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Best of Moonlight Blog 2008

William Long — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:49:36 +0000

As we move into 2009 I thought it might be fun to look back quickly on the year that was with a top 20 post of the most popular posts published on Moonlight Blog this year (according to page views on Google Analytics). I hope you enjoy this trip back through the year of 2008 at Moonlight Blog.

Youtube Unblocked in China – 7,803 views

SourceForge Blocked In China – 7,720 views

Top Ten Best WordPress Plugins – 5,043 views

Top Ten Best PlayStation Games – 4,812 views

Top Ten Best PS2 Games – 2,822 views

Top Ten Best Firefox Extensions – 2,645 views

WordPress Mod Rewrite Make Subdirectory 404 Error – 2,431 views

Top Ten WordPress SEO Tips – 2,011 views

Google Translation Gadget – 1,899 views

GoDaddy Blocked in China – 1,434 views

WordPress Excerpt Seo Tips – 1,388 views

The Most Popular RSS Reader In China – 1,235 views

Install WordPress MU On IIS With Url Rewrite – 1,225 views

WordPress MU Optimization Script – 1,087 views

Micro-blogging: Chinese Twitter Clone Site – 999 views

SourceForge Unblocked in China – 909 views

Boycott China Product If You Really Love China – 898 views

YouTube Blocked in China Again – 841 views

Custom WordPress Database Error Page – 838 views

DB2ASP – Free Access Database to ASP Converter – 812 views

All in all it was a fairly busy but very satisfying year of blogging here at Moonlight Blog. Thanks to the many readers who have contributed either with guest posts, comments, emails and tip offs. I’m looking forward to yet another great year in 2009.

Pownce is Shutting Down

William Long — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:43:32 +0000

Microblogging service Pownce, is closing down on December 15. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new pro accounts. The Pownce team has joined SixApart.

Pownce have built an export tool so users can save the content. Users can find the export tool at Settings > Export. Please export content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not be accessible after this date.

Is Blog Dead in China ?

William Long — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 08:59:45 +0000

In the past year, there is a continuing discussion in the Chinese blogosphere on whether blog culture is dying down. Moreover, recently bokee.com and blogchina.com, the two earliest BSPs founded by Fang dong-xing in China, are at business crisis. Fang is looking for investing to transform the websites into multi-media community platform.

What we see is: BSP and services related with blogs are slowly disappearing, blog has passed its golden days and walked into a dark future. The main reason is because the services around blogs cannot make a profit.

Why can’t they make a profit? The content quality of blog is better than SNS, Twitter and Digg, their traffics are high. They should be able to get income from Ads. However, at present, blogger’s income is too narrowed. Basically, they depends on Google AdSense. Which means their profit is affected by Google.

When Google entered the scene, it developed a huge number of blogging tools, such as google reader, feedburner, blogsearch, etc… which destroyed other BSPs dream for profit while google has a monopoly status in the market.

Blog is more open and individualized, its content quality is relative higher. SNS is more closed, especially towards search engine. It contrasts with blog’s openness and affects information dissemination. A good article is very difficult to get disseminated via SNS. Now most of the SNS in China are coping the facebook, which is a dead end. The best SNS is Tencent’s QQ, but you can’t find any similarity between QQ and facebook. The funny thing is Tencent never claimed itself to be a SNS.

Thanks globalvoicesonline translation

Micro-blogging: Chinese Twitter Clone Site

William Long — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:34:47 +0000

Twitter is a social network micro-blogging services. The Twitter Clones (micro-blogging services) and it looks like one of the Chinese Twitters are gaining popularity quickly. Here is the most popular Twitter-clone sites in China what I known.

FanFou – FanFou is the biggest Twitter-like site in China. It seems FanFou copied almost everything of Twitter, you can use FanFou to update “what are you doing” in less than 140 characters, it supports updating and receiving notification via Gtalk, MSN, QQ, mobile phone and web, you can follow the updates of your friends, and turn on/off the notification of your friends. It already has a wordpress plugin, maxthon plug and other 3rd party add ons. It also has two Twittervision-like mashups that put Tweets on the 3D globe and a 2D map of China. Xing Wang is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of FanFou.

JiWai.de – JiWai.de is the first Chinese brother of twitter: an online service that enables user to broadcast short messages to your friends or “followers.” It also lets you specify which JiWai.de users you want to follow so you can read their messages in one place. Just like twitter, Jiwai supports updating through sms and gtalk. Updating from mobile phones onto jiwai.de, however, compared with Twitter, saves considerable money for Chinese users who want to use twitter-like stuff. To meet the demand of more Chinese users, Jiwai.de also supports updating from some other IMs, including MSN, skype, and QQ. Zhuohuan Li is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of JiWai.de.

TaoTao – Tencent QQ is the most popular IM in China. While Tencent has realized the value of micro-blogging, they launched a stand-alone service called Taotao. Not like FanFou, TaoTao only support updating from QQ and Web. It have no widget support. Since Tencent has the most extensive im user base, and the characteristics of this kind of micro-blogging service also match with profile of QQ’s users.

Other Micro-blogging Site in China:

zuosa – http://zuosa.com
ilaodao – http://ilaodao.cn
komoo – http://komoo.cn
byuu – http://byuu.com
wulog – http://wulog.com
fish – http://fish.sh
laigula – http://laigula.com

Best of Moonlight Blog 2007

William Long — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 08:42:04 +0000

As we move into 2008 I thought it might be fun to look back quickly on the year that was with a top 20 post of the most popular posts published on Moonlight Blog this year (according to page views on Google Analytics). I hope you enjoy this trip back through the year of 2007 at Moonlight Blog.

WordPress Plugin: Chinese PinYin Slug – 2,467 views

Survival For Standalone Blogs – 1,682 views

China Internet Censorship Goes Crazy – 1,682 views

The Secret Of Internet Censorship In China – 1,461 views

FeedBurner Blocked By China – 1,276 views

FeedBurner Is Completely Blocked In China – 1,201 views

Google Answers Censorship In China – 1,082 views

About This Blog – 1,041 views

Baidu Hijacking Google, Yahoo, Microsoft In China – 1,019 views

Google Launches Chinese Blog Search – 1,014 views

YouTube Blocked In China – 986 views

WordPress MU AdSense Plugin – 944 views

WordPress Plugin: Post2Mail, Send Post to Email – 693 views

How To Visit Google BlogSpot In China – 670 views

WordPress Plugin: Yearly Blog Stats – 625 views

WordPress Plugin: Keyword Filter – 615 views

WordPress Plugin: MySQL Server Crash Monitor – 552 views

YouTube, Have a Merry Halloween – 540 views

WordPress Plugin: WP-PostViews JavaScript Edition – 526 views

About – 520 views

Google Launches Chinese Blog Search

William Long — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 15:40:48 +0000

Today, Google released a Chinese version of Google Blog Search, the URL is blogsearch.google.cn . The IP address of “Chinese Blog Search” is in Bei Jing. Now Chinese users can use Google blog search services in simplified Chinese language.

According to Google Chinese Blog, the Chinese version of Google Blog Search can track most of Chinese blog service providers,including Sina blog, Sohu blog, Tencent blog, 163.com blog, Baidu space, and other blog networks.

Meanwhile, Google blog search is also support most standalone blogs, such as WordPress, MovableType, Google Blogger blog.

The Chinese blog search is self-censoring, when I try to search “Tiananmen Square” in blogsearch.google.cn, I get no result. Google is not just translate BlogSearch’s interface into Chinese language.

Survival For Standalone Blogs

William Long — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:16:08 +0000

This is my responded to Zousuper‘s discussion on standalone blog’s survival(Thanks for danwei’s translation). Later Zousuper’s blog is blocked by Chinese government, but Zousuper is not render submissive, he set up a new host and blogging again. Here is the post:

The necessary conditions for setting up a blog on a separate domain in China – whether or not it is illegal, whether or not it requires registration – is currently a hotly debated issue. From the look of current policy, it seems that all standalone websites that have interactive information have to be registered.

There are issues of location here. If the server is overseas, then theoretically speaking registration is not necessary, but there is no way to guarantee that the server’s IP will be accessible. Rose Luqiu’s 1510 Blogs is a typical example. When a large proportion of visitors are from the mainland, then under normal circumstances a mainland server will be chosen. This is when we arrive the question of the blog’s legality.

Here I’ll summarize the steps and conditions for legally setting up a blog on a standalone domain; this should be basically the same in all major cities across the country.

Website registration is not a simple question. MII registration is just a basic registration, suitable for non-forum websites that do not have interactive information. If you think that MII registration will solve everything, then you are very wrong. Of course, you could close the comments section to your blog and voluntarily choose not to disseminate “harmful information”; in that case the MII registration would be enough. If your website allows leaving messages and exchanging information, and its traffic is low, you may be able to simply get by. In general, for normal small websites, MII registration is enough.

If your website traffic is relatively large, particularly if it is highly interactive, like a forum or a blog, then you’ll face the appearance of so-called “harmful information.” Normally, when you discover “harmful information,” someone will be tasked with notifying the webmaster to delete it; it becomes a problem when it occurs frequently.

Strictly speaking, individuals are not permitted to provide BBS services on the Internet (interactive online services in which users provide information for release, including message boards, electronic whiteboards, e-forums, online chat services, and guestbooks) without formally registering or passing review by state communication administrators. To providing interactive forum and guestbook services, you must set up “technological measures for network security,” in addition to registering with the PSB’s Internet Supervision Center. This means a system for review, control, and deletion of information, as well as associated “computer security personnel.”

Usually, registering with the PSB Internet Supervision Center is pretty complicated and drawn-out. The registration is vastly different from MII’s: it is very strict. If your website supports BBS, forums, guestbook, or chat services, then you must provide the following materials:

A copy of the computer security personnel certificate;
Registered Internet user network security form;
Providers of Internet services for news, publishing, education, health, pharmaceuticals, and medical equipment must be approved by the appropriate government agencies in accordance with laws and regulations, and must present the government approval documents at the time of registration.

The computer security personnel certificate is typically obtained by paying 660 yuan to be trained and tested. That means that if you want to write a blog, you must first pass the “security worker” exam. The registration form basically requires writing out your name, ID#, home address, mobile phone number, and place of work, so that if there are any problems you can be arrested on the spot. If you do not provide this information, then your registration may not pass.

After you’ve registered, you then face the work of looking out for and cleaning up “harmful information” – this is the responsibility of the “computer security personnel.” Because the appearance of “harmful information” on a forum or blog is ultimately the responsibility of the webmaster, the PSB will carry out punishment against the webmaster according to the volume of “harmful information” that is circulated. Here you’ll run into the issue of standards for punishment. Current punishment standards takes into account the number of registered users, the quantity of circulating information, the hit count, and illegal revenue; so long as one area exceeds the standard then you’re determined to be in “extremely serious circumstances.” An article clicked by one person is completely different from the same article clicked by 10,000 people; are you able to guarantee 24-hour review for your personal blog or forum? If you cannot, then hiding your webpage counters and your pageview numbers may cut down on some unwanted trouble. At the same time, you should keep your website income a secret; there is nothing good and a whole lot bad about making your website’s income public. Under normal circumstances, this is a standard for determining punishment. The greater your website’s income, the more serious the problem, and the worse off you will be.

Hence, if you have a forum or a guestbook system, you’ve got a hidden time bomb. “Harmful information” will cause a lot of trouble for the webmaster when it surfaces. So if you have a forum, it’s best to put it on a separate domain name and move it to an overseas server unless you can guarantee you’ll be online 24 hours a day to prevent every single bit of “harmful information” from being published. Otherwise you’re giving them an angle to get you.. So high-risk systems like forums should be moved out. The same goes for guestbooks and comments to blog posts. If you cannot cut off comment functions, then you must implement keyword filters to turn every sensitive word into ××. Doing this will save you a bit of unnecessary trouble.

In short, there is currently no clear idea about the system for registering blogs, but for most blogs that have a fair number of comments and discussion, it’s no good to simply register with MII; you have to go to the local PSB’s website to register for it to have any effect. And you must maintain a good relationship with the local PSB. Whatever they want, you give it to them; don’t antagonize them, and don’t dispute matters of theory with them. Don’t say anything when it’s not your turn – it won’t work, anyway.

Sources:William Long: The way for standalone blogs to survive (Chinese)

About This Blog

William Long — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 04:18:16 +0000

This is my first blog in English, which is set up using WordPress, in this blog, I’ll translate some of my Chinese blog into English, also, I’ll report the information about Chinese blogosphere, Chinese GreatFireWall, China society and people. Help you meet a real China.

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