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More on the efforts being made to help the earthquake victims in Sichuan.

First on the tech front, Baidu, Tencent, and China Mobile have released a series of earthquake-related services. Pacific Epoch offers the hard facts:

Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) changed its homepage logo on May 13 in honor of earthquake survivors. The gray logo is centered on a red cross and the date of the disaster. Clicking on the logo takes users to earthquake information on Baidu's finance channel. Baidu has donated RMB 2 million to the relief effort. According to a dzwww.com report, the word "earthquake" was searched 27.1 million times on Baidu by May 13, while "Wenchuan" was searched 4.95 million times and "Sichuan Earthquake" was searched 3.82 million times.

Tencent (0700.HK) released a special version of its instant messaging (IM) software QQ2008 Beta1 on Wednesday to allow QQ users to pay tribute to those affected by the Wenchuan County earthquake. The new version adds functions for yellow memorial ribbon and lit candle icons to be inserted in QQ signature blocks.

China Mobile (NYSE: CHL, 941.HK) partnered with the Red Cross Society of China to release an SMS donation platform on Tuesday, reports Sohu. Using the platform, China Mobile subscribers can send donations in increments of RMB 1-2 to earthquake victims. The donations will be deducted from users' mobile fee accounts.

But how do you actually going about making a donation via SMS? China Mobile's website says

China Mobile customers can make donations by sending SMSs with the numbers "1" or "2" in the body of the message to 1069999301; you can contribute 1 or 2RMB to the disaster-hit areas and make repeated donations.

The donation service is legitimate and I'd strongly encourage making a contribution. A little goes a long way. The money is deducted from your mobile bill.

There are also other domestic companies pitching in. Again from Pacific Epoch:

Alibaba's consumer-to-consumer (C2C) site Taobao.com opened an online store to donate product proceeds to earthquake victims on May 14, reports Hexun. Approximately 3,000 Taobao sellers with 30,000 goods have signed up on the platform to donate 50 percent of their sales to the rescue effort, according to the report. More than 2,300 of the goods are already sold out, said the report.

Alibaba's online advertising exchange platform Alimama has purchased 400,000 advertisement spaces across 100,000 websites to place public service announcements for Sichuan earthquake donations, reports Hexun. Alimama is also asking its ad sellers to donate one day of advertising revenue to earthquake victims. By Wednesday afternoon, Internet users had used Alibaba-owned platforms to donate RMB 4 million to the cause.

Alibaba provides a page in English here.

In the blogsphere, Ryan from Lost Laowai has developed an icon that links to the Red Cross Society of China's donation site. Zhongnanhai will feature the badge. Please post it on your blog. Or better yet: click on the link and donate to the Red Cross.

For more information, click on the donation badge below.

Hope everyone is having a happy May holiday.

I figured this is as good a time as any to update our progress on Zhongnanhai. Later this month, we will be unveiling a new site design complete with new writers and a renewed focus at bringing more stories and more opinions to our daily readership.

Keen readers will have noticed that Mr. Rich joined us in March, our fourth regular contributor. We will be adding more regular contributors over the coming months, including news, views, and perspectives from all corners of China.

If you are interested in writing for Zhongnanhai, we are specifically seeking people who regularly read news and blog websites, and have a keen interest in technology and/or arts and entertainment. If you are interested, please email me at cam@zhongnanhaiblog.com.

I should also mention that May marks this blog's one year anniversary. I launched it while sitting on a bar stool inside Malone's in Shanghai. I had been considering starting a blog for some time, and figured, a couple of beers in, that now was as good as any. I couldn't have anticipated then how much, and how fast, this blog would grow in the coming year. Our unique visitors, overall visitors, and page views have improved each month since then, hitting our record-setting month in April.

Thanks to everyone for stopping by, and check back often because big changes are coming this month.

Happy May Day!

Cam.

This will be quick, I promise.

After reviewing our statistics today, I noticed a number of hits sent to us from CNN. Surprised, I checked out the link, and sure enough, Paul's post on China's military buildup is linked there. This was a pleasant surprise.

This might be a good time to mention that this blog has grown by leaps and bounds since it began last summer. Considering that the three principal contributors - Chris, Paul, and myself - have otherwise busy lives, I'm amazed we've been able to post as much as we have. Aside from that, I'm shocked at how many people seem interested (or probably more accurately, bored enough) to engage us in our sometimes frivilous meanderings.

Since we began keeping records of this site's unique visitors, pageviews, and overall hits last August, we have seen an increase in all of these categories in each month of operation. In other words, every month has been better than the one before it. I'm not sure how long we can keep this up, but we'll certainly try.

Thanks again to everyone for stopping by (especially you, CNN!).

Ok, not to get overly sentimental here, but I feel I have to give a little something back to the guys who helped kindle my interest in putting my pedantic, and often times, pedestrian thoughts on the internet for all to read. Shortly after Zhongnanhai was launched by our faithful and studious leader Cam (you owe me a beer for this kind of language), an offer was made to become a contributor. Hesitant at first, mainly because I'm a lazy bastard, I eventually began offering up the occasional thought. But it wasn't until the good folks over at the China Law Blog took one of my entries and systematically picked it apart like a mid-40's migrant worker on an ear of corn that I finally began to realize that the blogging world has more than just a random collection of teenage angst and Trekkies. That being said, I'd like to take this opportunity to help those who have helped open my eyes. (place tearful sobbing sound here)

The guys over at China Law Blog have been chosen to be part of the American Bar Association's awards competition for law blogs. Click here to get the skinny about the contest from their blog.

Now, admittedly, when I hit a post on their site about tort and other such legal mumbo-jumbo, I tend to start contemplating the complexities of the Kirk-Spock relationship, and why Roddenberry didn't stick with the original Christopher Pike character as Captain. However, their site has provided me some great insight into the legal world here in China when it comes to business, and is written in such a way that a relative Cro-Magnon like me can understand (unless there are more than 2 syllables). So take a sec and give the guys over at Harris & Moure a shot at the title!

... in fact, you can probably read and understand the content here if you are in junior high! So says the Blog Readability Test. China Law Blog, which notified us of the site, is only slightly better, at a high school level. Ditto for Shanghaiist. Many other popular blogs are in the university and college levels.

We have our doubts that many junior high students read our pontifications on Zhongnanhai, as we don't post stories about vacuous subjects like Paris Hilton (oh.... wait.....).

The good news is Zhongnanhai remains above at least one other blog in reading level: Sinocidal. The five funny blokes, unfortunately, are apparently only writing at an elementary school level. (Which, I must wholeheartedly disagree with, considering the writing and creativity on that blog).

Our other site, China Media News, slides in at a university undergrad level.

Now, with this out of the way, please allow me to return to wasting my Tuesday afternoon....

I have to admit a little big of ignorance about blogging: I only started doing this a few months ago, and only started reading blogs a few months before that. As a trained journalist, I inherently believed that blogs were written by amateurs using suspect "facts" or information, at best.

I had known for a while that blogs, or the "blogosphere", was alive with discussion and controversy. I still remember, during the 2004 presidential election, CNN going live to a reporter in the Atlanta studios to update what was happening in the blogosphere. As I didn't read blogs at the time, I thought this was like reporting what people were saying in chat rooms - absolutely ridiculous.

Things began to change for me last year, when my friend Rob turned me on to ESWN. It was nice to find a website that translated stories from Chinese into English, and provided a bit of insight. Also, living in mainland China, I was (and remain) hungry for outside news sources concerning China in English. ESWN was a God-send at that time, and it also kick-started my interest in blogs.

Now, as a freelance journalist, I use blogs routinely to spark story ideas or provide insight. I don't think they'll ever replace the mainstream media, and much of what can be found on blogs must be taken with a big grain of salt. But rather than seeing blogs as a news source, I find they work better in a social context.

For example, if Richard at the TPD recommends a story in the Wall Street Journal, it's like a friend pointing out something I might have missed (I do not know, and have never met Richard, btw). Or, on a recent post on The Humannaught, Ryan wrote "Am I Racist?", an excellent read that I can see being discussed over a beer or two. It's something that we can relate to (which good journalism should also accomplish). Neither of these are "news", but they are ongoing discussions about things affecting our lives -- things I wouldn't have read had blogging not existed. And I feel smarter, and better informed, because of it.

That brings me to this article found in the Guardian. It's titled "The blog haters have barely any idea what they are railing against" and it's written by Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg. He says blogging has been the target of criticism since it was born.

From the dawn of blogging it's been tempting for established professionals to reject blogging as trivial and unreliable. Epitomising this stance most recently is Tom Wolfe - who, in a brief essay accompanying the Wall Street Journal's blog birthday celebration, dismissed the blogosphere as "a universe of rumours". To support this charge, he cited an inaccuracy in Wikipedia's entry about himself. Of course the online encyclopedia is not a blog at all. But critics like Wolfe can't be bothered making distinctions. He admitted that Wikipedia isn't "strictly a blog" but claimed it "shares the genre's characteristics", and dismissed a universe of blogs on the basis of a single Wikipedia inaccuracy - which was, naturally, immediately corrected. If it's online, apparently, it's all the same, and all worthless.

I understand the mainstream media's criticism of blogging, if only because I used to be a part (and still am, to some degree) of that machine. Journalists must endure years of schooling, practicums, ethics training, and more before becoming a "journalist". Then, it often takes years of reporting to really understand the business and build up good contacts to become an established journalist. So when any old person can publish their random thoughts on, for example, presidential politics, the establishment tends to scoff at it.

In addition, the mainstream media is (like any industry, really) resistant to change. Television ratings in the United States are plummeting, music sales have taken a sharp dive, and cinemas are routinely empty. In all of these cases, the culprit can likely be summed up in one word: the Internet. Blogging may be eating into time spent on established news websites, just like downloading has cut into CD and movie sales. Not to mention blogging can often beat established journalists at their own game, providing video and posts on events where journalists were not present. Bloggers can also quickly correct journalists on any inaccuracies. (This puts journalists in the awkward position of being "watched". Journalists like to consider themselves the anointed watchdogs of the powerful, yet feel awfully uncomfortable when others feel the need to watch their words and deeds just as closely to ensure accuracy and accountability.) Bascially, blogging has become a big pain in the you-know-what to some regular journalists, and has put a bit of a scare into mainstream media companies.

That being said, blogging can often be quite helpful. Rooland Song's aforementioned website is used as a resource by journalists, for example. And I use them as well, because there is excellent material on blogs that can't be found elsewhere.

Despite the criticism, blogging isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Many call it the ultimate in democracy, because anybody can have their say, and it puts everyone on equal footing. While there is a lot of questionable material in the blogosphere, that doesn't mean there are no gold nuggets as well. Blogging has changed the way we communicate and consume news and information. For that, I am thankful.

I may have been a late-comer to the game, but I can certainly see the benefits of both reading and writing blogs. As time passes, I'm sure others will come around, too.

Happy 10th birthday, blogging, and here's to another 10!