Chan Koonchung (陈冠中) author of 2013, The Fat Years (盛世：中国2013年) spoke at the Beijing ex-pat bookstore, The Bookworm recently. The book’s premise of a dystopian near-future where China dominates the world, will be popular in the West when they release it in English sometime soon, but meanwhile I have a few thoughts.
The central idea of the novel is that the people are unhappy and somehow not really free, in spite of their material possessions. One part of the plot revolves around a strange realization that the country has lost a month on the calendar, which nobody can recall.
A few ideas occurred to me while listening to the author:
Hong Kong, where the author is originally from, is really a different place. Though dominated by the mainland, its identity is being forced into sharper focus because of the looming merger of political systems set to happen fifty years after 1997.
Beijing, which the author describes as his favorite place on earth, is experiencing extremely rapid change, particularly since 2000. The idea of a “lost month” in the novel comes from the experience of living here and regularly realizing that major changes happen all the time and never being able to pinpoint exactly when or how.
The author does not believe that the Communist Party is simply another dynasty. The ancient Chinese belief in a cyclical view of history is just not true anymore in the face of the force of modernity. China is just another nation-state that must confront liberalization and democracy just like every other aspiring emerging country.
Just a few new ideas to add to my highly-incomplete picture of China, and a mental note that I must learn more about the Hong Kong (and Taiwan) perception of this place if I really want to understand it.
Something odd is happening on the Great Firewall of China. Last week my VPN service suddenly stopped (I won’t mention the name specifically in case somebody wants to shut them down again). It’s not impossible for the authorities to stop a particular VPN provider: they can just turn off the IP address. When that happens you can simply get a new IP address, either from that provider or from a different one. It’s very hard for the government to shut down all of them.
But a much more nefarious way to censor is to keep the VPN unblocked, but make it much slower. This makes it nearly impossible for normal users to know how to fix. Is it my current ISP? Is it the VPN provider? maybe the internet is just overloaded right now. Should I just wait to see what happens?
Here’s my internet speed today from my apartment near Dongzhimen:
and here’s my speed when I turn on the VPN:
Meanwhile I just noticed that the wordpress.com domain is unblocked. I can read/write to blogs hosted here. The Google-operated blogspot domain is still blocked, so this is my only way to publish something without a (fast) VPN.
The print publishing industry thinks a lot has changed in the past 20 years, but they haven’t seen anything yet. The transformation from print to all-digital publishing will happen very quickly. We are months and years, not decades, from when electronic distribution on Kindles and iPads becomes the mainstream format of choice. The TED people just announced TEDBooks, available for about $3 each as Kindle Singles, and I can’t wait to see much more like it.
Creating and then publishing to Kindle is straightforward: create a document in Microsoft Word (though, curiously, they want you to save in the old .doc format, rather than the much more flexible and modern .docx format), test the formatting on Mobipocket Reader, and upload to Amazon. Besides the odd prohibition against the .docx format, your text also must be free from special fonts or character formats like bullets. You can include .JPEG photos, but you need to be sure they look okay on the Kindle greyscale screen.
Kindle ebooks have several big advantages over internet web sites or blogs:
The content is final. It can be referenced later as a single, fixed work. There may be updates or corrections, just like there can be a new edition of a hardcover book, but the original stands as an unchanging point of reference.
It can be viewed offline.
Standardized display and viewing conventions. It can be easily printed when necessary and it “makes sense” when printed because it has an clearly identifiable start and finish.
If the end user cost were 99 cents or lower, or if there were the equivalent of completely free content, then eBook publishing will be open to many more new applications:
Class notes, published by the instructor or a motivated student note-taker
Church or other non-profit organizational bulletins and newsletters.
Company catalogs or detailed product descriptions
Help and product manuals
Christmas newsletters, either on behalf of an organization or a family
Special reports.
In fact, to really take off we need the equivalent to print publishing of what podcasting is to audiobook publishing: free, easily publishable and discoverable content that’s as easy to produce as it is to consume. As with audiobooks, there may be a lot of garbage there too, but eventually some quality brands will appear and the publishing world will never be the same.
Is this thing on? One unfortunate part about switching to Mac last year is that I’ve been unable to use the excellent Windows Live Writer blogging software (cuz it’s Windows only). Everyone says I need to get MarsEdit — the standard for Mac blogging — so finally today I downloaded it and am taking it for a spin.
Kevin Kelly tries to get to the bottom of one of the things I don’t like about Facebook: it’s too hard to distinguish among types of friends. So he provides his own taxonomy:
Friend — Most of the people that Facebook calls “friends” I call Acquaintances.
Actual Friend — Someone whom I’ve had a meal with, or has visited my home.
Real Friend — Someone who would drive me to the airport at 6 am.
True Friend — Someone who would get me out of jail.
I get where he’s going with this, but it’s still unsatisfying because I’m sure there are plenty of people willing to drive Kevin to the airport at 6am (in order to sell him stuff) or get him out of jail (in order to hang out with Kevin Kelly).
Okay, that last one is due partly to his star status (he’s famous as one of the originals at Wired Magazine). But even if he weren’t famous, it would apply to such non-friends as a guy would like to kill you.
I’m not sure there is a good way to categorize friendships other than pure manual inspection. In fact, part of the idea of friendship is that the strength of your bonds are constantly changing.
When a social networking site takes off, it takes off like you wouldn’t believe, and right now Facebook is on a roll. I can’t believe how many old friends are surfacing here lately, many of whom are using a social networking site for the first time. Me too: I’m addicted and haven’t been posting to my blogs lately because what little free time I’ve had lately has gone to Facebook. You can join me there: everyone’s welcome.
But that’s going to change, I predict. There’s a fad element to these sites that naturally lends itself to a boom and bust. Now that I’ve reconnected with a few old friends, what do I do next?
That’s why I think LinkedIn is here to stay, contrary to some people who think Facebook makes them obsolete. LinkedIn doesn’t try to push people together; it just sits there quietly, keeping your contact information up to date. Facebook makes me work too hard. But it sure is fun for now.
An upcoming paper in the Journal of Financial Economics studied business plans from the dot-com era and concluded that the “bubble” wasn’t much different from what happens at the birth of any new industry. David A. Kirsch from the University of Maryland (see WSJ.com) says:
the failure rate of dot-coms was only about 20% per year
spectacular blow-outs (like pets.com or webvan) resulted from the “get big fast” strategy that many pursued in order to gain their first-mover advantage.
many success stories happened in smaller niches that are just fine as businesses, though not as well-known as the big names.
This reminds me of the advice in entrepreneurship classes, how it’s a myth that “the vast majority of new businesses fail”. In fact, the majority of dumb businesses fail, but well-thought ideas that focus on good, flexible business plans with good execution do just fine.
Brad Feld has the interesting insight that a content publisher should worry most about the 19% who are left after the 1% of people who will actively participate in any new online venture (give up on the remaining 80% who are contributors only and won’t actively participate). He also points to Tom Evslin’s site where you can even download an Excel file to model this.
My quick take: you engage the 19% by offering them a way to participate that is brain-dead simple. For example, Amazon’s “Did you like this review” feature–just click yes or no and you’re done. No registration, no typing, just click on a link and you’re done.
I also think the world needs something to expose your passive activities (e.g. surfing from link to link) in a way that helps you build content and maintain privacy without specifically needing to enter something.
The WSJ article criticizing the Long Tail reminds me that sometime I need to write up my thoughts about why the Long Tail argument isn’t as insightful as it sounds.
There isn’t a single “Long Tail” for anything. Sure, you can rank every book in order of its sales, but how interesting is that? People don’t buy in that order. People looking for books on garbage disposals aren’t shopping for John Grisham novels. Instead, there are several distinguishable rankings for just about every category you can imagine.
One unfortunate part about switching to Mac last year is that I’ve been unable to use the excellent 
