Even when the NEXT BIG THING shouts right in its face IBM is often characteristically oblivious to it.
Remember PC?
Remember Relational database?
Both were originally brain children of IBM but adopted by Bill & Larry right after their birth.
More recently, when BEA announced ESB (enterprise server bus) product a paper immediately appeared on IBM's site claiming ESB is not really a product you can buy. It was slightly entertaining to observe IBM scrambling to come up with its own equivalent of ESB a few months later.
Obviously, when someone is obsessed with cheap labor on a sub-continent (isn't "service" just another way of saying outsourcing these days?), you certainly cannot expect him to come up with anything truly innovative.
Did it occur to the guys behind censearchip that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Chinese web content is written in Chinese? With that in mind, I wonder how meaningful it is to compare search results of English keywords such as democracy or Tiananmen.
Try these:
Read carefully. Wang's note merely said:
"Because of unavoidable reasons, this blog is now temporarily closed".
Which part of "unavoidable reasons" sounds like either wolf or government suppresion? Websites and Blogs shut down temporarily everyday. Virus attacks, unscheduled maintenance, power outage, datacenter problem, hardware issues, even natural disasters...
In recent memory, even multinational giant sites such as Yahoo, MSN became "temporarily unavailable" several times.
Why does "unavoidable reasons" have to be government suppresion in this case?
Now read the BBC report again. The first sentence in the report claims Wang "has been closed down by the authorities".
Obviously SOMEONE jumped into a conclusion. The tendency to make a judgement without corroborative facts, is the definition of BIAS.
A biased wester media that doesn't do its homework lacks credibility, and biased reporting does not help promoting democracy or freedom of speech, instead it helps build the Chinese government's argument that the west media is irresponsible.
At the end of the day, that's the point Wang's prank tries to make.
For those capable of thinking independently, without the divine guidance from the "mainstream media", then consider again who cried wolf, Wang or the media?
"Knee Jerk" is exactly the expression I would use in describing much of western media's reporting on China. I feel funny even having to say this, but China is a huge country with a complex society. The naive precept of a bipolar China with an evil communist government vs. the people is just that: naive. Speculating government suppresion in any social incidents is as "knee jerky" as pointing to the Bush administration whenever a car accident happens in America.
By reporting based on speculative instincts rather than facts and objective analysis, the western media has been DETRIMENTAL, rather than helpful, to the free speech movement in China. Reporting like this one and others have dis-credited the western media and alienated even disgusted much of the Chinese people (not the government). It's no wonder there has been a serious backlash in China's cyber free speech movement in recent few years. I'm sure at this very moment the Chinese Minister of Central Propaganda is laughing his rear end off reading this column.
Slashdot Mirror
Even when the NEXT BIG THING shouts right in its face IBM is often characteristically oblivious to it. Remember PC? Remember Relational database? Both were originally brain children of IBM but adopted by Bill & Larry right after their birth. More recently, when BEA announced ESB (enterprise server bus) product a paper immediately appeared on IBM's site claiming ESB is not really a product you can buy. It was slightly entertaining to observe IBM scrambling to come up with its own equivalent of ESB a few months later. Obviously, when someone is obsessed with cheap labor on a sub-continent (isn't "service" just another way of saying outsourcing these days?), you certainly cannot expect him to come up with anything truly innovative.
Did it occur to the guys behind censearchip that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Chinese web content is written in Chinese? With that in mind, I wonder how meaningful it is to compare search results of English keywords such as democracy or Tiananmen. Try these:
Read carefully. Wang's note merely said: "Because of unavoidable reasons, this blog is now temporarily closed". Which part of "unavoidable reasons" sounds like either wolf or government suppresion? Websites and Blogs shut down temporarily everyday. Virus attacks, unscheduled maintenance, power outage, datacenter problem, hardware issues, even natural disasters... In recent memory, even multinational giant sites such as Yahoo, MSN became "temporarily unavailable" several times. Why does "unavoidable reasons" have to be government suppresion in this case? Now read the BBC report again. The first sentence in the report claims Wang "has been closed down by the authorities". Obviously SOMEONE jumped into a conclusion. The tendency to make a judgement without corroborative facts, is the definition of BIAS. A biased wester media that doesn't do its homework lacks credibility, and biased reporting does not help promoting democracy or freedom of speech, instead it helps build the Chinese government's argument that the west media is irresponsible. At the end of the day, that's the point Wang's prank tries to make. For those capable of thinking independently, without the divine guidance from the "mainstream media", then consider again who cried wolf, Wang or the media?
"Knee Jerk" is exactly the expression I would use in describing much of western media's reporting on China. I feel funny even having to say this, but China is a huge country with a complex society. The naive precept of a bipolar China with an evil communist government vs. the people is just that: naive. Speculating government suppresion in any social incidents is as "knee jerky" as pointing to the Bush administration whenever a car accident happens in America. By reporting based on speculative instincts rather than facts and objective analysis, the western media has been DETRIMENTAL, rather than helpful, to the free speech movement in China. Reporting like this one and others have dis-credited the western media and alienated even disgusted much of the Chinese people (not the government). It's no wonder there has been a serious backlash in China's cyber free speech movement in recent few years. I'm sure at this very moment the Chinese Minister of Central Propaganda is laughing his rear end off reading this column.