PandaPassport.com – China Blog

I’ve been toying with Seesmic for a few months now. Very surprised to see Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Harrison Ford, and more of the Indiana Jones 4 Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull cast making an appearance on there today (from Cannes, I believe).

I thought I’d yank some of the videos from the public timeline, and stick ‘em here in case anyone wants to see (Kieswetter, that means you…)

Enjoy!

(Note: Lucas’ video not up yet, but I’ll post it if I can catch it.)

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Aug 29 2009 Update: Unfortunately this workaround doesn’t fly anymore. But check out John Pasden’s post on Sinosplice for an even better one.

I don’t use Twitter too much. I run my blog feeds through it, and that’s about it. But I do see the use in being able to publish to the web via text message. It could come in handy in certain situations.

Sending SMS messages to Twitter from China is relatively expensive, at least by Chinese standards:

“you need to text up Britain — the only internationally-open number is prefixed +44, somewhere in the British isles. International SMS is 10 times the cost of standard SMS; the moment a text message leaves the mainland, you pay CNY 1, not CNY 0.10.” –David Feng

So while I don’t plan to use it that much, I just set up an unusual workaround so that I can send text messages from my cell phone in China, and they’ll be published on Twitter.

Here’s how it works.

1. Set up an account on Fanfou.com, which is a Chinese version of Twitter. Jiwai.de will likely work as well.
2. Take the RSS feed of your Fanfou page, and run it through Twitterfeed. Update: Your fanfou RSS feed should look something like this, http://api.fanfou.com/statuses/user_timeline/pandapassport.rss, where you’d replace “pandapassport” with your own username. Look for the orange RSS logo in the bottom right, and copy and paste the link.
   

Now when you send a text message to Fanfou, it will show on that page, but it will also be fed to your Twitter page as well. Unfortunately, your Fanfou username will be stuck on the front (so choosing a short name is best), and a tinyurl link to your Fanfou “tweet” will be appended to the end. The fastest that Twitterfeed will check for updates is every 30 mins, so it will require that time at the most before your tweet hits Twitter.

But in case you ever need to send a message like “Help! I’ve been arrested in an Olympic protest” (or something along those lines…) this will do the trick, I’m sure. Read the rest of this entry »

Considering the trouble feedburner is supposedly giving to China Telecom users, I thought I’d take the feedburner graphics off my site in an effort to make sure the page loads well for everyone who reads it.

Don’t listen to the recent reports which say all feeds are blocked in China. It’s all hearsay, and none of them seem to have noticed what people inside of China are saying (i.e. the links above Re: China Telecom).

In any case, I decided to give feedsky a go. Because if big tech websites like arstechnica and techcrunch can’t figure out what’s going on with RSS feeds in China, how can you expect the average reader to know what to do?

I decided to make it simple for readers who want to subscribe:

Inside China? Use Feedsky (?)
Not in China? Use Feedburner

If you want to do the same, here’s the code for what I just did.
Inside China? Use <a href="http://feed.feedsky.com/YOUR_FEED">Feedsky</a> (<a href="http://www.pandapassport.com/web-20/how-to-set-up-feedsky-china/">?</a>)<br /> Not in China? Use <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR-FEED">Feedburner</a>

For those of you who don’t know Feedsky, it’s a Chinese knockoff of Feedburner. I’ve been using it for about half a year now on my much neglected Chinese site, and it looks fine. For those of you who might require a little help navigating your way through setting up your feed in a second language (i.e. Chinese), here are a few step by step instructions:

UPDATE:

1. A big Thank you to Yee in who reports in the comments that Feedsky actually does have an English Interface for their site.
2. A big cao ni ma go out the guys at feedsky for making that English version of their site inaccessible from the site main page. And practically impossible to search via google. How can you not link to that shit with an English Version button in some corner?!!?!!

Fuck. Like, really…
I owe somebody a kick in the nads. I’m sending them an email right now!
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Alright. I heard about this interesting form of “microblogging” on twit.tv, and they spoke so highly of it I thought I’d check it out.

In a nutshell, tumblr.com gives you a platform to make a website/blog, normally hosted on tumblr.com. As for content, it allows you to add things that you find in your day-to-day internet surfing (i.e. favorite links, cool youtube videos, quotable quotes, whatever), and place it on your blog. When you find stuff you like, you just click a few clicks – and voila, it’s on your site!

For anyone who’d like to start a blog, but couldn’t be arsed with the pain-in-the-ass of updating it, or coding — this is likely a good option for you. And I have a feeling a lot of people are gonna take to this one.

I’ve already started one, just to test it out. I’m gonna use this to keep track of online movies that I find during those “bored-out-of-my-f*cking-mind” moments.

Be sure to pay a visit:

China’s Pirated Media

…and here’s the RSS feed if you want movies fed to your news reader automatically, or have them fed to your Email whenever I post the links.

Here is my list of top 5 Chinese youtube clones, but make sure you stay tuned till the end, because the +1 is a real gem! The neato thing about most of these sites is that they can host shared/stolen content for everyone to enjoy/report.
Note: I’m not endorsing these sites, I’m just trying to make the barrier between the eastern and western internet a little bit more transparent.

So here are the top 5, according to the gospel of panda:

5. mofile.com

A lot of web-cammery, a decent tags section, these guys break my top 5 — even though I haven’t used them too much. Looks good though, as you can see from this White Stripes Video?Seven Nation Army:

4. 6rooms.com

You can find some stuff on here, but it’s more difficult than some of the other sites. I’m usually not too impressed with them, but I am today. They earn my 4-spot, mostly because they have Spiderman 3 online! (Click here to see) Poor quality, but what do ya expect?
Note: Sony claims that they “have so far found no pirated copies of Spider-Man 3 on the Internet” (thx Imagethief), but I guess that “so far” is done with as of now.
Here’s a sample:

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MySpace.cn launches today, and is doing so very quietly with very little warning on the english blogosphere. Today on MySpace’s main page, there’s a big over-animated flash banner which just goes to show that MySpace is already down with Chinese internet practices (most Chinese sites have enough Flash to make you seasick!).

Their slogan is ????. This is kind of a play on words, of ????, but ? (friend) takes the place of ? (have)? to give a nice warm and fuzzy?yet dual-edged sword slogan.

It’ll be interesting to see exactly how long Myspace takes to catch on with Chinese netizens, since they’ll be competing against Sina Blog, Bokee, BlogCN, Sohu Blog, just to name a few.

Of course everyone’s trying to take advantage of the China market these days, and it was inevitable that MySpace would cross the Great Wall eventually. But this move makes a lot of sense when you think about the demographics of China’s internet users – that being, in a nutshell, students.

Whether or not MySpace catches on with kids in the Middle Kingdom is certainly a key question. But possibly even more key is how more social network platforms will affect the evolution of China’s online society. And how that in turn, will affect society as a whole.

Whatever they decide to talk about, giving China another platform to discuss and spread ideas certainly cannot be a bad thing.

Found on Techcrunch: This new Stumbleupon plugin seems really cool. It allows you to stumble through one website, and land on random posts, like so.

Download it here

All the same, I thought this plugin could do with some icons. Techcrunch has one, but I thought I’d whip up a few more using Flash. For colors, I thought it would be best to bring in the web 2.0 color template, as those colors all over the place these days. Mouse hover over the icon to see which 2.0 site that particular color comes from, along with it’s hex-code.

Just right click, and SAVE AS to download your favorite:

…or download the whole pack as a zip file

When you’ve chosen the one you’d like to use, you can upload that pic to your UPLOADS folder. Then you can take this code, and slap it on your website to insert your neato Stumble button!

Of course, replace the gif name with the one you’ve chosen.

This post is what happens when I drink too much coffee.

China Stolen-Media-of-the-Day: 24 Season 3

To go along with Season 1 and 2 that I posted a while back, here are the continuing adventures of Jack Bauer in Season 3 of 24. All of this pirated goodness comes from our buddies over at youku, the Chinese youtube knock-off.

Anyone notice that they stream way faster than youtube?

Wow. Like, really really faster.