Monthly Archives: February 2009

Thomas Crampton, sometime correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, is usually the one pointing the camera and reporting the wisdom of others, not gracing a lens and sharing it himself. So when he does, it’s almost always worth a listen.

Such was the case with a recent short and insightful interview that blogger Monty Metzger captured after Crampton moderated a panel on the topic of social media in Asia at Le Web in Paris.

“TV? We don’t need no freakin’ TV… We got Youku!” Such is the unofficial catchphrase of Youku Buzz, an English-language blog put out by one of China’s leading (if not the leading) video-sharing sites–Youku.com.

The Youku Buzz blog, and its affiliated Twitter stream, was created to act as a bridge between the mostly Chinese content and English-speaking world. Youku Buzz blogger Kaiser Kuo explains: “The idea to do something like Youku Buzz came to me right after I was approached last summer by Youku’s CEO and founder, Victor Koo, to help out at the company.”

For the last hour-and-a-half, as Chinese Lantern Festival fireworks mark the end of the Chinese New Year celebrations, Twitter has been alive with chatter about a fire at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Beijing, which upon opening this year would have been one of the city’s most exclusive and luxurious hotels.

Located directly behind the newly built CCTV headquarters, and affectionately called dakucha or the “big pants”, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel (the “boot” to the CCTV’s “pants”) is burning as I type this.

Two months ago, at the end of this post, I mentioned I had bought a MacBook. I took delivery of it about a week-and-a-half ago and wanted to share my thoughts on it. I’m not exactly “new” to Macs as my college’s journalism department ran on them, but that was a decade ago and my knowledge of the fruity alt.PC has waned a little. I’ve always been a PC guy–I grew up on MS-DOS. I studied programming using Basic and later Visual Basic. I built IBM clones (when they were still called that) as my work experience in high school and later as my first business venture for beer money.