Besame mucho / love me forever and make all my dreams come true

The preacher talked to me and he smiled / Said, come and walk with me, come and walk one more mile

This is an interesting, and I think fairly perceptive overview of China's possible media future, from journalist and media observer Charles Mabbett:

When China’s most popular blogger Han Han had his recent post about a spate of violent attacks in Chinese schools taken down, it wasn’t the first time that he had courted controversy and it is unlikely to be the last.

The post entitled “Children, you’re depressing grandpa” was critical of a media ban on reporting the latest attack in Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, at a time when the Shanghai World Expo was due to get underway. Evidently, Sina.com, the website that hosts many of China’s most popular blogs determined it was too sensitive to keep online.

Han Han represents a relatively recent phenomenon in China, one that commands millions of readers and is highly influential as both social commentary and barometer of public sentiment. As of April 2010, his blog had attracted 350 million hits, making him by far and away, the king of China’s blogosphere.

[From Bloggers and Chinese Twitter, China’s new media wave | Asia New Zealand Foundation]

The underlying fact that should never be ignored is that China is only 30 years into the post Mao era, and the massive social momentum that Charles saw in-country is hard to describe unless you see it first hand. And never underestimate the Chinese pragmatism.

This fairly radical revision of the boundaries of twitter, which I didn't know, fascinates:

While Chinese Twitter can accommodate up to 400 characters, it is more common for users to post messages up to about 120 characters. Compared with English, Chinese characters allows between two to eight times more information to be packed into the same number of characters.

Which makes it vastly more powerful as a social networking and news dispersal medium. Twitter has played a huge part in the bloody political head-butting that hopefully reached some resolution yesterday here, and I'm keen to find out the Thai script limitations.

Update: Shorty after I posted this, I found this post on the Bangkok protests and the rise of Moblogging:

About the same time as my first tweet, I also posted my first "moblog". This is an abbreviation of "mobile blogging", which, as the name suggests, is blogging from your mobile phone. This was the most exciting development for me. For the first time I was able to post blogs while I was still on location and my thoughts were still fresh. If you visit www.mythailandblog.com you will be able to see some examples of my moblogs. The main difference between the blogs here at www.thai-blogs.com and those moblogs are obviously the number of words. However, if you compare my earlier moblogs to the ones I do these days, you can see that I am now typing longer moblogs on my iPhone. Sometimes, I post about the same event on both blogs, but the moblog is definitely more laid back and relaxed and has more of my daily life that I don't write about at www.thai-blogs.com. Even if the events are the same, the pictures are always different. This is because I use my big DSLR for this blog and my iPhone camera for the moblog. As I carry my iPhone around with me all the time, unlike the heavy DSLR, you will find the I write moblogs more frequently. And I also now find it easier to process pictures and video in my iPhone and then use a Word Press application to write my moblog. These are then uploaded up onto the Internet. Whenever possible, I try to post while I am still at the event.

[From Paknam Web: An iPhone, Twitter and the Red Shirt Rally - (Thailand Travel, Culture, Food and Life)]

Although I didn't for a moment feel threatened going about my daily business in the city, and I think the same goes for just about every expat here, there being absolutely no outflow of resident non-Thai and an ongoing daily arrival of 20,000 tourists (down from the normal 30,000 a day) which is still an incredible number, the live twitter stream on google, which in my office I kept open on my second monitor, was pretty much the live news stream I needed to carry on in a fairly normal way.

The world, how we approach it and how we draw information from it has changed just that little bit more in the past few weeks.

A Chill in My Vein

In honour of New Zealand Music Month, from Otaki (and a huge hattip to Yvette Parsons, without whom we may never have seen these):

or the live version:

With the upload comment:

only thing the annoys me is the sound person did not know how to do the sound correctly, so...that's why I was off pitch. sorry guys, but I did do the best I could under that situation.

I gave you silk suits, blue diamonds and gucci handbags / I gave you things you couldn't even pronounce

There's nothing I wouldn't be / Oh that's the gift of schizo

Oo-eee, in the USA this wack-job would be only slightly to the right of centre, but in the UK? Surely not. Perhaps so these days......

A high-flying prospective Conservative MP, credited with shaping many of the party's social policies, founded a church that tried to "cure" homosexuals by driving out their "demons" through prayer.

Philippa Stroud, who is likely to win the Sutton and Cheam seat on Thursday and is head of the Centre for Social Justice, the thinktank set up by the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, has heavily influenced David Cameron's beliefs on subjects such as the family. A popular and energetic Tory, she is seen as one of the party's rising stars.

[From Rising Tory star Philippa Stroud ran prayer sessions to 'cure' gay people | Politics | The Observer]