For the last few weeks I’ve been silent on the blog, having been occupied finishing final book edits and working on special Olympics assignments with the Wall Street Journal doing reporting, video and multimedia.

But one thing that did crane my neck while zipping around the city was the sight of a London cab in Beijing taxi colors. So I finally tracked down one of the 30 new London cabs driving the streets of the Olympic city. Made under an agreement between Geely (China) and London Taxis International, the TX4 was brought in as a nod to the international tourists and the Paralympic Games that follow in September. I was lucky enough to find one queueing up, and the driver interested in gabbing.

He said they are indeed limited, to around 30 in the city, and they will continue to stay in service even after all the Olympics are over. They are wheelchair capable, and are left-hand drive, unlike their British-bound counterparts.

It’s August 8, 2008, the day the Olympics officially begin, and the weather is probably close the worst case scenario for the organizers. Hazy, hot, humid and smoggy. It’s not clear it’s “dangerous” per se, but it doesn’t make for good pictures. (Taken 5:50 am)

It seems yesterday’s dispatch of sites being spontaneously unblocked was part of a larger move. Today, Hu Jintao held a rare pow-wow of media outlets in the wake of Internet restrictions being eased. From the WSJ:

The 66-year-old Mr. Hu’s appearance before foreign reporters Friday was a rare move into the public spotlight for a leader who has long shunned it. Mr. Hu has never given a news conference in China or abroad.

From the BBC:

Hosting the Games showed China’s desire for peaceful global ties, he said.

His comments came amid apparent concessions by Beijing in a row over internet access for journalists.

More sites which had been blocked in Olympic media centres - such as that of rights group Amnesty International - were accessible on Friday, journalists said.

Here’s a rather representative list of sites that are now available in China, which include newspaper, magazine and NGO web sites previously hard blocked. This is taken from some that were sent on a recent Great Firewall list, and some I’ve added.

• 西方媒体：(Western media)
• 路透社 http://cn.reuters.com/
• 维基百科 http://zh.wikipedia.org/
• 自由亚洲电台 http://www.rfa.org/mandarin/
• 美国之音 http://www.voanews.com/chinese/
• 华尔街日报 http://chinese.wsj.com/gb/index.asp
• 金融时报中文 http://www.ftchinese.com/sc/index.jsp
• 香港媒体：(Hong Kong media)
• 明报新闻网 http://www.mingpaonews.com/
• 明报月刊 http://www.mingpaomonthly.com/cfm/main.cfm
• 亚洲时报 http://www.atchinese.com/
• 亚洲周刊 http://www.yzzk.com/cfm/main.cfm
• 南华早报 http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/
• 南华早报中文 http://olympics.scmp.com/GCO_Simpchi_Index.aspx
• 苹果日报 http://www1.appledaily.atnext.com/template/apple/sec_main.cfm?
• 台湾媒体：(Taiwan media)
• 联合新闻网 http://udn.com/NEWS/main.html
• 中国时报 http://news.chinatimes.com/mainpage.htm
• 自由时报 http://www.libertytimes.com.tw/index
• NGOs
• Human Rights Watch http://www.hrw.org
• Reporters Sans Frontiers http://www.rsf.org (Chinese site unblocked only in Olympics media center)
• Amnesty International http://www.amnesty.org

This is actually quite remarkable for folks living in China. The “Big Three” NGOs that have been unrelenting critics of China have been reliably blocked for years. YZZK (Yazhou Zhoukan) and Apple Daily both in Hong Kong, have done some of the most critical journalism regarding China.
RSF, acknowledging the good news, doesn’t take much time to celebrate and continues to push hard.

“This partial lifting of censorship shows that the Chinese government is not completely insensitive to pressure. If the entire world had been pressuring China since 2001, even before these games were assigned to Beijing, the situation might have been different today. And perhaps imprisoned journalists would have been freed before the opening ceremony.

Let’s be clear though: these unblocked sites are still subject to the sophisticated keyword blocking system of the GFW, which looks at both URLs and the body of web sites. The sites above are no longer blocked, as a rule, but the content on the site might still trigger a block. On the plus side, it seems the keyword filtering of the GFW seems to be less sensitive than normal, but the big taboo subjects are still blocked quickly.

NBC Nightly News did a piece on the blocking yesterday (July 31). I was amused when Danwei’s Jeremy Goldkorn was on camera demonstrating how to use a virtual private network and noted that living with the net nanny wasn’t that big a deal.

Goldkorn: “I don’t see that it’s really going to impede anybody’s work.”
NBC: “Do you think the foreign media is just whining a little bit?”
Goldkorn: “Yeah. Absolutely they’re whining.”

I suppose one could make the argument that leaving the restricted GFW “harmonized” Internet as-is would have given foreign journalists a real taste of what China’s Internet users deal with every day. Now, they get a freed-up, “special” Internet to do their job and this issue goes away for the next three weeks. The question is, after the party’s over, will any of the sites above stay unblocked.

On the evening of July 31, 2008, Beijing time, reports started to roll in on Twitter that Web sites previously considered hard blocked in China were suddenly accessible. Among the sites now allowed for me (using Beijing CNC as ISP) and others include:

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/chinese/
• http://zh.wikipedia.org
• http://www.rfa.org (Radio Free Asia)
• http://www.atnext.com (Apple Daily HK, newspaper critical of Beijing)

These were all considered pretty firmly blocked for a long time, so it’s a pleasant surprise. Perhaps the cry of reporters in the Beijing Olympic Media Center finally made it through to the organizers that they should follow through on their promise.

Public relations-wise, putting a censored Internet in the press center simply seemed like a terribly dumb move. Yes, before the Olympics even start, why don’t you completely poke and upset the press corp and give them plenty of material for harping on human rights and censorship in China. Maybe they thought the journalists would be too busy writing about the bad pollution problems instead.

So for now, kudos to the authorities for opening up these sites, even though every indication is that the authorities will revert to pre-Olympic policies around October 17. John Kennedy suggested a betting pool as to when the sites will be reblocked. My bet: 8 hours and 8 minutes after the Olympic closing ceremony.

Let’s not forget though there are plenty of sites still blocked in China, including Tor Project, Amnesty International, Wikia, The Pirate Bay, AboutUs.org, and LiveJournal, for which Twitterer wangzhongxia could not help observing:

I don’t kno why Livejournal is a bigger threat to China than things like RFA mandarin edition

Sometimes you need a sense of humor to deal with the net nanny. 

I take back my gripes about paying Accor hotels US $30 a night for Internet access. We have a new winner, namely the Beijing Olympics Media Village. My wife who is staying there already told me they were going to charge reporters for Internet access (and a censored one at that) but now the details have been posted to Slashdot, the online tech salon:

“Working for the Olympics as an IT contractor, I recently moved to the Media Village (where all of the reporters live) and was surprised the there was no free internet. BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee of the 2008 Olympic Games) is charging a ridiculous amount of money for ADSL service: for

• 512/512 it costs 7712.5 RMB (1,131.20 USD);
• 1M/512 it costs 9156.25 (1,342.95 USD);
• 2M/512 it costs a whopping 11,700 RMB (1,716.05 USD).

That is for only one month! For extra features like a fixed IP? That costs an additional 450 RMB (66 USD). I just can’t believe that not only do I have to deal with the Great Firewall of China, but also pay through the nose to use it!”

While I can imagine that it is “noise” for NBC and the big guys, it is not inconsequential for other news outfits.

I suggest someone be kind and bring an Airport Express or other Wifi router and share the Internet love.

Since I’ve gotten so many inquiries on the fate of the dog in the last post, you’ll be glad to hear that it’s been adopted by someone in the complex until the owner can be found.

URGENT as of Monday afternoon, May 12, 2008.

Large sheepdog found in Central Park (新城国际) in Chaoyang district: appears to be a Shetland Sheepdog, found 24 hours ago on Sunday afternoon. Will be turned over to the police in the next day, according to Central Park management, and fate will likely not be good.

Details: Dog was found Sunday afternoon at west gate of Central Park, near The Place (世贸天阶), Global Trade Mansion, the new Eton School branch (伊顿新城国际社区中心) and Shanghdu Soho (SOHO尚都). Identifying characteristic: it was found with a colored collar. Responds to Chinese commands. Pictures follow. If anyone has any idea whose dog it is or can pass along this information please pass along this info.

Contact: Go to the management office at Central Park, or I can be contacted at +86 1365 108 1662

The Beijing authorities have an edict against large dogs, hence the urgency. [1] [2]

UPDATE: “Good news everyone.” The dog has been taken in on a foster basis by a resident until/if the comes and claims it. Thanks to all that spread the word.

Billionaire Warren Buffet at his annual shareholder’s meeting this week warned about getting too sanctimonious in criticizing China. Via The Standard (HK).

Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett issued strong support for the Beijing Olympics saying any effort to boycott the games would be “a terrible mistake.”

“The United States had a similar history of human rights trouble. A black man’s vote once counted as only of a white man’s vote and women were not allowed to vote at all, but in the end those issues were resolved,” he told a crowd of 31,000 in Nebraska.

Good for Buffett, one of the few folks putting things in historical perspective, something news outlets in the States fail to do.

Vice-chairman Charlie Munger via the Wall Street Journal was even more emphatic:

[Munger] didn’t pull any punches. For critics of China, “ask yourself the question: Is China more or less imperfect as the decades have gone by?” Mr. Munger, a professed admirer of Asian cultures, said. “The answer is that China is moving in the right direction. I think it’s the worst thing to pick on something about somebody you don’t like and obsess about it.”

From behind South China Morning Post’s paid firewall, here’s an article about a university student’s Facebook account mysteriously being shut down. No firm proof yet about why it was disabled but it may be related to organizing protests in Hong Kong ahead of the torch arriving on Friday.

Facebook cuts protester’s accounts

Jimmy Cheung
Apr 29, 2008

The university student who plans to protest with Tibetan flags during the Olympic torch relay on Friday says her Facebook account has been disabled for “persistent misuse of the site”.

Christina Chan Hau-man, 21, said she had received a warning from Facebook that her message volume had approached its limit a few days ago.

“I wrote back and explained that I had to respond to those who wanted to join my action,” she said. “Some 60 people have said they will join.”

Ms Chan said her account had been disabled on Sunday “for persistent misuse of the site” and information related to the protest had been deleted.

“It may be political censorship. But I don’t know what is happening exactly.”

Ms Chan said she would continue with her plan but believed fewer people would join because she could no longer reach her supporters via Facebook.

Facebook was not available for comment yesterday. Its rules say users should not disseminate content that would constitute, encourage or provide instructions for a criminal offence, violate the rights of any party, or otherwise create liability or violate any law.

League of Social Democrats chairman Wong Yuk-man said his Facebook account, which carried anti-Beijing content, had been disabled last Tuesday, without any reason being given.

Earlier today on Twitter I commented about the “insanity” that is Robert Scoble following 21,000+ people on the group messaging and microblogging service. Since his bot (software robot) monitors everything on Twitter for mentions of his name, he saw my comment and challenged me.

Scobleizer @fuzheado thinks he knows the point of Twitter and says I don’t. This might be interesting. Might.

Twitter limits you to 140 characters per post, so I had to be succinct:

Twitter is a modern digital commons - nonhierarchical, transparent, open, human-speed. Once bots inhabit it, tragedy perhaps.

Earlier that day I was thinking about what Twitter “was” before the Scoble tweet.

Twitter’s model is simple but powerful — complete transparency. Anyone in the Twitterverse can see what you’re receiving, who you are following and who’s following you. It creates a continually changing set of readers and writers, allowing peer discovery faster than any other SNS. Some other features help.

“Retweeting” an interesting post to your followers effectively bridges two disconnected cliques. The directed “@user” messages send an exploratory “Tweet” to make contact with new peers. It’s great in its simplicity, and the Twitter API furthers extendibility and usability.

The Internet had a lot of naysayers in the 1990s — people complained it was a peer-to-peer system that created ghettos. Terms like narrowcasting, personalized media, customized front pages and the Daily Me all implied compartmentalized lonely existences. Twitter does the opposite, by embracing radical transparency to support serendipitous discovery and social mixing. Perhaps it’s why a number of Twitterers have been noticing they spend a lot less time on Facebook. They’ve hit a wall with their “trusted” network of friends. They’ve tagged photos, thrown sheep, played 100 games of Scrabulous and reunited with old classmates. But they didn’t really broaden their horizons.

For English-language China-oriented bloggers, Twitter has fostered a nimble community whether it’s about Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, business, arts, pop culture, academic, Olympics, you name it. Suddenly a disparate set of folks are discovering each other, trading 140-character info nuggets faster than ever before. And with recent Olympic torch dramas and Carrefour boycotts, it’s been the only info stream that can keep up with breaking events.

Elliott Ng at CNReviews.com has a metric-heavy analysis of who’s who in this sphere, based on the list created by Christine Lu (the ultimate “connector” in Tipping Point parlance). It’s like a celebrity who’s in and who’s out list.

But as Twitter grows, there is the risk the signal may not keep up with the noise. Spam, bots and scalability are always a problem to new digital commons spaces. There is a very good chance Twitter, a “faddish web app“, could be the CB radio of Web 2.0 if it can’t find a way to scale with its new-found fame.

Let’s hope we don’t refer to it as the PointCast of 2008 and wake up with a bad hangover.