Are you ready? There is a visual feast of genuine Chinese food! Now you know Chinese restaurants all over the States are nothing.
Food channel at poco.cn used to be a collection of numerous pictures of Chinese food, whether dishes from restaurants or simply street food. Photographers who eat out would take pictures of the food and submit them to the website. Now food.poco.cn has grown into a food-themed social network. Besides vivid pictures, people also give detailed descriptions on location, interior decoration, and most importantly, menu of the restaurant. It is now a guidebook maintained by a group of gourmets all over the country. You will definitely find something really delicious but missed from those guidebooks sold in bookstores.
People nickname the activity of eating out “FB.” FB is the acronym for “Fu Bai” in Chinese, which literally means corruption but here refers to eat out. You may find posts calling up people to hang out and FB together. It is a good chance to enjoy good food and make new friends. Moreover, you may also get some discount if you join the community. Usually 20% off in those restaurants affiliated with food.poco.cn.

I don’t remember when it started. Whenever I tried to open a web page with Flash embedded, Quicktime always tried to play it but ended up displaying a broken blue icon where the flash was supposed to show up. However IE worked on it well [ I hate to say that ].

Macromedia Flash plug-in was properly installed and today I reinstalled Quicktime again. The problem still existed. I knew I should try reinstalling Firefox, but since I had so many extensions that I just didn’t want to bother.

Any comments? Solutions? Thanks in advance. Or if I figure this out, I”ll post it here myself.

Update: I fixed it. Everything works fine now. Thanks to Chris’ thread “View flash files in Mozilla Firefox“.

1. Close Mozilla Firefox completely (File > Exit)l
2. Open QuickTime.
3. Edit > Preferences > QuickTime Preferences.
4. Select “Browser Plug-in” from the drop-down list.
5. Click on the button that says “MIME Settings”.
6. Expand the “Miscellaneous” file format section by clicking on the “+” on the left.
7. Uncheck “Flash file”.
8. Click “Apply” and then “OK”.
9. Close QuickTime.
10. Open Mozilla Firefox.

It is fun to post comments to other blogs that I come across. But it is a pain to track all the comments I’ve ever made. In most cases I just forgot about them and do not go back to check again. Therefore I might miss some wonderful responses from those bloggers as well as the chances for further participation.
I tried a Movabletype plug-in to track comments posted elsewhere. I can’t recall the name of the plug-in for now but basically it needs to set up a new blog in MT and utilize the trackback function. I failed to get it up and running so finally gave up. There is a plug-in for Wordpress available if you are interested in.
Anyway, I found the way out. Pretty simple and efficient. Just post the blog post I comment on to my del.icio.us and attach a unique tag like “danscomments” or whatsoever to them. Then I have access to those posts and would check back from time to time.
BTW, this is the 200th post I’ve ever written. Phew. I finally hit it.

Via Xinhuanet.
Sounds so promising huh? This is the result of a survey conducted from May 9 to 13 by China Youth Daily. People might cheer up on the conclusion that “obesity has taken the place of famine as one of the Chinese’ top concerns.”
But that’s the real case? I’m so skeptical about the survey so let’s just read it through.

Read the rest of the entry…

I questioned the reports on MSN Spaces censorship in China and tested it myself. Seems like my test blog was not among those being watched. Bennett Haselton came across my post and offered a possible explanation [ Thanks a lot, Bennett]:

MSN Spaces China doesn’t ban you from posting the words in the body of your blog posts, or even in the title of an individual blog post. It only bans you from putting those words into the title of your blog itself. If you sign in to MSN Spaces and edit your blog settings, you can change the title of the blog, but you can’t change it to contain the banned words.
(Some reports have erroneously said that you are blocked from posting these words in the body of your blog posts, but that’s not the case.)

Then I tried to change my blog title and it still worked fine. However, that’s not the case in Rebecca MacKinnon’s test of setting up her “own freedom loving Chinese blog”. She finally succeeded by following Bennet Haselton’s Freedom Hack Instructions. That explains my case: I set up the spaces using the English interface so I circumvent the censorship without knowing it even though I log in from msn.com.cn.
Portnoy has translated Bennet’s instruction into Chinese.

One month ago, I made a wild guess that BROG, The (We)blog Research on Genre Project, might be the “cool” buyer of blo.gs. Yesterday, it turned out to be Yahoo!. I prove myself a bad predictor but also a naive graduate student/blog researcher.

I can’t express how I appreciate the two years spent at MU–I’ve learned so much and grown to a stronger person. But surely I missed something really fancy and beautiful. Will I have any luck at NU?

Read Marquette Love Stories and know those who met and fell in love at MU.
It is so sweet to be a MU alum, isn’t it?

Cameron Marlow is gathering data for his dissertation on “how people use their weblogs and their general communication behavior.” Sounds interesting! I just can’t wait to read it so took the survey in fifteen minutes. Honestly, it was a little bit hard to do the last section on social networks but surely it brings a new perspective into blog studies!
You will need to submit an email to get a login key. Someone complains about this and Cameron explains it is a strategy to stop people from taking the survey twice. I don’t think it’s a pain in the neck [not at all, but designing the questionnaire surely is!] and hope everybody else feels the same way.
The other thing I’m interested is the sampling method Cameron is using. He is employing a combination of self-selective participation and probability sampling. Results from the two sources will be compared and analyzed. Whatever differences/similarities he finds out, that will be a big leap on methodology regarding blog studies.
Read Cameron’s invitation post and take the survey. And, spread the word please.
BTW, Cameron is the guy behind blogdex.net.

Microsoft might be censoring, but not in the way reported by AP.
I Got the link from JD Lasica’s post.  The news titled “Microsoft Censors Blogs at Chinese Portal” says Microsoft is helping censorship in the Chinese blogosphere. Microsoft just launched its Chinese portal three weeks ago. According to the story, when MSN Spaces users attempt to input sensitive Chinese words like democracy, human rights, Taiwan Independence, a scolding message saying “Prohibited language in text, please delete” will be prompted.

Read the rest of the entry…

Just found three WP-based blogging hosts. Weblogs.us used to use MT as platform but then switched to WP since MT started to charge. Free signups are temporarily shut down for some reason. Blogsome and Blogthing are the twos suggested by Weblog.us. The latter one is having some database issues and will be back soon.
So far I have no plan to switch to WP, at least for TIMELINE. But I did try out WP by setting up a secret site only available to myself. So far so good. But it’s really a pain in the neck to learn WP tags from scratch and tweak templates.