News from Chinese Blogosphere(Aug 21th-27th) · Global Voices
Frank Dai

1 Firewall Update: From Aug 20th, internet users in mainland China generally began to experience access failures when they tried to browse websites outside China. Even the searching engine Google and its mail service Gmail are both inaccessible while all the websites based in China are normal. Keso pointed out that the major international router may face problem after test. Virushuo guessed that the GFW, mechanism to block websites is undergoing update operation. He said the new system can now block different websites on same URL.
2 Blog Tag Game: A game was spreading among Chinese Bloggers called “Five Weird Habits” with amazing speed. Its rule was that a blogger wrote about five weird habits in his or her daily life then named other 5 bloggers to continue the game on their blogs. It was started on Aug 15th by a Taiwan blogger named Anaislee and reach across the strait almost overnight. Incomplete has a map illustrating how the game was spreading in mainland China and Florahsueh discussed this social behavior using Maslow’s theory.
3 More Female Blogger than Male: In an interview conducted by Businessweek with Hu Zhiguang, CEO of Blogcn, whose company is leading Blog Service Provider in China, revealed that near 60% of blogger are female because they are more emotional to express feeling and males are too busy to blog. Mr Hu also talked about the issues like real name registration and sensitive words.
4 Online Game: New regulation governing online game would be soon approved by legislature body. It requires the game designing must have a system that limits the consecutive playing time no more than 3 hours. Anyone who plays over the limitation would face punishment on their virtual money and scores. Fons Tuinstra discussed its impacts on the profitable market of online game. Also a game called “Anti-Japan War Online” developed by China Communist Youth League was going to begin commercial operation by the end of the year. Joi Ito was very curious about how Japanese history was portrayed in the game.
5 Chinese Blogger Conference: A list of major speakers and panel moderators has been published including their biography. More details are still under way.
6 Nomination for Best of Bloggers: The annual competition initiated by Deutsche Welle called Best of Bloggers began now. Anti, a celebrated right-wing journalist blogger, told his readers that he had became one of the 12 judges in the competition. He asked people to recommend blogs to him for award nomination.