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Remember podcasts — the big to-do of 2005? I realized, as I worked through the playlist on my iPod during yesterday’s 22-hour travel marathon, that I have not listened to a complete podcast since the Gillmor Gang hung it up in November.

What’s on my iPod? I have a lecture series on the history of Byzantium, some repeats of Christopher Lydon’s OpenSource radio show, a few leftovers from the now-discontinued BikeScape … old episodes of the Ricky Gervais show.
Yep, I’ve hung it up on podcasts. Main reason — impossible to multi-task while listening. Great for car rides and commutes, not so good for background noise while working, and certainly a buzzkiller for erg workouts.

It stung, to no end, to have a competitor announce with great fanfare that they had launched the first blog in China by a PC company. Firsts are firsts and make for great PR superlatives, but this is not a zero-sum game and the question with corporate blogs is not how they behave versus a competitor’s, but the purpose they serve in market and to customers. (and we were first anyway, having had an engineering forum in place for months)

Spend any time researching the broader topic of blogs and China and a couple blunt themes emerge. First, there are a lot of blogs in China. That is a complete and utter “duh” statement, but there it is. Blogs are big and not regarded as a freakshow exhibit. Popular portals such as Sohu offer blog services to customers, and according to some research reports, the country leads the world in terms of numbers of blogs – a statistic I suspect is difficult to verify and which may be counting entities the west might not regard as blogs.

Technorati lists yanxi.bokewu.com as the 32nd most popular blog in the world (Technorati had a Chinese blog at the top of its list at one point last year, but it seems to have vanished ((Technorati rankings are irrelevant inside of China as the service seems to be intermittently blocked)) – and a untranslated look at some top Chinese blogs shows a seeming emphasis on pop culture and a youthful slant. Political blogs – which arguably led the way in the U.S. with such properties as the Daily Kos and the dynamics of political blogs during the 2004 Presidential election – are few and far between, but technology blogs, another source of the American A-List, do exist in China.

Digital media is consumed, some experts told me last spring, more through mobile phones than PCs. While RSS is a great delivery mechanism for mobile content (it separates the information from screen-breaking designs), I have no idea how popular
RSS is as a data delivery mechanism. Let’s assume it is a high, that consumers don’t care what it is called, and that, in the long run, blog generated XML is an expedient way to publish and deliver content.

As some readers and colleagues know, I define blogs as extremely agile and inexpensive content management systems first, and community structures second. I expect, overtime, many emerging Chinese corporations will trend towards blog platforms for their primary publishing and content management systems due to low cost and ease of configuration.

The challenge for those corporations is the issue of customer comments — which appear to be the point of definition for many people when defining what a “blog” is. (I tend to agree, comments need to be enabled for the presence to qualify as a blog. Otherwise, the presence is a “site.”) When we launched blogs over the past eight months, we followed a multi-blog strategy with blogs covering our areas of special interest as opposed to a single standard corporate blog. We expect those specialty blogs – social responsibility, insider tips, design, etc. – to attract customer service and fulfillment comments, and indeed they have. We have considered launching a separate service blog, but think there is a more effective solution for that type of customer interaction than a blog format.

Customer service in China – Chinese companies serving Chinese consumers — is as large an unknown to me as the language itself. There are two significant differences in the Chinese consumer PC market and western consumer markets.

1. ecommerce is growing, but online commerce is hampered by mistrust and lack of credit cards.

2. retail is the preferred place to purchase a PC

Our China PR team is pretty sophisticated in terms of blogger relations – identifying influential IT bloggers and working with them to develop reviews and open commentary – but as they point out, the public relations/media relations mission in China is far different than the U.S. — primarily around the mission of the mainstream press. What intrigues them is the notion that we’ve adopted: that bloggers are, at the end of the day, a form of press.

The areas that concern our China team are real and understandable. For me to cite the noblest sentiments of freedom of the press, First Amendment, and naked conversational market is just that — sentimental and not pragmatic. The notion of a customer conversation – of accepting comments and then replying to them is a big challenge, especially doing so in public. I trust we’re going to get there, but wherever our blogs operate, we need to be sensitive to the local mores and not take a dogmatic approach that forces a particular “way” of operation on the local market. The worse thing about globalization, is my opinion, is homogeneity, the best thing is the sharing of best practices such as GAAP and basic human rights. Developing a global corporate blogging policy is a start, but understanding the vast difference in approaches to media, to public dialogue … let’s just say I regard the implementation of a global corporate blogging strategy to be one of the most fascinating challenges in my current assignment.

Everything was going just great. The flight out of Beijing left on time, and after reading three back issues of Fortune, the latest Atlantic Monthly, and weeding out 100 emails, I went into 2001-Space-Odyssey-hibernation mode with earplugs, noise canceling headphones, eye-mask, a horse-pill Ibuprofen, and 15 mg of temazepam. It was probably the best airplane coma ever, for I awoke right in time for a quick breakfast, a visit to the head to reinsert my single contact lens, and enough time to get my cstuff repacked into my knapsack in time for a landing at San Francisco.

Then I hit the TSA security checkpoint where I pulled out my Zip-Loc bag with my shaving cream and my deodorant and my toothpaste and my bottle of Kiehl’s face moisturizer. Yes, I admit, I use moisturizer — otherwise my face would crack open. This is expensive stuff. Like $15 for four ounces and a complete pain in the ass to find on Cape Cod.
Well, the four ounces were the problem. According to the nasty little TSA troll, it was 0.5 ounces too big and so it had to go.

A$%^&$#e!

That bottle has made it from Boston to Raleigh, Raleigh to Boston, to New York, Boston to Beijing — clearing at least a dozen TSA security points. Let’s not mention that the bottle was half empty and probably represented two ounces.

I am bullshit. The whole liquid-gel freakout is a total indignity. My shoes are already off and I have to worry about the condition of my socks for public viewing. I pull my belt off. My pants will probably follow sometime next year. Then I get asked to step into a booth and get blasted with puffs of air.

Well, all in the name of National Security, so off I go this morning to drop a twenty on a new bottle of goo, this time asking if they have something TSA compliant.

Where to begin on this topic? The title is intimidating enough, but here goes. I’ve been living the topic this week, so this post will be a multi-part brain dump.
In terms of large numbers, China leads the world in a lot of counts. The landmass is big. The population is big. Growth rates are big. Historical tradition is big. And the number of blogs is reported to be big and getting bigger, but I’ll defer to Sino-net experts on adoption rates and trends.
The big issue is whether any Chinese corporations blog. I’ll duck that issue for now, because I honestly can’t say, but will assume the answer is yes. The question is whether they blog globally, which is going to force me down the rabbit hole of digression to tackle the bigger issue of blog translation, something I’ve been discussing with John Bell at Ogilvy’s Digital Influence Project, and who recently returned from China himself.

I’ll dismiss, right off the top, the notion of machine-translation. Yes, a google on “WordPress Translation” will yield a number of sidebar plug-ins which will accomplish the act, but I will assume they are no better than Babelfish in terms of fluency and accuracy. I’ve tried using machine-translation to read what others are saying about me, in say Italian, and the result is barely understandable.

So, human translation is required and that is easily worked — find someone with the skills and have them monitor the originating blog for updates, perform the translation and post it.

Okay. Where do they post it? In the originating blog, right adjacent or following the originating blog post? In an entirely separate, cloned translation of the originating blog? Now you’re managing two blogs. One owned the originating blogger/bloggers and a second managed by the translator. Do you put a language selector on both so users can self-select the language they want?

Questions. Questions and more questions. What about the comments? Do they get translated? Would I want someone translating my commentary on my behalf, without my permission?

This is the stuff I’m coming out of Beijing wrestling with. My first resolution is to provide global web services from one centrally managed, self-hosted WordPress platform. Where will it be served? Good question — probably in two data centers to provide some mirrored redundancy and content distribution. Where will it be managed? Doesn’t matter. The sysadmin can be anywhere. Is there a Chinese version of WordPress so my China bloggers can easily work the administration dashboard?

This is going to be an interesting challenge over the next few weeks. I need to get one out the door like yesterday so time to write the brief and identify the talent.

Flight is being called, so I need to steel myself for a coma flight to San Fran, then Boston. Weekend in Cotuit decompressing, then off to Raleigh next week.

Stay tuned for more, I’ll try to put something more coherent together on the flight and post from home.

As the man wrote in Slapstick every time someone died: “Hi ho.”

He was the best writer to ever live in Barnstable — my home town. He defined American Literature in the late 60s and early 70s with Slaughterhouse Five. I loved his work and will miss him. He also had a character in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater die in Cotuit Bay in a sailing accident. I like to believe it was by being hit in the head with the boom of a Cotuit Skiff.

“Eunice also wrote an historical novel about a female gladiator, Ramba of Macedon, which was a best-seller in 1936. Eunice died in 1937, in a sailing accident in Cotuit, Massachusetts. She was a wise and amusing person, with very sincere anxieties about the condition of the poor. She was my mother.”

I know a lot of bloggers like to post excerpts to their posts so people will click through to their blog and see their beautiful design and peruse their sidebar widgets — but if you are blogging on a service like wordpress.com — and that reader is inside of China, they aren’t going to be able to see your genius in its full glory, only through an aggregator.

So go full text (Derek Slater, I can’t read your post linking to me) and be assured that there is a way to get past the Great FireWall via an aggregator. (Wikipedia is another matter altogether). An excerpted post is just a tease.

[update: red-faced I just changed my syndication options from "summary" to "full text."]

I opened my presentation on the summer Beijing Olympics with this poem. I first read it in the mid-70s and it has stayed with me ever since. I think it may be the only poetic spreadsheet ever written.

Thanks to my son Eliot and an interesting story in a recent New Yorker, I bought the two albums on iTunes by this Montreal group, forgot about it, then on the flight to Beijing plugged the noise-cancellers into the laptop and fired up Funeral and Neon Bible.
This is not a Canadian joke. Who could have thought an accordion and violins could rock? Arcade Fire evokes the Talking Heads at their peak, a little Bowie, a little T. Rex, a little Jane’s Addiction. In short, several of my favorites from the 70s. But weirder, smarter somehow, awesome stuff, I highly recommend them. Good YouTube sample here.

The U.S. protest with the World Trade Organization over China’s lax enforcement policy towards the piracy of intellectual property is a reminder that all is not well between the two powers, and that the pernicious issue of copyright and respect for IP lags western expectations. Despite the rise of the Napster Generation, and the bleatings of the anti-DRM contingent, “piracy” is still an issue inside of the U.S. and is not confined to foreign shores. This is not to apologize nor gloss over Chinese, or for that matter Russian blaseness over IP laws, but to point out the problem is not confined to the East.

The crux of the US complaint is the enforcement level for the Chinese is if an offender is apprehended with 500 copies of the pirated work. In theory, in the U.S., a single offense is enough to invoke that big red FBI-Interpol warning that runs at the beginning of every DVD.

Ironic then that Google got pinched here in China for using Sohu.com’s product dictionary for its pinyin input system. Sohu detected the transgression by finding the same errors in Google’s code that Sohu knew existed in its own.

Reminds me of the story that map publishers used to put phantom towns, misspelled streets, and bogus churches on their maps to bag plagiarists.

Anyway, while it is unfortunate the U.S. has had to formally complain about China and IP rights. Let me note that Lenovo spends about $1 billion a year to insure its PCs ship with a genuine copy of Microsoft Windows.

Sitting in a conference room discussing the forthcoming summer Olympics, amazingly uncrippled by jet lag … a post more appropriate for Twitter, but I’ve all but dropped Twitter as one of the most spectacularly useless toys I’ve played with this year.

I’ll blog on Olympic marketing later — I have the global web strategy and am presenting my plan tomorrow. The challenge is simple: what can an Olympic sponsor do online that users will actually care about and return to?

I think I have an idea.

This is a short trip. Three full days in country, four nights, not a lot of exploration or out of office experiences — unlike last year’s first trip where I spent a lot of time meeting Chinese internet companies.

Saturday was a treat. My daughter’s coach invited me to ride along in the launch and watch the Brooks School girl’s crew practice on Lake Cochituate — the same lake where I learned to row one cold April in 1973. Non-rowers can’t appreciate what it means to ride in a motorboat about twenty feet away from a practicing crew. Spectators to the sport usually see a few seconds of the race, typically near the finish line, and get, at best, a look at 30 strokes worth of rowing. It’s all the more frustrating, as an ex-rower, to only see those final strokes, knowing that the coaches and judges get a stroke-by-stroke view for the entire 1,500 meter course.

I arrived at the boathouse right on time and climbed aboard the launch with Greg Spanier, a veteran coach and math teacher at the school. He explained it was the team’s third row on their home waters — the ice having melted only a couple weeks before. The crew had spent spring break in Austin, Texas, rowing out of the University of Texas — something we didn’t do in the early 70s when we rowed in wooden boats and took out chances with the ice being out during March vacation.

Brooks rowing runs deep in my memory, but is an especial tradition at the small school of about 300 students on a rural campus in northeastern Massachusetts. Founded as an Episcopalian school in the early 1930s, and named after 19th century Episcopalian bishop, Philips Brooks, the school has maintained something of a British “public” school tradition, referring to “forms” instead of grades, and organizing the student governance along a prefect system. Rowing being what it is in England, it was and still is a core part of the “St. Grottlesex” tradition in the small prep school that circle Boston.

Brooks has sent rowers to college championships, world championships and the Olympics. In the past four years the girl’s crew has won two national high school rowing championships.

My daughter was aboard the first boat that won one of those championships, an event I watched from the shores of Lake Harsha outside of Cinncinnati, a momentous affair for a parent and a squirming torture viewed through the viewfinder of a video camera zoomed in as close as it would go. Yesterday I got the chance to truly watch my daughter row  for the first time and it was … awesome.

Next weekend is the first scrimmage, and then the season begins, four or five races leading up to the New England championships in Worcester on Lake Quinsigamond. She graduates the next day, finishing her stint at the little school that means more to me than my college experience, bound for the University of Virginia and the big leagues of NCAA women’s rowing.

Thanks to Mr. Spanier for the ride yesterday and best of luck to the team this season.

I’m off to the airport — and the family isn’t happy to have me missing Easter Sunday with them — but, the Olympics call and a man’s gots to do what a man’s gots to do ….

I know I can get online in my hotel room once I arrive sometime Monday (3 am est, 3 pm local time) and will try to post in the evening if I can find time. Beijing work hours tend to be late night local time so I can answer eastern US time zone emails.

Back on Friday night.

Conventional wisdom says it’s the ride, not the destination that matters in life. For me, it’s the food. I go to Europe not looking forward to the five hour knees-up crunch in coach, or the crying babies, or the bad movie … but the stinky cheese and real bread on the other end. I go to China thinking about the bowl of noodles I had at a restaurant next to the Worker’s Stadium and the Rice Congee for breakfast with peanuts and scallions …. San Francisco is about the smoked ham and chicken salad at Brandy Ho’s and a Negroni at the Tosca afterwards.

4.8 Sunday — family angry at me missing Easter, but off I fly to Beijing at 9:45 AM, arriving there on …

4.9 Monday — somewhere over the North Pole or Pacific Ocean, in a self-induced Restoril coma with noise-cancelling headphones and sleep mask proving the sensory-deprivation tank. Need to fill iPod with podcasts and figure out the right airplane book.

4.10-4.12 — Beijing

4.13 — Somewhere over the Pacific back to the States via San Francisco. Land in Boston in the evening, home by 9 pm.

Will be roaming on cell phone and looking at email

Tis KPI season — “key performance indicators” — and I need to pick the three or four measures that will drive a web marketing operation.

Any suggestions? If you could track everything with utter precision, what would you track? How would you measure brand strength? Awareness?

I have my theories. I need more.

‘Very active’ hurricane season is predicted – 04/03/2007 – MiamiHerald.com

“Taking another toss at the tropical weather dart board, a group of university forecasters Tuesday predicted ”a very active” hurricane season.

They expect 17 named tropical storms that grow into nine hurricanes, including five intense hurricanes with winds above 110 mph.”

We’re overdue here on Cape Cod. It’s been 15 years since Hurricane Bob blew through the village and I’m not looking forward to another one. A week of no power, months of chainsaws, angry displaced yellow jackets, trees that think it is spring and flower in September ….. and then there is the annual boat anxiety brought on by every bad weather report.

Chinese company tops Greenpeace “Green Ranking” of electronics industry | Greenpeace International

“Given the growing mountains of e-waste in China – both imported and domestically generated – it is heartening to see a Chinese company taking the lead, and assuming responsibility at least for its own branded waste,” said Iza Kruszewska, our International Toxics Campaigner, “The challenge for the industry now is to see who will actually place greener products on the market.”"Lenovo, which bought IBM’s consumer electronics division in 2005, scores top marks on its e-waste policies and practice; the company offers takeback and recycling in all the countries where its products are sold. Lenovo also reports the amount of e-waste it recycles as a percentage of its sales. However, the company has yet to put on the market products that are free of the worst chemicals.”

This is big news for us. We went from a low place on last year’s list to the top of the latest ranking from Greenpeace.

The International Herald Tribune covered the list:

“The environmental group ranked 14 companies according to their efforts to limit the use of hazardous chemicals in production and in ensuring that goods that become broken or obsolete are recycled.

Greenpeace spokeswoman Iza Kruszewska said Lenovo, which bought IBM’s consumer electronics division in 2005, has tried to lessen its environmental impact since the list was introduced in August 2006. It was the first of the electronics giants to offer all customers the opportunity to give back computers for recycling.

Lenovo is a rare example of a company bucking the tide in China, which is a dumping ground for hazardous electronics, domestically made and imported, she said.”

Top 10 Reasons as to why I still need to be convinced about marketing on Second Life

“I have been analyzing Second Life for months, but a great article in Brandweek titled “are marketers dying on Second Life?” prompted me to write this post.”

Okay, I’m breaking my self-imposed vow of 2L silence, but Eric’s list so closely mirrored mine that I had to point at it.

After burning my brush pile this morning, roasting a couple wienies over the embers, and looking wistfully at the anemometer not spinning on the roof, I hauled out my single scull — the A$$ Clown – and tuned things up … oiled the wheels of the seat, hit the oarlocks with Boeshield, changed the batteries of my SpeedCoach, and made the momentous decision to celebrate Fool’s Day with a row around the Three Bays. Upstairs to dig out my cold weather rowing gear — spandex, fleece and Gore-tex — and by 2 pm I was clomping down Old Shore Road with the boat balanced on my head, remembering why I hate the rivet on top of baseball hats (because they drive into the soft-spot on top of my scull).

The anemometer boned me, as the harbor was far from placid but instead looking a little choppy. Sculling in rough water is an enerverating affair of chaotic pitching, missed strokes, waves over the side and into your lap … a total suck-fest unless you are really into masochism and think rough-water rowing is what separates the wimps from the gold medalists. Me, I’ll take a millpond any morning, but that’s what I get for impetuously deciding to hit the water at 2 pm on Sunday afternoon in early April — waves and more waves.

I gently lowered the shell into the water, slid the sculls (oars) into the locks, tightened down the gates, and climbed in, I managed to slip off one clam boot (nice look, man in blue spandex with black rubber clam boots) toss it on the beach, get my foot into the stretchers (boatshoes), get the other boot off, toss it too on the beach, and got my other foot tied in. Time to go. Auspicious thoughts (“This is the year I will lose 50 pounds and win the World Master’s and The Head of the Charles), then nervous thoughts (man, it is getting rough out there. Where did this wind come from?) then push away with the shoreside oar and there I am bobbing in the A$$ Clown (an Empacher T18 trainer, named after Michael Bolton, who was so tarred in the movie Office Space, and suggested by my loving wife, who told me one morning that I looked like an A$$ Clown because of my somewhat revealing rowing shorts) thinking, “Didn’t they just pass a law that makes it mandatory for kayakers to wear a personal flotation device between Jan 1 and May 1?”

Yes, there is such a law. But I am a sculler, not a kayaker. Kayakers see where they are going, scullers do not, but glide along most gracefully … backwards without the faintest idea of where they are going. Why is there such a law? One word: hypothermia. As in, if you go sculling in April on Cape Cod when the water temperature is under 40 degrees fahrenheit (4.4 celsius, 277.44 kelvin), and capsize, then you will die in a matter of minutes, or, instantly if you heart goes into a massive cramp.

Stick close to the beach, I tell myself. First rows are always a little sketchy. Left hand over right hand or right hand over left hand? I turned on the SpeedCoach and started a pick drill with my arms only, then arms and back, then arms, back and quarter leg drive, and then arms, back, half leg drive and then WHACK hit a mooring’s winter stick and nearly made like a u-boat. Calming down, I moved a little closer to the beach, and starting rowing with my arms and back only, saving the rolling seat for a moment when I could get out of the wind and into the lee of the shore. It was a southwest breeze — the prevailing Cape Cod wind of spring and summer, and while it was pushing clement breezes and making the day a nice one, it was also pushing one foot waves down the length of Cotuit Bay perpendicularly into the starboard side of my boat, and onto my spandex lap.

Shrinkage was the least of my problems, so I decided to suck it up and row hard to get out of the long harbor fetch and across to the opposite shore of Grand Island and into the lee. Three strokes of total pitchpoling chaos and I catch a crab — a figurative crab, the bane of all rowers, where the blade of the oar enters the water at an acute angle and knifes deeply down, rolling the boat with it. “Here it comes,” I thought. “I wonder if I can get this sweatshirt off before it drags me to the bottom.

I recovered, thought hard about turning around and quitting, but I had less than a kilometer to show for the effort and didn’t want to get on the evil erg one more time. So, onwards I pushed, across the channel to the lee shore, when suddenly all was tranquil and smooth and I began to really row, stretching out the stroke and making the boat actually move — the first time I felt good in a scull since trashing my back in one on the last row of 2006 last November.

Things were pretty uneventful for the next two kilometers. I looked over my shoulder every twenty strokes to make sure I wasn’t going to hit a dock or winter stick, and by the time I entered North Bay I was sweating and double-breathing on the stroke, a sure sign I was getting some workout benefit.

Through the boatyard at Crosby’s– the yachts all shrinkwrapped in white plastic on their stands in the parking lots, the slips open, not a soul in sight — and under the drawbridge where the keeper usually give me a wave when the bridge is manned in the summer months. Then to the halfway point (number 4 on the aerial photo), where I rested for a minute in the lee, drinking some water, before slogging into West Bay (site of the dreaded Oyster Bags and the people who don’t want to look at them) and back into the open fetch and waves. Going bow-first is better than taking waves abeam, so the row was actually pretty productive, a little hard due to the headwind, but not too terrifying.

The roughest part of the row was at the Wianno Cut, where the waves from Nantucket Sound roll in between the stone jetties and make things a little roller-coasterish. A shell is at least 20 feet long, and about 18 inches wide, so any kind of wave rolling under is guaranteed to induce a massive case of the pucker effect.

Then the best part after the worst — Seapuit River, right inside of the barrier island of Dead Neck, the surf on the other side crashing away, the birds twittering, and not a soul in sight. This is why early spring rowing is the best — I literally did not see another person for an hour. No boats. No fishermen. No clammers. No water skiiers — nothing.

The row back across Cotuit Bay wasn’t as hairy as the first crossing for all the cobwebs were out and I was rowing like someone who has rowed for 34 years should row.

I pulled back into the beach and wouldn’t you know it, someone pinched my clam boots. Bastardo. I hope they get Mad Cow Disease. So, off with the socks, and into the water. Lift the boat back onto my head (this time the hat was tucked into my waistline), and off I went, up the hill, waiting for the inevitable sound of a car coming up behind me, stopping, and a voice asking “Is that a rowing boat or something?”

“Why no. This is my new hat. It is made of Carbon Fiber. Do you like it?”