Archive for November, 2006
Postmen in the Mountians
This one movie from China I like a lot. Postmen in the Mountains is the story of a rural postman who is passing on his responsibility of delivering mail to his young son. The father makes one last trip to accompany his son for his first trip. The whole trip lasts a couple of days as they travel on foot through picturesque areas and minority regions. Everytime I watch this movie, some bitter sweet saddings happen as I have been to some such places in China and I have met generous people like the ones in the movie.
Watch the trailer of Postmen in the Mountains.
Seems the director of the movie is in Singapore on Nov 29 talking about the film industry in China at the National Library in Bugis.
Sadding is another word used by one of my friends in China. She will always ask if life is sadding, happying or boring.
Second Life intro and Educational Projects on Second Life
I ran a demo session for some teachers introducing them to Second Life. Navigation, buying, building and basic scripting. Some links from the class.
How to sign up as an educator to run a first time Second Life class
Sim Teach Second Life Education Wiki
Idaho Bio terrorism Awareness and Preparedness Program’s Play2train
Technorati Tags: secondlife
Some questions from the demo.
No time in first life, why would I create a second life?
I think it is a bit like having an email account or having a mobile phone. A lot of your communication and learning will happen through such virtual worlds so I guess we would not have much of a choice in a couple of years.
If I run a class in such a virtual world, can some random guy walk in and cause disturbance?
Most such systems lets the user set up groups and access can be controlled based on who is the member of this group.
Web Annotation With Fleck
I was trying out this new web annotation service called fleck. You can place remarks over a page and share it with friends.
www.fleck.com. You can type in the address of the web page you want to add annotation on. Alternatively, you can install the Fleck bookmarklet on the browser bar.
For example, we are adding notes containing English translations on this Japanese news.
At the bottom of the page are some buttons. To get the URL of the bookmarked page, click on the blog button.
Copy the URL to paste it on your blog.
You can also email the annotated page to your contacts via email.
Technorati Tags: fleck
Japanese site translates Chinese blog content
There is a site in Japan called China Intelligence Bureau (Searchina) dedicated to Chinese current events and they recently started a column called “Today’s Blog“. This column features interesting Chinese blog posts translated into Japanese.
The blog translations are under a category called “Today’s Blogs” . There is a page that describes the Chinese blogosphere and why they think that blogs are worth following. (in Japanese)
Here is a translation from a Chinese blog post about rising divorce rate in China. The original Chinese blogger is credited at the bottom.
Television Dramas based on blogs in Japan and Japanese HR people reading blogs
Earlier this year, Ivan invited me to speak with him at a publishing related event. The talk was mainly for younger writers, encouraging them to use social web tools like blog etc. to get noticed. I mentioned some examples of writers in China getting published after they became popular online via their blogs. There was even a service launched in China to facilitate blog to book publishing.
Today we got a message from our Japan spy Mousan. Mousan wrote about an emerging trend in Japan where blogs are being made in to TV drama. There is a new drama series based on a blog by an intern doctor writing about her life. (The linked articles are in Japanese)
Mousan adds
The most popular blog that became a drama is
http://yugure.ameblo.jp/
The writer is a husband and he writes about his daily life with his sassy wife.
(It’s kind like “My sassy girlfriend” from Korea)
It was published as novel, comics, drama and will be even a movie.Both blogs are from the same blogging provider “Ameblo” which encourage the bloggers to publish their blog as a book.
Mousan also mentioned that now Japanese human resource people search for job applicant’s blogs and forum posts made by them
Be careful about what you write in your blog!
http://news.livedoor.com/webapp/journal/cid__2649462/detailThere are some cases where employment offers were canceled due to imprudent topic in the candidates’ blogs or BBS.
This is because HR is checking their candidates’ blog.
If you write about any confidential topic that you heard at the interview on your blog, it means you’re violating business rules.
So you must think carefully when you blog, and it’s safer to delete topics that you think are “imprudent” for job hunting.