It seems the use of video parody has inspired a creative streak in China. At the recent FEAC conference in Manila, I talked about the rise of podcasting (audio and video) in China, and the famous viral video “The Bloody Case That Started From A Steamed Bun” which lampooned the high budget movie “The Promise.”

Roland Soong at ESWN has a story about how Hu Ge’s video has inspired even more creations. But it seeems some folks are not happy. An excerpt:

The targets of the spooks [sic] are two classical Chinese movies: Twinkle Twinkle Red Star (闪闪的红星之潘冬子参赛记) and Railroad Guerilla Brigade (铁道游击队).

A spokesperson for the company that produced Twinkle Twinkle Red Star said: “Hu Ge was making fun of a commercial entertainment movie and did not overstep any moral bottom line. But Twinkle Twinkle Red Star is an acknowledged red classic and its contents have nothing to do with a singing contest. To make fun of it for no apparent reason is incomprehensible. This can only be Internet junk.” But the movie company probably has no recourse because they are up against the state behemoth CCTV.

In round #3, creative netizens made a spoof on the CCTV spoofs (see story in link). This spoof used the used the video clips from Twinkle Twinkle Red Star and Railroad Guerilla Brigade. The difference was that the newly dubbed voice-over contains a lot of obscenties. CCTV has announced: “We will investigate until we get to the bottom of this. We will be merciliess in eradicating this type of behavior.”

Global Voices has a nice interview with Ziboy, a photoblogger in China. He’ll be exhibiting at the 798 artist community in northeast Beijing, so if you’re around, check it out. He’ll use electronic submissions from users on the Internet, and project the pictures at the gallery.

• Flickr group
• Interview at Global Voices
• Exhibition poster

A number of folks have reported that as of two days ago Technorati, the most useful blog search engine, has been inaccessible from inside the PRC. That’s unfortunate, as it had a decent number of Chinese blog sites indexed. Don’t be surprised to see one of the mainland web sites launch something to fill the void.

UPDATE (28-April-2006) - Technorati is accessible again according to folks in Shanghai and Beijing.

Amusing tongue in cheek view of Wikipedia, at Wired.com. A taste:

Why do people talk about Wikipedia so much?
Wikipedia is such a powerful argument engine that it actually leaks out to the rest of the web, spontaneously forming meta-arguments about itself on any open message board.

From the Associated Press, a story about politics in the state of Georgia:

The campaign manager for Secretary of State Cathy Cox resigned on Wednesday amid allegations that he altered an online biography of her Democratic opponent to add a mention of his son’s arrest in a fatal drunk driving accident.

Cox said an internal investigation confirmed that the posting about her opponent, Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor, on Wikipedia, a popular online encyclopedia, came from within her gubernatorial campaign.

I would like to think, the act of someone editing Wikipedia in and of itself is not a sin. But using Wikipedia as a venue for putting embarrassing facts to discredit an opponent should be frowned upon.

Interestingly, this should remind readers that actually not “logging in” is less anonymity than creating a username because Wikipedia records your IP address in the edit history instead as the “user.”
Beware this operational aspect of wikis when not logging in.

From Digg, an amusing story of how someone discovered the US State Department has plagiarized content from Wikipedia, without the proper attribution. So to all those pundits out there, it seems to be good enough for the US government…

Wikipedia, and all Wikimedia related sites, have been blocked in the People’s Republic of China since October 19, 2005. Now, there are ways for PRC-based users to access the content, such as by the trusty proxy server. One lesser known way is via a mirror inside the PRC at wikipedia.CNblog.org, but it is read-only and users cannot edit the content.

Another way for power users to access the Wikipedia site is through another server, as the “Great Firewall” does not block a certain Wikimedia address, but I will not disclose it here, so as to keep that avenue open for PRC users.

However, there is a new encyclopedia being put forth by Baidu, the most popular Chinese language search engine. If you visit baike.baidu.com, you’ll hit the new one which is quite sparse. A quick check with some online Chinese users indicate it isn’t very popular or respected. Baidu owns the copyright on the content, and articles seem to be referenced by an arbitrary number rather than by the subject title. A quick check of some articles also shows some information has been lifted from Wikipedia, without the proper GFDL notices.

Apologies for those who have made bookmarks here or to the RSS, but I’ve just moved the blog to http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/ to make room for other projects. I pledge not to move this for a while!

This week, I’m in Manila, Phillippines for the Free Expression in Asian Cyberspace conference organized by SEAPA which brings together journalists, activists and NGOs from around the Asia region on how the use the Internet to increase virtual citizen conversations.

Prominent folks from the blogsphere, like Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan Zuckerman, Jeff Ooi and Isaac Mao. You can check out the conference blog for a rundown of presentations on “Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia in Manila to share experiences and discuss needs, threats, trends, and issues of ethics and the emerging roles and responsibilities of bloggers, podcasters and the alternative online media.”

Get a life. Well, get a Second Life. I’ve avoided it, but it’s finally reached a point where it can’t be ignored. For the last few weeks, I’ve heard the virtual avatar “game” mentioned on the TWiT podcast, by Rebecca MacKinnon on the Berkman Center’s uses, and finally at the Morph blog about how it will be the venue for a Creative Commons meeting.

It appears the critical mass is gathering in Second Life (as opposed to There.com) and avatar-based interaction has finally reached the big time. Quite a long way from the original The Palace.

But I do have a beef - you’re supposed to choose one of their assigned “last name”s in Second Life, and they’re not only Euro-centric, but they’re incredibly New Yawk - Stiglitz, Greenspan, Krugman, Melnick, Levitt, Spearmann, Meyer, Reisman, Stein. What’s a goy to do? Oy!

So might I suggest some names to add so you don’t alienate about 50% of the world - Wong, Ouyang, Nakamura, Sohn, Nguyen, Ratchadamri, Narayan, Kumar. The real world is diverse. The virtual one should be too.