The Economist

I need to call The Economist in London or Singapore by June 9th in preparation for a subsequent telephone call with the brilliant 'Nonsense'. I've found a little countdown widget from a really good new Web 2.0 site for the Lynx Effect that will help me remember (and you too if you need a widget to remember something).

The Forbidden City

I've yet to actually venture inside the Forbidden City despite living next door. I'm waiting for a crystal clear day and some swotting up on the history first I keep saying. However earlier this evening I was reading Rachel Clarke's excellent blog which I follow because she is doing grown up stuff on social media metrics as well as gaming and advertising too. Rachel posted about a Canon Eos/Rebel XT competition which is a camera I bought recently, and that I'm having a lot of enjoyment with. Anything that makes me look vaguely proficient is always welcome and this sucka sure takes care of me. Here's a little run round the Forbidden City walls on my lekky bike which I have reason to believe may resemble the Hoffmeister bear on a girly bike when I'm riding it!

Breaking News

Easily the biggest news of the year for Social Media in China is the just announced 430 million dollar investment by Oak Pacific Interactive for Xiaonei the Chinese Facebook. I posted just recently about China 2.0 over here, with inexpensive ways for brands to get involved with social media, but these guys have just thrown an incredible amount of money into this small start up despite a) the Social Media model is unproven in China b) a revenue model is yet to be harvested from that. This is the equivalent of Google's purchase of Youtube in 2006

Whether this proves a sound investment or not (and its hard to see why a way to make it work wont be found) this is another example of the shift from interruptive messaging of the traditional monologue model of advertising to the dialog model we are seeing all round the world. Advertising may not be broken in developing economies as Russell points out quite correctly, but as long as the shift of eyeballs to computer screens continues it's possible that the massive passive is diminishing a lot quicker than us Asian planners may have first anticipated.

For a comprehensive and authoritive analysis check out Kaiser Kuo's blog post on Ogilvy's Digital Watch.