Monday, June 05, 2006
Flickr is accessible in China
I just found that Flickr images including some sensitive ones (like the famous one of the man standing in front of a column of tanks the Tien an men square) are available from China. I tested it by asking an acquaintance who is now in China to click on the tank image from flickr and he was able to access. It is not surprising though. It will be hard for the Chinese censors to automate the blocking of jpegs, mp3s and mpegs.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Picture=a thousand words
Ok...Finally, after procrastinating for several months, I got to writing my first post. A recent post on Global Voices Online, a meta-blog of sorts that I recently discovered triggered this post. The post was an interview of ziboy, a blogger from Beijing and to whose site I have been a regular visitor for last three years.
Pointing to two facts that thwarts communication between China and the rest of the world - China's amazing infrastructure for web censorship, and the linguistic divide between mandarin speakers and the rest of the world, John Kennedy writes,
Photoblogs are of brilliant design, though, both in being able to get past keyword filters and in their ability to speak to any audience regardless of culture or language group.
Very true. And that is exactly the reason I have been addicted to Ziboy's site. I have quite a lot of interest in happenings in China and China Daily, like most other news sites from China provides "black&white" (meaning texts and images that metaphorically go through multiple layers of "filters" to produce a monochrome image of the world around us) and therefore an incomplete picture of events. Any form of citizen voice from China therefore is a welcome change for folks like us eagerly trying to guess what Chinese society as a whole is collectively thinking.
In this interview Ziboy "politely declined" to answer a question regarding his views on Chinese censorship. For good reasons of course. But the pictures on his blog are quite bold at times. I wish more people in China can take cues from Ziboy's goals and less riskier methods to achieve those goals. ("Ziboy: The goal is to provide foreigners with a non-official window into Beijing and China not bound by the constraints of text, to let them see images from lives of normal Chinese that aren’t found in newspapers, magazines, on television or in other exhibitions. From the beginning until now my goals and thoughts haven’t really changed.") I would like some photo bloggers from the provinces in China- areas that are somewhat less visible to the international audience.
Questions:
Pointing to two facts that thwarts communication between China and the rest of the world - China's amazing infrastructure for web censorship, and the linguistic divide between mandarin speakers and the rest of the world, John Kennedy writes,
Photoblogs are of brilliant design, though, both in being able to get past keyword filters and in their ability to speak to any audience regardless of culture or language group.
Very true. And that is exactly the reason I have been addicted to Ziboy's site. I have quite a lot of interest in happenings in China and China Daily, like most other news sites from China provides "black&white" (meaning texts and images that metaphorically go through multiple layers of "filters" to produce a monochrome image of the world around us) and therefore an incomplete picture of events. Any form of citizen voice from China therefore is a welcome change for folks like us eagerly trying to guess what Chinese society as a whole is collectively thinking.
In this interview Ziboy "politely declined" to answer a question regarding his views on Chinese censorship. For good reasons of course. But the pictures on his blog are quite bold at times. I wish more people in China can take cues from Ziboy's goals and less riskier methods to achieve those goals. ("Ziboy: The goal is to provide foreigners with a non-official window into Beijing and China not bound by the constraints of text, to let them see images from lives of normal Chinese that aren’t found in newspapers, magazines, on television or in other exhibitions. From the beginning until now my goals and thoughts haven’t really changed.") I would like some photo bloggers from the provinces in China- areas that are somewhat less visible to the international audience.
Questions:
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