OK, so I probably made up the first word in the title, but it struck me as I was using yet another Mao poster for a China post at 901am that using Mao may be unfair to China, a Iconographical Racism for lack of a better term.

What I’m trying to say in something closely resembling English is that in applying clich?ɬ©d imagery of a country, am I subliminaly being discriminatory? After all, as an Australian I find nothing more annoying than the Sydney (f*cking) Opera House and Kangaroos being used in a similar way in stories about Australia.

The question then becomes though is what imagery does one use when referencing China? after all, the Chinese Flag doesn’t exactly make for nice complementary eye candy. When I think of China I think of these things roughly in order:

1. Exports
However ships loading off the Pilbara and Kimberly (Western Australia) coasts doesn’t really tie in to China itself

2. Manufacturing
Consumer goods, WalMart etc… pictures of people in factories though aren’t China specific enough

3. Great Wall
clich?ɬ©d

4. People
Population stands out in relation to China, and yet crowds seems to be synonymous with Tokyo not Shanghai.

So how do you find a nice piece of clich?ɬ© free eye candy to compliment a post on China?

food for thought.

Just wrote a post at 901am on the latest efforts by the Chinese Government to further censor blogs and remembered that I’d read an article in the last week of so about how the censorship regime works in China. Thanks to the wonders of Web 2.0 I found the article in my BlueDot feed. OK, so I’m late to the social bookmarking movement but the concept of bookmarking has value when you suffer from information overload like I do: I find far, far too many interesting things every day and if I was willing I could probably end up writing 15-20 posts a day, but the 48 hour day is yet to be invented and as is usually the case only a handful end up being posted, and yet adding things to BlueDot is a sinch..but more importantly it’s handy to use as a reference point when I’m looking for something I can remember reading a week before, or even longer. Given that despite 2 hours of trying to prune them my Firefox Bookmarks are still out of control it might be time to add another account somewhere, maybe a private one to bookmark other things as well, business stuff such as software, scripts, how-to guides I want to come back to etc etc… certainly my conversion to all things Web 2.0 is progressing 🙂

Looks like the emphasis is moving onto Mii creation. In a house of 3 people we’ve got at least 10 Mii’s on our Wii now, the golden child loves setting them up, although name choices such as xcgddc are interesting…I’ll have to work on his typing 🙂

Anyone tried a business search lately on whitepages.com.au? Where as once the site was a great resource for finding contact details, it’s now as useless as tits on a bull, even when using the correct business name. Pop across to yellowpages.com.au and it works straight away. This is a fairly new phenomena, certainly I’ve noticed it only in the last couple of months, question is though: is Telstra/ Sensis purposely destroying business search at Whitepages to drive traffic to YellowPages? It’s certainly working that way in this household, I’ve just about given up using whitepages.com.au now to find phone numbers when I need them.

From the official Crowded House mailing list:

Having spent the last couple of weeks in the studio, Crowded House are keen to try out their new line-up live in front of their fans. Neil Finn, Nick Seymour and Matt Hart will be joined on stage by new drummer Matt Sherrod at the Thekla Social in Bristol on Monday, 19 March (see below for venue details). This is the first time the new Crowded House will be playing together, and the performance should give an early indication of what they’ve got in store for the Coachella Festival in California next month. So it promises to be a pretty special night!

Why do the Poms get the privilege first?

Tags: Crowded House

I’m nearly at a loss in describing this, other than to reiterate what I’ve said previously: Robert Scoble speaking at a PayPerPost gig lends his credibility to the folks at PayPerPost, shots as follows from the main page at www.postiecon.com:

They’ve certainly got the slick slimy greasy marketing part down pat.

Tags: PayPerPost, Robert Scoble

I was all prepared to post today about how living in the fastest growing part of Australia (officially) is becoming a pain, even if the growth figure of just under 10,000 extra people in 5 years came off a low base of 50,000. Every day or two I’m now having to deal with banked up traffic..not total traffic jams, but close there to it, I even thought to grab a snap this morning:

On the way back from dropping the golden child off to school, as I rounded a bend maybe 3 minutes from home, just short of the Collie River Bridge (Australind ByPass) I came across a horrific accident. 2 cars and a truck. The 2 cars had vered off the road and rolled. It looked like the driver of the Commodore had been pulled out and gone to hospital, the car wasn’t in a good shape but it still had some shape. The white 4WD (maybe a Honda smallish 4WD) was rooted and the Police had put up white sheets around the car, a sure sign that there was at least 1 dead body in the vehicle. The Truck was pulled up to the side of the road, the only evident damage looked like a scrape to the front left hand side. It could have been me. If it wasn’t for the old folk with their caravans heading North after the long weekend I could have been there 15-20 minutes earlier. Thankfully my impatience in queueing earlier saw me divert to some shops to grab a few things. Someone today lost a father, a mother, a child. Maybe I’m just getting old myself, but life is short, and who am I to complain about traffic when someone lost their life. Perspective is a wonderful thing, a double edged sword perhaps, but it does make you think.

I tried to leave a comment at The Blog Herald, I was moderated or deleted, not sure, so I’ll post here.

Tony LongHung at the Blog Herald writes:

the linked article at The Boston Herald:

For the record it was Victoria that banned YouTube videos. I’m not shy of writing the occasional sensationalist headline, but I usually try to get my facts right, particularly then they are so blatantly clear in the headline as in this case.

Sorry Blog Herald team. This is what you get for deleting/ moderating my comments. In the age of Akismet, censoring me when I try to point out a real mistake in a post is a personal slight, and its when I make the issue somewhat larger than it could have been if you’d allowed me to comment on your site. Not looking for a fight here, but certainly I’d ask the question: will you people ever learn?

Update: fixed Tony’s name. The delicious Irony of it all 🙂

Tags: Blog Herald

TechCrunch bravos USA Today for going down the social networking path on their website. If The Australian, Australia’s version of USA Today went down the social networking path, would you use the service? Imagine it: Glenn Milne could serve the virtual drinks, and punch the Crikey team member could be one of the interactive games on the site. Maybe next year? 🙂

In case you miss it, check out my latest post at 901am, prompted by today’s Crikey Subscriber email. Welcome to Communist Russia, Australian style….and no one believes me what I tell them that the Australian Liberal Party is as socialist as they come, be it in an agrarian flavour.