMORPG games on e-Bay and related auction websites. Becoming a professional farmer, he started to send money to his bank accounts in China. These transactions were noticed by the Japanese authorities and he got arrested, his student visa not allowing him to conduct commercial activities in Japan. The police evaluates his total revenue to 1 million €!

1 million € in 6 months!!! Can you imagine this?

It’s that time of the year again… The temperature dropped from 15C to 5C in one night. In less than 2 month - except for the lucky ones - it will be one more Xmas in Beijing. But Emilie is helping us going through the winter with a really nice review of the French backeries and restaurant!

All the reviews are both in French and English and at the end of the reviews, you’ll have the Address Book with the addresses, phone numbers and web sites.

By the way, she calls it the French backeries and restaurants but I saw at least 3 Belgians in the list!

So now, the less you can do is follow the link and add some comments on her blog so say thanks to Emilie!

YouTube’s co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen and their 65 employees must be quite excited and happy about this acquisition. What about us, poor users?

Both YouTube and Google provide online videos for the Internet users all over the world… All over the world? Not really… If you go to the Google Video Website from China and try to watch a video, you will have the unpleasant surprise to get the following message:

Thanks for your interest in Google Video.
Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn’t available in your country.
We hope to make this feature available more widely in the future, and we really appreciate your patience.

So far, YouTube was providing a good - if not better - alternative to Google for the Chinese Netizens. I hope - I mean… I really, really hope - that it will stay like that after this acquisition. According to a Google Statement, YouTube will continue to operate independently with its headquarters in San Bruno, California. Let’s see…

Source:
People’s Daily Online - 2006 10 10

Links:
YouTube
Google Videos

Here comes a new online cultural E-Magazine. It seems that they are spending a lot of time to provide this nice looking and fresh E-Magazine. And the first issue looks promizing!

They first cover the history of the Beijing Opera, explaining the different roles with their respective make-up and costumes.

They continue with a description of the Wenshou, these mysterious zoomorphic creatures you can see on Chinese roofs. What is the description of each of them - HangShi, DouNiu, XieZhi, XiaYu, SuanNi, Sea Horse, Heavenly Steed, Lion, Phoenix, Dragon, Phoenix-riding God, etc. - and why are they aligned on the roof?

Did you know that the ancestor of Football was invented in China. The name of the game was CuJu and even FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter recognizes this fact! It was already played by Chinese people during the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC - 24 AD) and considered both a form of entertainment and a good way to train the soldiers.

Okay, I let you discover the rest of the magazine by yourself! I give you just one more topic from the magazine. They introduced it with a riddle…

Two sisters of the same height,
Together they go in and out of the kitchen.
Sour, bitter, or spicy, a thousand flavors,
They are always the first to taste.

Who are they?

Link
New cultural E-Magazine: NiHao from China

With the update of Google Earth coverage of Beijing, especially East of the 2nd Ring Road, it’s getting easier to explain to people how to go to any given place in Beijing.

As an example, I just updated the map showing how to go to Beer Mania. ^_^

I noticed this morning that Google Earth for Beijing has been updated.
Before, everything East of the 3rd Ring Road was in really bad quality…
And the East of the 3rd Ring Road is quite important! That’s where I live,
where I work, where I hang out…

Check for example the Lido Office, my working place, North East of the
4th Ring Road. You can even see the green umbrellas of Starbucks! That’s
where we have a cup of coffee everyday after lunch… ^_^