Destination Beijing

I will head for Beijing this Wednesday, what will be the start of a two week trip. Many are seeing in China the superpower of the 21st century. Beijing is rapidly gaining an important strategic position in the global space, mainly thanks to its ever-booming economy. The Chinese government recently pledged 40 billion US-$ to refund the the International Monetary Fund. It is at present the main lender for the US of A and just kicked off a discussion if the Dollar is still worth being the world's reserve currency. And these are only a few examples...
In Europe, we are still quite ignorant about the country, its culture and the Chinese people at large. Westerners use to think first in the communist regime and lack of freedom. In a recent article, Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash is reflecting on the role that our Media are playing here:
"Most western newspaper readers and television viewers with a mild interest in China probably do see a lot of stories about Tibet, the upcoming anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, corruption and popular discontent. They see fewer stories about the extent of popular support for the system, bright students still joining the Communist party, or experiments in economic and political reform, especially at the provincial and local level."
According to Ash foreign journalists' motivations are mainly of an economic nature. Stories on social and political unrest are simply selling better. "They report so much about Tibet not because they are ideological China-bashers but because their consumers are fascinated by and care about Tibet."
One of his conclusions points slightly into another direction and here I fully agree with him:
"The larger problem with regular China coverage in the mainstream western media is not its negativity; it's simply that there's too little of it, given the growing importance of China and the fact that Chinese culture and society is so different from the west's."
I plan to meet some foreign journalists next week and I'm eager to discuss and learn more about these issues. But first and foremost, I'm looking forward to talk with locals and get their point on the changing environment and about what is supposed to be the Chinese century. I'll report in this blog over the coming days.

Is Twitter killing blogs?

Venture capitalist Howard Lindzon was voicing the provocative thesis this week. The convenience of the 140-character microblogging service will result in the demise of “personal diaries” or will at least leave many posts unwritten.
There is a clear tendency to a more concise way to broadcast information, not only in the personal space. Newspaper editors are slashing the length of their articles, for example. Personally, I would rather use the Facebook news feed in order to ping my friends (or followers, if you prefer)… also because most of them are probably not aware of this blog and would never find it.
Twitter is gaining traction, not only in the US. The website received in February 9.8 million unique visitors, up from 6.1 million in January, according to comscore.
Twitter is allegedly now the third most popular Social Media service after Facebook and MySpace, and catching up rapidly.
It is developing an incredible commercial value. Rumours appeared on Friday that Google is pondering an offer, significantly higher than the $255 million price tag that has recently been attributed to the service.
Twitter is talk. If you follow the discussions on Twitter, you know what millions of people are saying. That’s something companies or publicly exposed persons are caring a lot about. If not, they should do it, in order to be able to preserve their brands. Little tools, like Tweeting Trends, Hashtags or Monitter are able to analyse and measure the “talk” and figure out trends. Twitter itself was recently incoporating a search function that makes it easy to monitor specific issues or names.
Its value is probably that Twitter “owns” all this chatter. At present, there is no competitor in sight. After the recent relaunch, Facebook is aspiring a share of the short message revolution and wants to be a tad like Twitter.
I just read by the way that “nanoblogging” is already around the corner…