ponderings of the pococurante

These are not my observations, just some points culled from various essays that i found on shanzhaixiehui.cn (China Imitated Association)

Since there’s a growing interest among non-CHinese people about the phenomenon, these points might help clarify the issue somewhat:

1. Shanzhai is a reaction against various forms of monopoly, both economic and cultural.
Example: CCTV has a monopoly on the spring festival galas. One of reasons why there was going to be a shanzhai version (it was canceled) was to challenge that monopoly, to create an alternative choice for the viewer.

HEre is what the director of the failed shanzhai gala said

山寨春晚”的总导演老孟接受采访时说：“这台节目的本意是靠平民的智慧和力量展现草根文化的精华。”由此可见，中国人如何看山寨文化。

“山寨”是中国改革开放30年来“吸引外国技术和中国政府的默认”所带来的“另类现象”。最近还与中华民族主义相结合，成为了一种中国特有的文化现象 。

Two points in there: one is that shanzhai is closer to being grassroots (cao gen) and therefore closer to what the people want. And secondly, that the shanzhai movement or culture has widespread support, and is one of the first non-mainstream type movements or concepts to gain that kind of traction in China since the beginning of the reform period.

2. Shanzhai is the eye of the beholder:

QQ、肯德基、百事都是山寨企业发家的——有好的模式干嘛不学?

So all these competitors were once “shanzhai” versions of something else. QQ to msoft, KFC to mcdonalds, and Pepsi to Coke. Baidu is also mentioned as being shanzhai to Google. What’s the point here: the scrappy competitor learns from the successful business model, tries to emulate it, and will somehow mature into its own, come out of the mountain village and down to the city, where it becomes somehow normalized, a bona fide and respectable business with the kind of scope and clout that the originals had. Therefore, in this meaning of the word, shanzhai is transitional, a temporary state.

3. Why does shanzhai work?
山寨启示一：觉察、填补市场空白

a. because it fills in certain blanks in the market–it caters to certain niches that are overlooked by the major players.

　山寨企业启示二：争夺、开拓市场空间

b. because it creates and expands the market.

　山寨企业启示三：企业不一定一开始就做第一

c. because you don’t have to be #1 from the start: start out shanzhai, and build your capital and market share, and then, when the time comes, worry about elevating brand image and influence.

4. When a celebrity attending the political conferences being held now in Beijing called for a banning of shanzhai, it caused bit an uproar on the internet. This is no doubt because not everyone seems to be clear on the difference between piracy and shanzhai. Shanzhai doesn’t infringe on IPR. It means imitating something closely enough so that it looks like the real thing but you can’t get sued for it . If you look at this shanzhai netbook you will find that sure, it looks like any other 10″ netbook from ASUS, or Acer, or HP, but its shanzhai, and therefore has no brand name, and probably yes, cuts a lot of corners that the biggies dont. On the other hand, their production cycles are quite different than the biggies, which allows them to make and put their products on the market much faster. This is an aspect of shanzhai electronics that doesn’t get talked about much.

Or take the following two cars:

The top car is from Sichuan CEO brand and the bottom one is from BMW. The former is less than half the price of the cheapest model of the latter.

And that, of course, is the bottom line when it comes to the popularity or at least persistence of the shanzhai phenomenon.

And just for fun, here’s the shanzhai Jackie Chan

From what i’ve heard, it seems that the sentiments being expressed have 1. desire to break the monopoly and create more choices for the consumers, by offering them something more grassroots, something less controlled (ie not under govt control or supervision), and mostly, offering this thing to them at a price point suited to the average Chinese consumer. Why buy an iPhone in CHina for 4600 rmb when you can get a HIphone for 2600, and which has a nice UI (maybe not nice as Apples) and has many of the same functions? I mean if you can’t afford the extra 2000, like me, what does it matter if its really Apple or not? If it uses Windows Mobile, that’s ok with me, so long as all the functions work and don’t have any major bugs or flaws in them.

By doing so, they are tapping into a market that the biggies don’t tap in–and that means that they have a positive effect on the economy as well. With the financial crisis, everyone is talking about layoffs and social stability as well as the mounting pressures faced by young people, especially uni grads fresh off their studies–well, shanzhai industries and enterprises just might be able to contribute something in these difficult economic times.

And that’s why it’s become so popular around China. There’s a slightly nationalistic tenor to all of this. Nothing bad in the anti-French or Japanese type way–just a pride in homegrown products, in the sense of achievement you get in reverse engineering something and building it again, maybe a bit different, maybe even a bit better. Even as the financial system reels, shanzhai is still a celebration of capitalism and competition.

I was thinking about what advantages Google Reader has over all the other aggregators, such as Flock or Yoonoo, or FriendFeed. The obvious one is that you have more control over what you want to see. For example, I not only can see Facebook friends’ status updates, but also their posted items. I also have my Twitter in three feeds: me+friends, replies to me, and direct messages. This functionality is a bit like Twitter client functionality, e.g. Tweetdeck where you can put replies and DMs into separate columns.

However, there is one great advantage to the Google Reader method: searching stuff. If you got a DM from someone in Twitter you could simply search their name or a word you remembered, etc. and find that message–faster–than if you had to go the website and search it.

Going back to the point of controlling things: Flickr–I put my Recent Activity feed in there, so that I can read what comments I get without having to login to Flickr, or without having to get email from FLickr which then crowds my inbox.

Of course, you cannot comment or reply to people very fast, but on the other hand, if you see a Tweet or facebook status you want to reply to, you can just open that link from within Google Reader into another tab on your browser, do your replying, and then close it…that way you aren’t wasting a bunch of tabs and getting cluttered up in that regard.

There are some other miscellaneous points I think are worth mentioning:
1. if you like scanning text fast, Google Reader is great. I find it easier to skim than the more graphical interfaces on websites. While some people like having video and pictures embedded in Facebook notes, i sometimes prefer just seeing the text, and then deciding for myself if i want to open the link and see the videos. Skimming is a good way to see what’s up there without really wasting a lot of time on Facebook. This way you don’t have to switch pages in Facebook, especially here in China where sometimes Facebook is very slow. You can just switch right away between status updates and posted notes, refreshing whenever you want.
2. Sharing on Google Reader–since you’ve got a motherlode of RSS feeds on Google Reader, and since you used TwitterFeed to get your Google shared items to get to your Twitter (which is synced with Facebook, for me), you can just read stuff and share it really fast. I don’t have to bother with “Twittaht” or other sharing chiclets that sometimes take time to load properly, i can just press share and then forget it fast, letting Twitterfeed send that information every half hour to my Twitter. In the meantime I have already moved onto reading something else.
3. Google integration. I can go from information i have in my reader to my email and my documents very fast. and did i mention…SEARCHING!
4. How you configure your browser matters too. If you have Share on Facebook, TwitThis and Add to Google Reader, that will help quite a bit, since you will be able to, if you so wish, to go from something inside Reader (eg a photo from Twitter or Flickr or some Amazon wishlist from Friend Feed) to opening up the original webpage and then being able to Share on FB as a note. Of course to share on Twitter or Facebook as status you just have to press share in Reader. But having a browser set up right means that you have more options at your fingertips.

But again, I think the most impt thing is that Google Reader is where you can match the maximum number of information “inputs” with your desired outputs. I am sure that with Yahoo pipes and some other creative meddling you can make this even smoother.

This is my very own China-centric shanzhai method of integrating my social media life:

This is a work in progress, so everyone feel free to comment:

This might not work for you, because it depends on what services you use and how heavily each one.
But for those with similar social media usage profile as me, this might be useful.

Here’s what I use:
Photos: Flickr and Picasa
Microblogging: Twitter, Friend Feed, Fanfou, Jiwai, ZUosa, etc.
Social: Linked In, Facebook
Blogging: personal blog

Tools: Google Reader, FriendFeed, Facebook, iPhoto 09, FLickr and picasa uploader, Twitter clients, Twitter addons for Firefox, Feedburner and Twitterfeed.com/Feedlr.com

So here’s your problem: you have to connect the inputs and the outputs. The inputs are the vast sources of information out there on the web: RSS feeds
from your favorite websites, as well as your social media sites. Therefore the best place to manage them is somewhere where you can aggregate them together
and therefore see all or most of them at once, in some kind of neat, efficient form.
FriendFeed, Facebook, and Google Reader are all good ways of aggregating information from various sources.

I decided that Google REader, which i have used the longest, is the best candidate for me.

What is your output: for me, it’s mostly where my “audience” lies. Most them are seeing my pictures on Flickr, or reading what i have to say
on Facebook and Twitter, as well as my blog. However, I would say that Facebook and Twitter are the big ones here, since I doubt that
that many people are going to check out my flickr or my blog, since they tend to be more personal and those who don’t know me well are not going to even know about those. That’s why Facebook and Twitter are impt–they are wider audiences and can therefore be used to introduce people to your more specific content, such as
whatever niche subject you are writing on your blog.

So that’s your major output: Twitter and Facebook.

Now you have to hook them all up.

In my Google Reader, there are the following feeds:
My Flickr photostream
My Flickr Recent activity stream
Facebook friend updates
Facebook posted notes (Friendfeed handles this too)
Facebook status updates=Twitter so no need for separate feed
Picasa Web ALbums (can be done in FriendFeed)
FriendFeed itself
Fanfou feed

All of this depends on one trick: that is, hooking Google Reader up to Twitter and Twitter up to Facebook.
The latter is easy, when you set up the Facebook Twitter app you should be able to sync (but just one way, i think there is two way but it doesnt matter that much to me)
To sync Google Reader and Twitter, you use Feedlr.com or Twitterfeed, which pumps an RSS feed into your twitter stream.
TO do this you just have to sign up for Twitterfeed, give them your Twitter info, and then find your shared items RSS feed from Google.
I won’t tell you how to do that here, suffice it to say you can google it and find it real fast. Or just go to your public shared items page.

WHen this is done what you have is this functionality: anything you share in Google–>Twitter.
Of course, you could always just add your FLickr or other RSS into Twitterfeed/Feedlr and get the same result:
however, it’s harder to make a choice about things that way. That is, unless you go through the bother of
filtering that feed, EVERYTHING in your eg Flickr feed is going straight to Twitter. That means, for example,
that every pic you upload will be sent as a Twitter update. That might get annoying.

However, with Google Reader, you just press “share” if you want to share a particular picture in your Flickr or Picasa stream.
Similarly, if you saw a nice posted item from your Facebook friend, you could share it and therefore get it onto Twitter, though perhaps
that item might not be publicly available if Twitter friend A cannot access Facebook friend B’s posted notes. However, at least the information
and the link will be on your Twitter. Twitter friend A can therefore go look for it if it’s really that interesting to them.

For Twitter: there are tons of good clients, and the ones such as Twitkit in Firefox are great since you can just see it in the sidebar of your browser.
This is good since you can therefore cut and paste URLs real fast. However, no Twitter client is that perfect, and right now, since I am
running Snow Leopard 10.6 build 10A222, and there are bugs, I can’t get Adobe AIR apps such as Twhirl and Tweetdeck to even work…
and so Google Reader to the rescue: I have my Peijin+Friends timeline as a feed, as well as my Replies (@peijinc) as as feed. Don’t have
DM’s just yet but that should be easy.

The hard part is that Twitter isn’t good about RSS:
so you have to use this form: http://username:password@twitter.com/statuses/user_timelines/123455555.rss
or something like that. THere are several types of feeds:
1. YOU
2. YOU+friends (which is what you normally see)
3. Replies
4. DM

Of course, most of the time you see these all together, I guess there might be one uber-feed you can use, or else even use Yahoo Pipes to
combine them all…but the problem is that you HAVE TO USE FEEDBURNER to make these feeds functional. Of course, you have to know your number,
which you can see when you just press the RSS button on Twitter, you will see your number pop up at the end of the URL in the address bar.

Therefore, get the feeds you want, sign up for Feedburner, and burn those feeds. Then take the resulting URLs and pop them into
Google Reader.

Now, sign up for Friend Feed, and try to avoid some redundant things like Facebook and Twitter. I activated the FF app in Facebook
which means that everyone in Facebook got a shitload of redundant things from my blog and Flickr and Twitter. Perhaps, for the sake of simplicity
one ought to stick with YOuTube, Amazon wishlists, Picasa and/or some other feeds that you don’t normally see. Put those in your FriendFeed, and then stick the
FriendFeed RSS into Google Reader. FriendFeed is nice because you can see Flickr photos or Amazon wishlist books from your contacts, which is stuff you don’t normally
find in their Twitter or Facebook streams. You can also see stuff from their blogs, which they might not post onto their Twitter and which you might
not know about otherwise if you weren’t a huge fan of their blogs in the first place.

So now, I’ve got plenty of ways and workarounds for everything.

My blog posts can be written in ScribeFire/Firefox, and then posted to my blog. The RSS feed of my blog can appear in FriendFeed or Twitter directly (the latter using Twitterfeed.com).
Or I can use the RSS of my own blog in Google Reader and just share the items that i think are worthy, so that they end up in twitter and therefore Facebook.
With my Flickr. I can use the Blog APIs (i host my own blog using WordPress) and therefore blog a picture right away, and that blog entry can be shared on Facebook using “Share on Facebook” bookmarklet or sharing chiclet, and therefore end up in Facebook Posted Items page rather than just status updates, maybe because pictures in Facebook posted items often capture more attention than do just text status updates with TinyURLS.

Having FriendFeed is nice, again, if for example you want to find out something on FF Friend D’s Amazon wishlist, and then share that with others: simply press share in Google Reader, and then it will appear on Twitter and then Facebook.

***

Uploading pictures–
iPhoto 09 has built in Facebook and Flickr functionality. I recommend using this to upload to both sites without having to switch programs and reload the pictures you wanted each time. Just select all and then either press Facebook or press Flickr and then wait for them to upload.

***

SMS (for China users):

in China use zuosa or jiwai to sync with your Twitter. Then use their SMS numbers to update your Twitter.
Fanfou: use Feedlr or FriendFeed or Twitterfeed to get Fanfou updates into your Twitter stream. Alternatively, you can find your
Fanfou RSS and put that into Google Reader, and then share selected items, which then go to your Twitter, and from there to Facebook or FriendFeed.

***

IM clients

Zuosa, Jiwai, and Fanfou offer MSN and Gtalk clients, so that means you can always update without a special Twitter client.
This might be good when you are doing a bunch of IMing anyway and don’t know where that Twitter client is located or because it’s not open
and you don’t want to open it. If you use Adium, Pidgin, or Digsby this is nice because you can move from one to the other quite fast.

*****

Some other advantages of this method

Having it all in Google Reader is nice if you have Gmail or otherwise use GOogle services frequently. You could embed Reader into your Gmail, and of course you can email
Reader items right away. Google Reader is just a tab or window in your browser, or you could use Prism on windows and Fluid on mac to create a dedicated “Google Reader” app.
I find that though everything has become bland and texty, that Google Reader is still a better way to get it all and get it all fast. Honestly, the Facebook posted items are too tiring to read most of the time, especially since i waste enough time with status updates. THis way you can have them all there and “scan” down the screen a bit faster, winnowing out the excess
and reading the articles that you like–and then posting them to your twitter or perhaps emailing them to other people who are not on any of your social networks. Also, you might have a Google Reader friend who isn’t on the social networks but has great reading tastes…well you can Share their items and put them on to your streams.

Also, Google Reader finds and stores feeds fast and easy, and FriendFeed can take any ATOM or RSS feed but takes a bit longer. It’s nicer to have a shitload of feeds in Google Reader, where you know that no one can see what you are reading UNTIL you decide that you want to share with the world.

Disadvantages:

well, you can’t comment or reply to Facebook or Twitter messages. YOu need at least a Twitter client or IM client for that. IF you are reading Google Reader
in Firefox that’s great since you can just install Twitkit. With FriendFeed you can comment on FB status, but not from within Google Reader, so again you have to step out of Google Reader.
But you don’t have to step out of your browser, link will open a tab and you can open FB as the need arises and then close all those tabs and get back to work.
So you could just open FF in a tab next to Google Reader. Then you’d have all the bases covered.

So everyone knows there are a bunch of twitter clones out there in CHina, such as fanfou, jiwai, etc. There were ways, rather circuitous ones that is–of syncing updates, which involved using fanfou and RSS’s…for the most part, most people i know here tend to just update twitter by going online with their mobile phones. A lot of these people have iphones and have twitter apps. They can either get online where there’s wifi or else just pay for the data by getting online via GPRS or whatever its called.

However, i just learned (and please let me know if this is really old news) that you can update your twitter with your mobile phone by just sending SMS’s. I know that you can do this with twitter, but there are not local #’s–as i recall there were just three numbers for the entire world, one in the US, one in the UK, and one somewhere else. However, with zuosa.com you can make updating a whole lot easier.

Sign up for zuosa.com. Then go to the settings section (设置）. then on the right there’s a link for syncing with twitter (同步 twitter) and then enter your twitter information.

Then the last step is to get your phone set up. Go to the part where it says 绑定手机 and then send a confirmation SMS to the zuosa mobile # indicated. You will get a confirmation reply SMS. From then on, you can just send your updates to zuosa via that mobile #, and your zuosa, and hence your twitter, will get updated for the price of an SMS. It’s probably more convenient, and probably cheaper over the long run, then getting a data plan, though perhaps with the iphone and the twitter apps its not that much of a hassle anyway.

My sense, however, is that its cheaper and a bit easier just to use SMS.

I’d love to have an iPhone but i think that I would settle for the Meizu M8, which bears a not so uncanny resemblance to the former. The 8GB version can be obtained for about 2400 rmb, making it a bit of a better deal than a new IPhone. I found some nice picture of it and its interface on taobao.com.

Now that’s a fine looking specimen. Of course the IPhone is farther ahead in its development, especially with regards to third party apps. BUt i think that the Meizu is a fine phone as far as they go. Maybe if i get some money i will buy one of these.

I recently bought the K-touch A902, which in case the pictures don’t make it obvious, takes its inspiration from some phone designed in Cupertino.

Someone noticed that it had a health menu that had several interesting functions. One was the BMI (body-mass index) and the other was the MENSES calculator. As you can see from the picture you tell it when your last period was and how long between your periods, and the results come up on the calendar. The um, red colored days are the days you bleed. You can also click on the other days to find out if those are good days for getting pregnant. Pill Schmill, condom, schlongdom, I’m all about the timing now.

This shows the result of the internet speed test I just took on Speed.io and it looks like that although the PING speed isn’t hot, the rest is OK. I have noticed, and this is a purely subjective judgment, that my internet has become seemingly faster. That’s because I use iStats on my mac and I have my I/O in real-time on the upper right hand side of my screen. There are more double-digits and triple-digit numbers than I use to remember…anyhow. I have also recently used a program called Cocktail, for OS X, that has among its many functions the ability to tweak and optimize your internet connection. This is something that with windows was accomplished with the TCP/IP optimizer. I don’t know the technical aspects of this, so I can’t really judge if any of those programs work well, and under what conditions they might work well. The difference might in fact be negligible … like decreasing the friction coefficient somewhat. The big issue is still the distance, the infrastructure, the GFW.

…but it does have Beijing. I learned about this interactive map from Lifehacker (source of all good information in the universe), it’s kinda nifty, for example in the Beijing one the usual suspects are featured — the Bell and Drum Towers, Tiananmen Square, Lama Temple, CCTV building and tower, etc. There is basic information about each attraction, how much it costs, etc. But the overall loading is a bit too data intensive for our connections here in China. Would be nice to see Shanghai on the map, but then again it would be more nice to see some real fucking attractions that would be worth putting on maps in this city….

…but it does have Beijing. I learned about this interactive map from Lifehacker (source of all good information in the universe), it’s kinda nifty, for example in the Beijing one the usual suspects are featured — the Bell and Drum Towers, Tiananmen Square, Lama Temple, CCTV building and tower, etc. There is basic information about each attraction, how much it costs, etc. But the overall loading is a bit too data intensive for our connections here in China. Would be nice to see Shanghai on the map, but then again it would be more nice to see some real fucking attractions that would be worth putting on maps in this city….

google china software pack

I just noticed that on the Google China page you can find this bunch of Chinese Google or Google-related software for download in one pack. It’s got spyware removers, virus removers, toolbars for explorer or firefox, the Google Chinese input (yeah, the plagiarized one), some other Chinese/English language tools, etc. Might not be bad if you were doing a fresh install or had a fresh install of Windows you wanted to begin pimping out without putting too much effort in to scrounge around…one stop shops are always appreciated like that.

Another thing I noticed is that yesterday, Sept 10, was Teacher’s Day in China, and so the Google China homepage had that chalkboard picture…but the rest of the world had the Hadron Collider picture, which you see here:

google hadron collider picture logo

Today–Sept 11 in China–the Google China page has returned to normal, while the other Googles (including France, US, Japan) are still using the hadron collider picture. I guess what this means is that they are really operating on the Two Googles one system tip. Or something like that. I guess the Hadron Collider is not as big a deal to Chinese people as it is to everyone else on the planet.
I can understand that, really—it is such an acquired taste.