Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for April 28th through April 29th:

• With YQL Execute, the Internet becomes your database (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog) – Use Yahoo to query and assemble data from around the internet, manipulate resulting XML recordsets with server side Javascript.
• Glimmer: a jQuery Interactive Design Tool – Articles – MIX Online – "Makes jQuery accessible through a visual tool. The objective for Glimmer is pretty simple: to enable the power of jQuery through an interactive design surface. If jQuery is the "write less, do more” JavaScript library, then Glimmer is the “write none, do more” jQuery design tool. Glimmer has three core audiences: power users, designers and developers."
• Inside Facebook Reports: Why Hasn’t Facebook Grown More in China? – A look at Chinese consumer internet and social media usage, QQ, 51, Xiaonei, Kaixin, and some reasons why there are only around 300,000 Facebook users in China today.
• Facebook maps the swine flu hysteria | The Web Services Report – CNET News – Visualizing interest in swine flu by mapping percentages of mentions on Facebook wall pages, using data from Lexicon.
• Develop Twitter API application in django and deploy on Google App Engine — The Uswaretech Blog – Django Web Development – Walkthrough of a sample Twitter application on Google App Engine, using Django/Python.

These are my links for April 11th through April 12th:

• Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds – Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
• The dark side of Dubai – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent – "Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging."
• Topless Robot – Hot Girls Have Lightsaber Strip-Fight for Your Viewing Pleasure – Star Wars CGI meets fake body spray ad
• Poll Result: Best VPN to leap China’s Great Firewall? – Thomas Crampton – - Witopia – Undisputed winner. Quality of service, speed of surfing, though it is said to be relatively expensive at US$50 to US$60 per year. Hotspot Shield – Bandwidth limits can be painful. Force you to wait until the next month if you use it too much. – Ultrasurf – StrongVPN
• InfoQ: Facebook: Science and the Social Graph – In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008 (November 2008), Aditya Agarwal discusses Facebook’s architecture, more exactly the software stack used, presenting the advantages and disadvantages of its major components: LAMP (PHP, MySQL), Memcache, Thrift, Scribe.
• The Running Man, Revisited § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM – a handful of scientists think that these ultra-marathoners are using their bodies just as our hominid forbears once did, a theory known as the endurance running hypothesis (ER). ER proponents believe that being able to run for extended lengths of time is an adapted trait, most likely for obtaining food, and was the catalyst that forced Homo erectus to evolve from its apelike ancestors.

Happy Lunar New Year. It’s the Year of the Pig.

Some are predicting conflict and misfortune:

“The Year of the Pig will not be very peaceful,” said Hong Kong feng shui master Raymond Lo…Pig years can be turbulent because they are dominated by fire and water, conflicting elements that tend to cause havoc, Lo said.

“Fire sitting on water is a symbol of conflict and skirmish,” he said. “We’ll also see more fire disasters and bombings.”

He noted that the Russian AK-47 rifle, a weapon of choice among insurgents around the world, was invented during a pig year.

“So it will not be surprising to see more gunbattles, murder with guns and bombing attacks in 2007,” he said.

Others see a good year for finance:

“Because of the water element in the Year of the Pig, the economy will continue to grow, which also paves the way for another round of interest rate hikes,” said Peter So, a celebrity fortuneteller in Hong Kong.

Not everyone is pleased with pigs:

While the pig is beloved by the Chinese, the animal is offensive to Muslims, who consider it unclean. For that reason, Chinese New Year celebrations have to be handled with care in Malaysia and Indonesia, mainly Muslim countries with large ethnic Chinese minorities.

Asiatotal.net, a Hong Kong-based company, is planning to distribute “iT”:

iT is a compact, ultra-simple, portable desk top computer complete with everything necessary to connect to the Internet, home entertainment devices, printer, USB card reader for reading the memory cards of digital cameras and many other USB peripherals.

It has been developed, designed and manufactured to be distributed free in order to enhance the lives of the millions of people in the world who – for economic reasons – are not connected to the Internet. A way to move them out of the digital underclass.

The device is based on Windows CE, and comes preloaded with IE6.

From the Business Standard:

This device has a conventional keyboard with 14 additional keys, 10 of which will be sponsored by firms that want to tap rural markets, like a firm selling seeds or crop insurance. By pressing the relevant “hot key”, farmers can directly access firms’ websites where product information will guide them to making the right purchase.

A major near term challenge will be the absence of an internet connection in many of the target communities. Asiatotal is explicitly not providing the networking service. This might work in places such as Kuppam, where there is already wireless broadband service, but many other places would have on-demand service only, dial up or perhaps cellular data service, which is rapidly becoming available in many rural markets.

I’m not sure about targeting seed vendors or crop insurance though. Based on my recollection of the Kuppam web traffic logs, they could probably do better with horoscopes, cricket scores, and matrimonial services…

The firm says it intends to distribute 3 million iTs across developing countries like India, China, Brazil, Mexico, and those in eastern Europe. It will be shortly rolling out these devices in Brazil.

I hope they make some progress with this. If they’re able to make the business economics and user adoption work with this device, using the 100 dollar computer instead of a Windows CE device should be a piece of cake.

(via ContentSutra and Business Standard)

Marc van der Chijs observes some new signage in the Sanlitun diplomatic district in Beijing:

You are not allowed to blow up your car! Not sure if it is a temporary sign (Mr. Bush will visit Beijing this week) or whether it has been here longer already. Or does it mean something else?

There actually has been a warning from the US State Department regarding a threat against 4- and 5-star hotels in China. Hopefully nothing will come of it, though I’m sure there’s more under way than putting up these signs.

(via Asiapundit)

I’ve been only semi-functional for the past few days, having gone through three bottles of Robitussin so far in an attempt to fend off some sort of cold.

In the meantime, I see there’s more ominous news about the possibility of an avian flu outbreak. Latest is in CNN:

The latest outbreak, among geese, was in a village in the suburbs of Changtian city in the eastern province of Anhui, Noureddin Mona, of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, told Reuters.

He said the Ministry of Agriculture had told him on Monday 2,100 birds had been infected, 550 had died and 45,000 had been culled.

“We are highly concerned about this,” he said of the outbreak, adding that the area had been sealed off at a radius of 3 miles (5 km).

Bill Bishop points out coverage in Caijing, a Chinese business magazine:

When Chinese scientists identified H5N1 in Guangdong in 1996, however, the authorities denied that China had been substantially affected by the bird flu. As late as 2003, official animal epidemic reports had never listed avian flu. That official stance contradicted scientific research results during the same period, which revealed several cases of avian flu infection.

In 2004, in the wake of the SARS crisis, the animal epidemic became more transparent. Avian flu is no longer a state secret. The 49 H5N1 infection cases among ducks and chickens in early 2004 were publicly disclosed, a move that won widespread applause.
…
On the other hand, Guan Yi, a microbiologist at Hong Kong University, said he and his colleagues have found the avian flu virus in southern China in one province where the authorities claim there is no bird flu. Guan told Caijing that the virus can be found in most of China’s poultry markets, but that “we are not informed of it.”

At this rate, I’ll recover from whatever this is just in time to deal with the flu season.

SimonWorld notes some analysis in the South China Morning Post on last week’s official Chinese GDP numbers.

Last week China reported another stunning GDP growth number of 9.4%. But as we’ve found numerous times before, the numbers underlying the GDP calculation don’t add up. Either China’s consumers went on strike or fixed asset investment has been over-estimated. Jake van der Kamp is on the case and reaches an unsurprisingly but important conclusion:

…It seems from this that in the year to September the man on the street spent 17 per cent less on daily necessities and toys than he did the previous year. But this is not what other official statistics say. They say that retail spending for the year to September was 13.6 per cent greater than it was the previous year (the blue line) and that this retail spending alone was almost twice as great as the remainder number we calculated for all personal consumption spending.

How is it possible?

It is not. The latest GDP figures from the mainland simply do not add up. I hesitate to use the word “rubbish” to describe them but I am starved of a better one.

I think the enormous discrepancy most likely results from an overstatement of fixed asset investment. Capital spending probably is much less than the National Bureau of Statistics says it is. This would imply something else again, however. It would suggest that a vast amount of money earmarked for capital projects was embezzled by corrupt officials and used instead for personal spending on luxury services and toys.

I shall not suggest that this surprises you.

Every second anecdote from the mainland tells you it happens every day. All I have done is put some possible numbers to the scale of it, a very big scale indeed. But I do suggest to the National Bureau of Statistics that it adopt a brand new approach for checking statistics, a new one to the bureau that is. The next time it publishes data it might want to check that the sum of the parts adds up to a given total.

It’s always worth taking any government reports with a grain of salt. In particular, no one actually believes the published numbers by the Chinese government. But this offers a glimpse at some of specific disconnects in the official reporting system. Plus, “rubbish” as financial commentary is pretty entertaining.

For reference, 15 trillion yuan is roughly $1.85 trillion US dollars. The US GDP in 2004 was roughly $11.75 trillion US dollars.

From Asia Private Equity News

…every resident of China must now have approval by SAFE for their business plans (including such information as who owns what) for holding companies overseas; disclose all of the nefarious and clever deal structures created by their attorneys and repatriate every penny raised in the offerings of those shares overseas back into China. Did I mention that the regulation is retroactive?

Most foreign investment in China is through Wholly Owned Foreign Entities, or WOFEs (pronounced “woofie”), which are typically based in the Caymans, Bermuda, or other banking center, and which hold the bulk of the company assets. The new regulations appear to require permission from the State Administration for Foreign Exchange (SAFE) before starting a new operation.

via SiliconBeat and TechDirt

From CNET:

Hewlett-Packard is preparing to open a research laboratory in China later this year with a focus on computer security and services among other projects, according to an HP Labs executive.

The plant is expected to compliment six other HP Lab sites, including Palo Alto, Calif.; Cambridge, Mass.; Bristol, England; Haifa, Israel; Tokyo, Japan; and Bangalore, India.

“This plant along with the one in Bangalore will help us serve our next billion customers,” HP Labs Associate Director Howard Taub revealed Wednesday during a meeting with CNET News.com reporters at HP’s Palo Alto facility.

I’m glad to see HP Labs finally heading back to China. This will be sort of the second time around. The original HP Labs operation which started in Beijing in the 90’s basically ended up with Agilent after the spin off from HP, and around the same time Microsoft Research and others set up shop and glommed onto a lot of people. That, plus lots of organizational flux, seems to have ended up costing 6 years on the ground for getting plugged into the local research scene.

See also: China is run by Engineers

The blog outsourcing topic has rolled along while I’ve been spending the day at the Blog Business Summit, listening to discussions on commercializing blogs. There’s now a post about it (Outsourcing bloggers in China) at CNET, which turned up a few other skeptics, and it’s looking like the Blogoriented guys are probably a hoax.

Despite that, I also think it’s inevitable that we’ll see at least a couple of real projects along these lines within a year, not aimed at simulating teenaged girls, but rather at building blog networks, filled and buzzed by creating inexpensive original content and editing search feeds that target specific niches.

David Sifry at Technorati has a good summary on the growing problems of spam blogs and fake blogs, and all the search engines are likely to make progress against what are essentially the next generation of link farms. Unfortunately, as discussed in this afternoon’s sessions on web advertising and affiliate models, if you can get traffic, there’s potential for a lot of money to be made by simple manipulations of the system, at least until the search engines improve. Content picked up by the blog search engines gets indexed immediately, leaving a way around some of the the sandboxing and other mechanisms used by Google and others, and makes profitable links visible immediately.

It’s cheap and apparently effective to implement spam and fake blogs. I’ve noticed the volume of junk e-mail is decreasing, while the number of spam blogs in search results seems to be increasing. It’s going to take cooperation among multiple parties to fix this, but everyone recognizes this as a problem, so it’s going to get better. (Here’s Mark Cuban’s take.)

I think that a follow on issue is that genuinely “original” content, in the “first author” sense, rather than in the “new idea” sense, can be probably be reliably cranked out through a well defined process. Think of something like an Indian call center or coding shop crossed with a daily news bureau, supervised by an editor who picked topics with some guidance from Wordtracker, Google and others. You’d get low cost, original writing, around an editorially consistent, topically relevant set of themes, and perhaps even with some interesting domain expertise, all tuned to be informative and keyworded to be search engine friendly.

Many of the same processes used at Wipro, Infosys, and other software and BPO outsourcers could be adapted to this application. Why cheat the search engine rankings when you can just reduce the cost of production and actually receive ranking benefit when the search engines get better at filtering for contextually better results and get rid of the “really fake” blogs? The Weblogs Inc blog network model seems to be working so far – Jason Calcanis says they’ve just hit a $1M annual ad revenue rate. Reducing the content production costs can’t hurt. I’m sure they could apply some of these ideas, if they haven’t already, and if they don’t, some other new blog network will certainly try.

This approach to farming out the process-oriented writing tasks should apply equally to a number of periodicals, such as magazines and newspapers. The difference between the news content in many newspapers is already often just the local editor’s preferences on the AP or Reuters newsfeeds and what fit in between the committed ad inches.

I don’t think this sort of blog or content outsourcing would be “bad” or “evil” in the sense of creating lower quality content, at least in some topic domains, since a pool of skilled professionals already exists offshore, and is growing rapidly. If you got a good editor in place, it might even improve the overall quality of online content. It’s not misrepresentation, unless you tried to pass off your authors as being something they’re not. But I wouldn’t even bother with attempting the nuances of local US culture with a staff of offshore bloggers, despite the availability of cultural indoctrination programs they run call center trainees through. That would work about as well having US bloggers cover cricket or Bollywood gossip or Korean K-pop singers for their respective local audiences.

This seems to leave American pop culture as a secure niche for a while. Unfortunately, I’m incredibly bad at celebrity gossip. Although, now that I think about it, I did meet Cher once at her house in Malibu…

Putting on my evil genius hat, here’s a hypothetical approach for building an astroturfing blog empire, filled with posts from simulated teenaged (18-35) girls. Start by extracting common phrases, topics, and contexts from some LiveJournal and MySpace blogs. Next, build some auto-blogging agents resembling Weisenbaum’s Eliza program crossed with some modern chatterbots. Finally, set it loose on LiveJournal, Xanga, and MySpace and have it start forming its own blogrings and online cliques, responding to filtered inputs from comments, selected feeds, and topical news, biased for the current hot keywords and with statistically plausible content and linkage…any Emacs Lisp and SQL hackers want to take this on?

See also: Outsource your Blog, Reasons I Still Read Newspapers

Update 08-19-2005 12:32 – some discussion at My Heart’s in Accra

Update 08-27-2005 00:10 – See also Goofy algorithm generates web page about “Prostitute Phobia” (at BoingBoing), which comments on this site, which is one of a collection of automatically generated pages.

I had been speculating on something like this after reading an article last month about outsourcing personal website maintenance to India.

via Marginal Revolution, Content to Go

As I write this entry my partner Jeff is in the air on the way to our office in Shanghai. What Jeff and I are doing is simple but as far as I know we are the first. We are outsourcing blogs to China.

Our general business model is a two tiered effort to hire Chinese citizens to write blogs en masse for us at a valued wage. The first tier is to create original blogs. These blogs will pop up in various areas of the net and appear to the unknowing reader to be written by your standard American. Our short term goal for these original blogs is to generate a steady stream of revenue through traditional blog advertising like google adwords. We estimate that our current blogforce of 25 can support around 500 unrelated blogs. Hopefully a few of those will be hits. The long term goal is to generate a large untraceable astroturfing mechanism for launching of various products. When a vendor needs to promote a new product to the internet demographic we will be able to create a believable buzz across hundreds of ‘reputable’ blogs and countless message boards. We can offer a legitimacy to advertisers that doesen’t exist anywhere else.

The second tier of our plan is a blog vacation service where our employees fill in for established bloggers who need to take a break from regular posting. As all bloggers know, an unupdated blog is quickly forgotten. For a nominal fee we can provide seamless integration of filler.

I’m not entirely sure that the project is real, they claim to have raised $5 million US and the domain was just registered 3 days ago, but this caught my eye because I think there are some real possibilities for something like this.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with commercial blogging or professional blogging. However…their plan calls for deliberate misrepresentation of commercial interests as personal ones, on a large scale. This could be blog spam taken to the next level.

If they’re really heading off to put together an offshored blog content network, I think it could be done without heading straight for the “astroturf” market, which might give it a slower start but longer legs.

In my quick take on this idea, I’d probably choose India or Phillipines over China for basic English language skills, since the target audience is in the US, and have content editors with actual domain knowledge working with lower cost writers. This might not work for simulating teen LiveJournal sites, but should fit pretty well for topical blogs of most sorts. Hmm. That sounds like the direction the newspaper and magazine business is already heading…

Update 08-19-2005 – Followed up with more comments, plus ideas on how to build the evil astroturfing network in a new post.

“Yahoo! is investing $1 billion in cash to purchase Alibaba.com shares from the company and other shareholders. The agreement gives Yahoo! an approximately 40 percent economic interest with 35 percent voting rights, making it the largest strategic investor in Alibaba.com. ” … “The overall transaction is valued at more than $4 billion.” …. “The combined entity will have a four-person board. Management of Alibaba.com will hold two seats, with CEO Jack Ma serving as the board’s chairman. Other directors will include Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder and Chief Yahoo!, and a representative from Softbank. ”

Press release, Reuters (via MSN)

Summary from China Net Investor

Yahoo’s online assets in China:
Yahoo China: Yahoo China’s main site; Portal
Yisou.com: Search engine
3721.com: Search technology provider
Share of China’s search market (all three combined): 22.7 percent
Source: Shanghai iResearch

Alibaba’s operations:
Alibaba.com: Business-to-business e-commerce site; handled $4.5B in transactions in 2004
Taobao.com: Online auction site; eBay’s main competitor in China
Alipay: Online payment system; more than 2 million users; competes against eBay’s PayPal

more and roundup of comments at PaidContent

more from Bill Bishop

This deal is potentially disastrous for Ebay in China. Taobao was eating its lunch on a small budget; now they have the backing of Yahoo to ramp up their efforts several notches. Some people thought if things got really bad for Ebay they could always buy up Alibaba (Ebay is rumored to have offered Alibaba $1B a few months ago). Now that option is gone and there is not another auction player they can buy that would be meaningful. The Alibaba transaction may be the deal that leads Yahoo to ‘Japan-ning” Ebay again, this time in China.

Shades of 1999:

A fine collection of analysts’ comments from around the web at China Net Investor:

Consider that CBS Marketwatch cited a IDC report as saying the entire China online ad market was $130 million in 2004. Now I think Baidu may surpass a $1.3 billion market cap by the end of first day of trading (China Net Investor: Baidu now has a market capitalization of $3.92 billion!), and if that happens, then I must say that I don’t know of that many other companies that trade at 10x INDUSTRY revenues, even if the industry happens to be growing real fast.

and

“Baidu.com’s P-E ratio is sick”

and Bill Bishop (via Silicon Beat):

“Who in the world doesn’t now think Baidu is China’s Google, even though Google is still really China’s Google?”

and from a comment to the same post:

I watched the stock price like watching a movie. A fantastic show for traders. There are 4 million shares outstanding and the trading volume is 22 million. This means every share has been traded 5 times. It is absolutely not long term investment. it is a toy for traders only.

Good news: It’s a real company, with a real market.
Bad news: Retail investors want to buy shares because they have a feeling it’s like Google. It’s not.

See also: link, link

Although a lot of US investors have been setting up shop in China, this is probably not what Battery Ventures had in mind: (via Silicon Beat)

There appears to be a fraudulent site or company in China masquerading as Battery Ventures, in what looks to be a first for a well-known venture capital firm.
…
But check out the Chinese clone site, at http://www.usa-big.com. Pretty identical to the real Battery site. About the only thing that’s really different is the logo. The clone drops the “V” and just carries the big “B”. Calling themselves the “American Battery Investment Group.” Suppose that makes it just fine then.

Apparently, Battery’s evil twin offers to invest in companies that pay a “processing fee”…