Splitting up

As part of the move to a new server, I’m splitting up the topics between new blogs.

At present, content will be divided between:

• The World Egg:  New Worlds, new humanity. This will be taking the topics of virtual worlds and transhumanism. Those of you who have been coming here for cyberpunk topics will probably find this one is for you.
• Trigram 2.0: Continues the name of this blog; will be more about Asian life, the global economy, and the telecoms sector.
• Jianghu: My martial arts blog, taking over from http://jianghu.wordpress.com
• Cymro yn y dwyrain: My Welsh-language blog on Asian life.

A new home

Since wordpress.com is not accessible from inside China, I won’t be able to post to it once I move to Beijing at the end of this month. So… this blog is moving to this new home. Thanks for coming along! If you have been reading via RSS, don’t forget to update your feeds…

The Beijing tech scene

I’ve just found Tim O’Reilly’s report from the Beijing Foo Camp, posted a week ago. It chimes with everything I feel about Beijing after my time there, and in particular, this:

There are (reportedly) very large differences between the tech cultures in Shanghai and Beijing. Shanghai is very entrepreneurial, with money as a common language. Beijing is more complex, richer by most opinions, but more difficult. We might have felt more at home in Shanghai, but because of the complex interactions between government, academic institutions (which are centered in Beijing), the artistic revival here, and business, many felt that the future is here in Beijing. Of course, they also said that the rivalry between the two cities is like the rivalry between LA and New York.

I totally agree – and it’s one of the reasons why I keep touting Beijing as one of the most interesting places in the world to be right now – and why I’m going back next year

The whole of Tim’s post is worth reading for his thoughts on Beijing, China, and the tech/arts scene.

New feedburner RSS link

I’m thinking of moving this blog to a self-hosted WordPress installation, with a new domain name (or rather, back to the old one). Those of you reading via RSS, could you update your feed to this new one:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/trigram

Hopefully, you won’t lose track when I migrate…

Looking for a new phone

A year ago, I bought a Nokia 6708, largely for the stylus input and Chinese dictionary. I was pretty happy with it at first, but I have to say that I gradually became more and more dissatisfied. It blue-screened quite a bit, frequently hung and needed a reboot, and regularlt seemed to just turn itself off. It took ages to boot. The lack of letters on the keyboard gradually became a real nuisance. I found that I hardly ever used the Chinese dictionary. The USB connection to my Windows XP laptop was really fussy, and hardly ever seemed to work, so I couldn’t transfer files. The camera quality was pretty lousy. I began to think about getting a replacement.

Then two weeks ago I accidentally left it in a taxi. I’ve filed lost property reports, but it hasn’t shown up and probably never will. I’ve been using my old Nokia 6108, but it’s really obsolete now – especially as I can’t transfer my contacts from my laptop, and there’s no way I’m going to type them all in manually! I had been planning to hang on a few months until Meizu MiniOne is released, but now I can’t wait that long.

Actually, the timing is a bit serendipitous. I’d also been thinking that I need:

• a music player. The Zling Nax (Chinese clone of an iPod Nano) that I bought as an experiment is actually pretty crap, with terrible battery life and sound.
• mobile internet. The 6708 was actually internet-enabled, but my current phone plan doesn’t include data transfer; I signed up for this plan when I first came to Singapore in 2002! My contract has long since expired, but I’ve never got around to changing anything

I’m even more convinced that I need mobile internet after reading this O’Reilly Radar article by Peter Brantley. The points he makes about the way the Millennials (he just says “younger generation”) work – constantly online, social, self-organising, flat hierarchy – are spot on, and remind me of things I was thinking about quite a bit last year: how is this going to work out in Asia? The cultural changes and power shifts that are being driven by ubiquitous multimedia technology, social tools, and mobile internetmean that it’s not just about management styles any more. Here in Singapore, the government is reaching an uneasy modus vivendi with the internet-enabled voice of its citizens, but I’m not sure how it’s going to work out. During the recent protests in Myanmar, we’ve seen how important mobile phone cameras and internet access were – to the extent that the junta were forced to simply cut off all internet access to the outside world. China, of course, will be watching all of this very carefully indeed. However, I’m straying into what’s going to be a separate blog post!

So: I need a new phone, mobile internet, and an mp3 player. To get internet access, I need to sign a new contract. If I sign a new contract, I get discounts on a number of handsets, one of which is the Nokia N73 “Music Edition” which, to be honest, seems to cover all bases, except that it doesn’t have wifi… Seems to be a good choice, though, at S$368, which is what M1 are offering…

Media tools, roles, and working

Too busy to do more than a few lines on each of these, but there’s a wealth of interesting content in my click-stream today!

• Microsoft’s Community Group Therapy blog had a piece on ‘Co-working‘ (found, as with so many good things, via Smart Mobs).
• This led to what was apparently the original story on the topic, in Business Week. The concept is to set up one of these rent-a-cubicle places for freelancers (an idea that’s been around for a long time), but with lounge areas and a coffee-bar. The aim is to replicate the ‘Starbucks’ atmosphere, where independent creatives tend to hang out rather than work alone at home, but with a more focused clientele that may be better for networking and stimulating creativity. This really seems like an idea that would work in Singapore: I’m pretty certain from my working experience over the last year that there would be a market. Business Week apparently identified it a trend to watch earlier this year.
• There’s a wiki dedicated to discussing co-working, and an Institute to promote it. Hmmm, I wonder how much capital it would take to get one going here…?
• Staying in Singapore, Cherian George reflects on the changing balance of power between the local mainstream media and blogosphere, and speculates on how the government may react.
• Indeed, how should mainstream journalists react? This article on Public Journalism Today gives some suggestions on introducing innovation to the newsroom.
• On the other side of the divide, NGO-in-a-box has a handy guide to using free, open-source software to produce multimedia content.
• I’ve also found this interesting blog: Innovation in College Media – likely to be a useful resource in my new job.
• And rounding up, back to where I began, at Microsoft’s Community Group Therapy blog. I’ve written a lot about the intergenerational culture gap, the Gen-X and Gen-Y approach to power distance and technology, and how this may impact management – particularly in Asia. This article is an extremely good example of the kinds of issues I’m thinking about.

Reboot

OK, so I took the blog down for a few days while I thought about where to take it. I’ve given it a new look, and reorganised the blogroll. The categories list was getting too unwieldy and it wasn’t used much anyway, so that’s gone. You can still get at them via the new ‘Tag Cloud’ page, though. The archive list may or may not come back, I haven’t decided yet.

As for the new direction, the new subtitle should give you a hint – at least, it will if you’ve read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash! A lot of the themes I’m interested in at the moment are encapsulated in that book, so it will certainly do for the moment as a hook to hang the theme on. I’m also going to be a bit less concerned with being ‘proper’: not so much to boost traffic, but to just acknowledge that we live in a bizarre, grown-up world full of all kinds of things….

Comments on the new look would be welcome – I’m not sure how permanent it will be…

Long Tail: UK vs Taiwan

Wired editor Chris Andersen blogs a very interesting piece about his book The Long Tail. It’s already been incredibly influential, of course, and it seems that it’s now a best-seller in China. That doesn’t surprise me, of course: the Chinese are so super-driven to make money that I expect to see novel applications of the theory being implemented very soon!

What really caught my eye, though, was this:

The book has also sold more than 50,000 copies in Taiwan (cover below), which is really an astounding number (I think it actually sold more there than in the UK).

What on earth? What explanation can there be for Taiwan showing more interest in this than the whole of the UK? And what does this say about Britain today?