Recently thousands of online tombs have been established in China. Online burial sites are convenient way to pay respect to the dead. Online tombs are also relatively cheap, 10 yuan (1 euro). After selecting a graveyard user can offer flowers and candles to the dead.

“The Web page of the online tombs is similar to blogs and it’s a very modern and low-carbon way to celebrate the traditional festival, suitable for young Chinese with so much pressure at work.” said Song Qin, a legal consultant who paid respects to his deceased grandparents. (China Daily).

Online burial sites are also low-cost and low-carbon way to pay respect to the dead.

“Zhu Yong, deputy director of the 101 Research Institute under the Ministry of Civil Affairs, said the green concept of interment prevails in many countries. Online burials can avoid the waste of natural and social resources, providing people a convenient way to commemorate the dead, he said.” (China Daily)

Google says (Google’s blog post via Techcrunch)

“On January 12, we announced on this blog that Google and more than twenty other U.S. companies had been the victims of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China, and that during our investigation into these attacks we had uncovered evidence to suggest that the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties, most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on their computers. We also made clear that these attacks and the surveillance they uncovered—combined with attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the web in China including the persistent blocking of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger—had led us to conclude that we could no longer continue censoring our results on Google.cn.”

Google finally shut down Chinese search site Google.cn. Fortunately we still have Chinese search machine Baidu (百度) to search Chinese websites, music, videos etc.

China says (Xinhua News Agency)
“Google has ‘violated its written promise’ and is ‘totally wrong’ by stopping censoring its Chinese language searching results and blaming China for alleged hacker attacks, a government official said early Tuesday morning.

The official in charge of the Internet bureau under the State Council Information Office made the comments about two hours after the online search service provider announced it has stopped censoring its Chinese-language search engine Google.cn and is redirecting Chinese mainland users to a site in Hong Kong.

- Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks, said the official.”

Criticism of social media has been growing.

Dean Whitbread created Unsocialmedia.com:

“Unsocial Media will reward you by making your life more difficult. You will join an Unsocial Media network in order to be rejected, ostracised, pilloried, for reasons of self-improvement, so that you waste less time worrying about what other people are thinking and doing. Unsocial Media will remind you that you are spending too much time chasing your tail and disappearing up your own arse. You will benefit from Unsocial Media because we have far too much media already, and because your arse is too big, since you spend far too much time sitting on it in front of a computer.”

Think about that. And how social is “Unsocial media”:

“If you create a link to someone, after that the Unsocial Media Immoderators won’t leave you alone, even to the point of calling you on the phone, coming to your house, following you to the pub and harassing you at the bar, petulantly demanding alcohol and cigarettes.”

Oh, irony.

“Micropayments are just part of Google’s overall plan to help newspapers make money from online content. Google’s proposal — its “vision of a premium content ecosystem” — include five key features that combine the Google’s e-commerce, search, and advertising platforms:

* Single sign-on capability for users to access content and manage subscriptions
* Ability for publishers to combine subscriptions from different titles together for one price
* Ability for publishers to create multiple payment options and easily include/exclude content behind a paywall
* Multiple tiers of access to search including 1) snippets only with “subscription” label, 2) access to preview pages and 3) “first click free” access
* Advertising systems that offer highly relevant ads for users, such as interest-based advertising
” (Search Engine Land)

Google doesn’t believe that micropayments will catch widely for buying online content.

“We envision the typical scenario to be where a user pays a monthly fee for access to a wide-ranging package of premium content.” (” (Search Engine Land)

“YouTube and Flip are already big players in this young space, and the logical competitive move for Apple is to make personal media deliverable and accessible anytime, anywhere. That means in the next few years, we’re likely to see video cameras with live-streaming software built into future iPods and iPhones (and the rumored touchscreen tablet, if it ever exists). These features will likely be integrated into iTunes, which Apple would convert into a social experience with real-time sharing services, in addition to being a storage tool.” (Wired)

What about technological infrastructure in general?

Finland made 1 Mbps broadband a legal right for all citizens (deadline July 2010). I’m waiting for 100 Mbps connection (Finland has set a target of mandating 100 Mbps by 2015). Finland should hurry if it wants to stay as a high-tech country.

Koreans probably access 1Gbps service by 2012. Now Koreans usually have up to 100 Mpbs broadband.

Goals are nice but reality bites. Check this for more information

China’s media market is catching up with the West. China’s GDP is growing 9%/year and the use of internet 49%/year; e.g. Facebook has only 350 million users – Chinese QQ.com (only in Chinese) has nearly a billion users.

Want to know more, check this:

Back Dorm Boys (后舍男生)

Now Google tries to shake hands in peace. How?

“Publishers and website owners can now limit the number of times you can access their websites for free through Google to five times per day. Google put the new limit in place because “some [publishers] are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content.” The previous version didn’t limit the number of pages on a subscription-required (or registration-required) site that users could access from Google’s News or web search. Unless you use Google or Google News to access the same website over and over rather than sampling the full breadth of what’s available, this rule change won’t affect you.” (Wired)

Read more: How to placate publishers ~ Google’s move by Wired.

“Ten years ago, Korea was an innovation powerhouse in the web industry – The country was filled with entrepreneurship and was churning out some of the most interesting web services before any other countries did. But these days Korea-born innovations are hard to come by. On the contrary, some worry that Korea might be becoming “internet Galapagos”, inflicted by walled gardens and lack of entrepreneurial spirits. What happened, and what should Korea do? Are there any signs of hope we can find?” (A great blog Web 2.0 Asia by Chang-Won Kim)

Well, it’s not easy here in Nokialand either.

The Korean way (by Chang-Won Kim):

“There’s a move to innovative business models and that’s particularly true in the digital industries,” said Martin Bloom, co-founder of design and branding consultancy Bloom & Tse. “Few Chinese know the rules of western business schools and they don’t know the constraints we do in the west, so they experiment and find novel solutions. Chinese entrepreneurs are street smart, not book smart. They have to adapt very quickly, and that’s important.” (Guardian.co.uk)

Now about 30 percent of a Chinese mobile bill is spent on music. The next step is mobile video – and it will change media.

“As outside China, video, social networking and online gaming are major trends; the latter alone predicted to be worth $8bn per year across China by 2012. Illustrating the potential for growth, he said that telecoms revenue for last year was $120bn but half a trillion dollars in the US, a far more saturated market.” (Guardian.co.uk)