China Digital Media Readings for January 31st

• Posted by bbishop
• on January 31st, 2012

• MIH Is A Good China Partner, Yahoo Is A Bad China Partner | DigiCha -
• Sina Weibo deleted posts archive | The Rice Cooker 電飯煲 -
• Monopoly to Blame for Online Rail Ticketing Debacle -Caijing – The Spring Festival travel season, or “chunyun,” is the world’s largest annual migration movement. During the 40-day travel rush, there will be 3.158 billion passenger trips. Among them, 235 million passengers are expected to choose rail as their mode of transportation, indicating that the Ministry of Railways (MOR) will have to allocate at least 235 million tickets during this period.
  Since the start of the 2012 Spring Festival travel season, the MOR has implemented a three-pronged approach for passenger ticketing: Internet booking, telephone booking, and real-name ticket purchasing. The changes in 2012 have led to increases in the variety and effectiveness of access channels for buying tickets.
  Despite some notable improvements, the flaws of the new system were brought to light at the start of the travel season. In early January, China’s only official railway ticketing website 12306.cn was overwhelmed with the pressure of more than 1 billion daily visits. The frequent downtime and unresponsiveness of the site caused a flood of complaints from users. The MOR’s explanation was insufficient bandwidth and inadequate advance estimates.
  Caijing learned that 12306.cn was originally designed to handle an average daily traffic of only 300 to 400 million passengers for high-speed rail and bullet train online ticket sales. However, on the eve of the Spring Festival travel period, the MOR unexpectedly decided to include ordinary train ticket sales as well, resulting in far more visits to the site than originally anticipated. “It was like putting a big foot in a small pair of shoes,” said one insider. Traffic reached a peak of 1.4 billion hits in one day, making it “the world’s busiest website” and crippling the site’s server in the process. Nevertheless, some improvements have been made since the site launched in early January.
• Thousands Line Up For Foxconn’s Jobs in Zhengzhou (video) » M.I.C. Gadget – On the 30th of January, thousands of hopefuls stood for hours outside a labour agency located in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou. The lines stretched more than 200 meters along the road, and the people who were waiting in line with their applications just hope to get a job at Foxconn as the electronics contracting giant ramps up hiring for its iPhone plant at Zhengzhou.
• 百度推迟发布2011年第四季度财报至2月底 _百度（BIDU） _i美股 – why did baidu $bidu delay its earnings release by several weeks?
• Intellectual Microblog Exodus? | China Power – Sina Weibo microblog, China’s equivalent of Twitter, has seen its reputation take a hit with news that a number of leading academics and public intellectuals have declared that they no longer use the site because they believe new registration rules are too strict and that it is stifling freedom of expression. $sina
• 新浪域名故障 暴露超五成重点域名有风险 – 行业 – 21世纪网 – china needs to up its “domain name security”
• 新浪网遭遇大面积故障 部分地区用户无法访问-搜狐IT – much of sina’s website was down for almost 30 minutes this afternoon $sina
• Product Manager, Future Technologies (R&D) at Pearson in Beijing – Job | LinkedIn – The role: Provide Product Management guidance for R&D activities which will rapidly accelerate Pearson’s introduction of innovative mobile and tablet offerings.  The role is based in Beijing.
• So Not Helping: Chinese Government Publication Lauds Twitter’s New Policy | PandoDaily – I still don’t disagree with the substance of the op-ed. But now I feel a little uncomfortable with that fact. The Chinese and Thai government aren’t exactly helping Twitter turn the PR mess around by voicing their enthusiastic support. With friends like these…
• Official Chinese Newspaper Endorses Twitter’s New Approach To Censorship | Sinocism – Well done Twitter. China still is not going to let you in but you have earned some brownie points (should we call them Panda points?) for helping China with its Internet censorship arguments. And you have reminded us all that free speech is under attack everywhere.
• TV through the Internet steps forward | Industries | chinadaily.com.cn – China’s leading Internet protocol television (IPTV) operator, Shanghai-based BesTV, is vowing to reintroduce TV to people’s everyday lives, bringing back the traditional family atmosphere.
  BesTV New Media, a subsidiary under Shanghai Media Group (SMG), was the first media company in China to offer IPTV. It launched an initial public offering on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in December, with some calling it the first new media stock in China.
• Rebecca MacKinnon: Inside China’s censorship machine | Full Comment | National Post – In fall 2009, I sat in a large auditorium festooned with red banners and watched as Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, paraded onstage with executives from 19 other companies to receive the “China Internet Self-Discipline Award.” Officials from the quasi-governmental Internet Society of China praised them for fostering “harmonious and healthy Internet development.” In the Chinese regulatory context, “healthy” is a euphemism for “porn-free” and “crime-free.” “Harmonious” implies prevention of activity that would provoke social or political disharmony.
• Twitter, Democracy, and Internet Freedom | TechCrunch- fontaine carrying water for hypocritical us government. how many times has us government subpoenaed twitter and tried to keep it secret?//Editor’s Note: Richard Fontaine, a Senior Advisor at the Center for a New American Security, is the co-author of Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age.

  The truth is that the U.S. government will always enforce some limits on free expression, and our political system will continually wrestle with where the limits should be drawn. But we should not allow this to undermine the important cause of promoting global Internet freedom. Authoritarian governments will inevitably attempt to shield themselves from criticism and pressure by pointing to democracies that ban online expression. Denying them the opportunity to do so successfully will require the United States and other to articulate, publicly and consistently, the critical distinction between the restrictions placed on online speech by democracies and the repression favored by many autocracies.

  The distinction rests not only in the kind of banned speech, but also in the process by which the decision to restrict it is made. True democracies bar forms of expression based on law and regulation, and they make decisions to do so in accordance with due process. Their pronouncements are generally transparent, with decision makers accountable to the law, to legislatures, and ultimately to the people, who can turn them out of office in periodic elections. There is a world of difference between a democracy banning speech on “security” grounds when the citizens know what the decision is, who made it, and how to change it, and a dictatorship banning its own “security”-infringing speech by autocratic fiat.

• Twitter critics confuse politics with business decision-global times- Networks like Facebook and Twitter played a big role in pushing forward the events including both the Arab Spring and riots in London last year. The tendency has prompted governments to curb the use of social networking platforms in times of emergency. But there is also some debate on the boundaries of the freedom of speech.It is impossible to have boundless freedom, even on the Internet and even in countries that make freedom their main selling point.

  The announcement of Twitter might have shown that it has already realized the fact and made a choice between being an idealistic political tool as many hope and following pragmatic commercial rules as a company.

• 探照网络舆情监测：政府部门成主要客户来源_中国经济网??国家经济门户- 2012年1月7日，山西省疾控中心科员王烨连续五年“吃空饷”累积10余万元的新闻被曝光，引发网民的大量关注。同时，这条信息也开始进入网络舆情监测者的视线，成为他们用来分析的典型案例之一。　　这些网络舆情监测机构，利用网络舆情监测软件，动态监测网民对此事的帖子、评论转发等情况，从而绘制出一份每日该事件网民关注度的折线图。
• Tiger Mom Meet Sunzi Dad? | Sinocism – latest post by yours truly
• 人民网评：重塑网络社会 涵养良性心态-搜狐IT -
• 中国电信确认引进iPhone4S 打破联通垄断 – 消费·传媒 – 21世纪网 – 21cbh says China Telecom deal for iphone 4s is signed, will launch q1 $aapl
• Chinese Internet Companies Jump on WSJ Report of Facebook Initial Offering – Bloomberg -
• McConnell, Chertoff and Lynn: China’s Cyber Thievery Is National Policy—And Must Be Challenged – WSJ.com – It is more efficient for the Chinese to steal innovations and intellectual property than to incur the cost and time of creating their own.
  BY MIKE MCCONNELL, MICHAEL CHERTOFF AND WILLIAM LYNN
• Sina Weibo to Face the Tencent Empire in 2012 | TechRice- It’s the Chinese Lunar New Year in China, the Year of Dragon, which feeds a television frenzy that culminates in CCTV’s (China Central Television) Spring Festival Show. Watching these shows I noticed that Tencent Weibo–not $Sina –is the dominant partner (surely because they paid the most money).In 2012, Tencent will continue to push forward aggressively in social and present a formidable challenge to Sina. In my first blog post of 2012, let’s have a look at how the two top microblog players in China will fare against each other.

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