Wang Jianshuo, an avid English-language blogger based in Shanghai found this scene in the rare Shanghai snow tied to a holiday travel nightmare storm throughout much of China over the last week.

Craigslist's China sites are not particularly lively. In Beijing, English-language readers tend to head for classifieds run by the local expat magazines that's Beijing and City Weekend. Several friends, Chinese and foreign, have mentioned Kijiji as a more commonly-used alternative. At least their promotional team knows how to play in the snow!

Henry Jenkins, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who is perhaps academia's leading fanboy, spent part of January in Shanghai and has been posting observations on his blog. I want to highlight one of his better contributions: on social responsibility in Chinese video game culture.

Video games, "freedom," and "addiction"

Jenkins was attending the International Games and Learning Forum, organized by MIT and Beijing University. There, the focus was on "serious games," those that might potentially be used to promote learning. His most frequently repeated observation was that, while U.S. experts on … Read more

Southwest Airlines announced Wednesday that it plans to begin trials of satellite-to-airplane broadband Internet service sometime this summer.

Spokeswoman Marilee McInnis said Wednesday morning that initially Southwest plans to test the service on four planes. But because the airline's planes fly many different routes, she did not anticipate--at least not yet--that travelers would be able to plan to fly on one of those planes.

That means that in the early going at least, the service--which will allow passengers to access the Internet if they have their own Wi-Fi-enabled laptops--will be available at random.

McInnis did not say if Southwest'… Read more

Microsoft has launched Live Search 地图, the China branch of its Virtual Earth project.

Compared with Google's ditu.google.cn and Sogou's (搜狗) map.sogou.com, the site seems about the same, if a little faster--though traffic may still be low. What Google and Microsoft have in common is that the maps contain listings for restaurants, banks, and other locations rendered as icons on the map. Sogou has no such advantage, but sometimes it resolves addresses better than Google.

But here's the interesting part: Microsoft's new service includes major highways and the locations of main cities on Taiwan. … Read more

So you're a fan of intellectual property innovation and you want to bring Creative Commons to Hong Kong. What are your pitches? Exalting the free market and smearing Hollywood.

Creative Commons, founded by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, develops licenses that let creators allow or disallow a variety of reuses of the work. It's catchphrase, if it has one, is "Some Rights Reserved."

Teams of lawyers have adapted these licenses to more than 40 national jurisdictions, including mainland China, but the Hong Kong efforts are still under way.

Rebecca MacKinnon--an excellent media blogger, an assistant professor … Read more

Internet-based copyright infringement is pretty much the only way people can keep track of TV and movies from abroad in Beijing. It's hard to even find legal DVDs, and if there aren't even illegal DVDs to buy, it's often trivially easy to find entire movies on Youku or Tudou.

Yesterday, a Chinese public-security ministry official asked for international help in copyright enforcement, noting that many infringers use Web sites hosted outside Chinese jurisdiction.

"Copyright infringements, by their very nature, are international crimes. To effectively curb such activities, (we) need enhanced international cooperation on law enforcement," … Read more

If you want to look at how the personalities of Apple's two co-founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, differ, perhaps one way would be to measure their responses when asked to pose for pictures.

Let's start with Woz. Though he claims to have been acutely shy in his early life, these days Woz is a social butterfly. He shows up at tech event after tech event in Silicon Valley, such as the 30th anniversary of Apple, or the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, and is almost eager to glad-hand anyone who comes by. Want a picture of … Read more

Several news stories have noted that China's Internet user base increased by more than 70 million in 2007 to a count of 213 million at year's end. Little noted is that 23 percent of these users access the Internet from mobile devices, the remainder counted as broadband users.

The statistics, released by the China Internet Network Information Center and reported by ChinaTechNews, do not seem to specify how many of these mobile users also use broadband, and I can't find data on whether people use broadband at home or at work.

CINIC also reported (translated) that almost … Read more

There are tens of thousands of people for whom Burning Man is an annual certainty: They and their friends and families know for sure where they'll be during the week leading up to Labor Day.

For these people, this morning is a D-Day of a sort: The first day that tickets to the counter-cultural arts festival go on sale.

And, as always, tickets are being sold in a tiered pricing structure, with 10,000 tickets going for $210, 10,000 for $225, 10,000 for $250 and whatever supplies are left at $295. Burning Man asks people to buy … Read more