Success in small steps
July 2, 2008
I have been battling away now on my Beijing blog for nearly a year now and it is just over a month until the the games start in August.
The Wall Street Journal linked to the blog today and Problogger published an article I wrote on Facebook.
Traffic from Google still isn’t great, but I am expecting that to change when the Olympics are on and in the next thirty days as media networks go into Olympic coverage overdrive.
I still have no idea as to how the site will fare, but I am fairly confident I have done enough to at least get it to a point where it should do well.
I keep thinking of the analogy of someone publishing a book or releasing a movie - no matter how much work you put into something you have no idea as to how successful it will be until it is actually released. The site is live of course, but the start of the Olympics is going to be our “premiere”.
My China visa woes
June 15, 2008
I have been in China for a few months now and since I last posted about getting a visa to stay here for the Olympics, I still haven’t gotten it yet.
Worst still the agent has my passport and my previous visa has long expired. The Chinese government is getting very strict now as to who can stay here while the Olympics are on. People who have been here for years are having to leave the country.
The agent who is getting my visa assures me there is no problem and it will be ready soon. Problem is he has been saying the same thing for the past few weeks. Sometimes it gets me really worried as to might or could happen and other times, usually after a couple of beers I just think it will be a fun story to tell people in a few years.
It makes me feel pretty uncomfortable not having my passport, living in a communist country. It is also the longest I have stayed in the one place for quite some time. Even though I am planning to stay here for a few more months yet, I am dying to travel somewhere else.
Fun and games in China
April 27, 2008
I was surprised last year when I came to China how easy it had become to rent an apartment and live in the country (aside from the crowds and the pollution). With the run up to the Olympics, China has become more like it was ten years ago - controlling the movement of people in the country.
I had a bit of a panic last week when I started reading about the visa clampdowns and how China was basically trying to do what it could to make it difficult to both enter and stay in the country. I have applied for a six month visa and will know next week if my application has been successful.
This of course has made it a huge headache for anyone wanting to travel to the country either for business or pleasure. Tibet is totally off limits for now. Many festivals and events have been postponed until after the Olympics. So there is not a lot of Olympic stuff happening now.
The new design for my Beijing site is now up. There is still a bit of work to do on it, but it’s a big improvement on the old design.
Internet clampdown in China
March 19, 2008
Sorry, for the lack of updates on this blog. I have been spending what little time I have online working on my Beijing Olympic site. Traveling in China is fun, but also very tiring. Everything seems to take a day or two longer than you expect. Finding wifi places in smaller towns is also not easy. Internet cafes in China are not very relaxing places to try and work.
Just the other day I was trying to do some work and I constantly had 3 or 4 people standing around me looking at what I was doing.
China has really clamped down on the internet over the trouble going on in Tibet. Having trouble with Gmail for the first time, which is worrying. I know there are ways around it, but it is slow enough trying to reach external sites. I did see some images of the rioting in Tibet on tv here, but not in the last couple of days.
What is your China strategy
May 9, 2006
China is set to have 60 million bloggers by 2006 according to a Reuters article (via).
China is also moving its advertising from traditional media to the internet according to businessweek.
“…the slump has print publications scrambling to find new online models. The Economic Observer, a five-year-old Beijing-based financial weekly printed on pink paper (in a nod to London’s Financial Times), saw its ad revenue growth slow to 5% last year, from 100% three years ago. So the Observer has launched a lifestyle supplement to appeal to younger readers and is seeking a foreign partner to help upgrade its Web site, adding more graphics, video clips, and perhaps a search engine for financial news. “We must focus on changing our platform,” says He Li, editor-in-chief.”
I spent almost a year in China in 1999, just at the tail end of the boom in foreign investment. I also got caught up in the whole China thing, and spent some time studying Mandarin.
Now, we are possibly on the verge of an Internet boom in China. It has gotten me thinking how could I benefit from this growing market. I have gone out and registered a couple of China related domains, but still not exactly certain what I will do yet.
I am not sure if just going out and creating a Chinese language version of your site is a good idea, but it might be a good start.
