Réseaux et medias sociaux Chine : China’s Parallel Online Universe

Un article intéressant paru dans le Diplomate le 27 décembre : China’s Parallel Online Universe by Christopher Walker & Sarah Cook

To the casual eye, China’s social media landscape might look diverse and lively. But the social media clones are careful to follow Communist Party censorship.

As the showdown escalated between Chinese security forces and residents of Wukan, where villagers revolted against the Chinese Communist Party, you didn’t find as much discussion of the incident in Chinese social media as you might expect. And it wasn’t only because the internet was shut off in the town.

It was also a result of China’s development of a set of “social media clones” that ably mimic the functions of the most popular, internationally recognized social media applications, such as Facebook and Twitter. The replicas, however, come with a major catch: they systematically comply with the Chinese Communist Party’s strict censorship requirements.

This innovative approach embraces, rather than resists, technological advances. It satisfies the growing demand of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens for social media tools, reducing incentives for them to circumvent the “Great Firewall,” while still enabling the Communist Party to control what they say to each other on matters of political consequence.

Here’s how this critical piece of China’s modern censorship mosaic works.

First, the big transnational social media players – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – are blocked in China. This clears the playing field for homegrown firms, such as Renren, which provides Facebook-type functions, Youku.com, a YouTube-like video sharing service, and Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging service.

These services are then required to have automated or manual monitoring and censorship mechanisms in place to quickly identify and delete user-generated postings or disable accounts that run afoul of the Communist Party’s ever-changing censorship red lines. It’s a daily reality for Chinese bloggers, academics, activists, and even ordinary users to discover a posting deleted, their account locked, or their “friends” unable to view what they have just shared.

The case of Sina Weibo, which boasts some 250 million registered users, is instructive. Launched in 2009, it’s similar to Twitter in that it allows users to post 140-character “tweets” and gather followers. Since coming on the scene, the company has enjoyed explosive growth and the service’s millions of users have become an important audience for a diverse range of interests

But in the same way this microblogging service can enable commerce, entertainment and personal communication, it’s also increasingly used to share information and commentary unwelcome to the ruling Communist Party. To keep pace, Sina Weibo reportedly employs some 700 people to perform around the clock monitoring of millions of tweets.

Despite Sina Weibo’s vast user base, it represents just a small corner of China’s parallel social media universe. Instead of MSN messenger, there’s QQ, which downloads automated keyword filtering upon installation. Instead of Wikipedia, there is Baidu’s Baike. Instead of Blogspot, every major web portal has its own blogging service.

Suite de l’article sur : china%E2%80%99s-parallel-online-universe

Google aussi puissant qu’un Etat, la responsabilité sociale en moins

Par son système de référencement et l’ordre de des résultats de recherche, le géant du web dispose d’un pouvoir sans équivalent sur l’économie numérique et la visibilité de milliers d’entreprises. Sans aucun contrôle ni contrepartie…

A lire sur : google-changement-algorithme-recherche-referencement-panda-pire-ennemi-economie-numerique-fermes-contenu-217230.html

China Has Homemade Supercomputer Gain

© New York Times, 28 octobre 2011

China has made its first supercomputer based on Chinese microprocessor chips, an advance that surprised high-performance computing specialists in the United States.

The announcement was made this week at a technical meeting held in Jinan, China, organized by industry and government organizations. The new machine, the Sunway BlueLight MPP, was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province in eastern China.

The Sunway system, which can perform about 1,000 trillion calculations per second — a petaflop — will probably rank among the 20 fastest computers in the world. More significantly, it is composed of 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors, designed at a Chinese computer institute and manufactured in Shanghai.

Currently, the Chinese are about three generations behind the state-of-art chip making technologies used by world leaders such as the United States, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

“This is a bit of a surprise,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee and a leader of the Top500 project, a list of the world’s fastest computers.

Last fall, another Chinese-based supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, created an international sensation when it was briefly ranked as the world’s fastest, before it was displaced in the spring by a rival Japanese machine, the K Computer, designed by Fujitsu. But the Tianhe was built from processor chips made by American companies, Intel and Nvidia, though its internal switching system was designed by Chinese engineers. Similarly, the K computer was based on Sparc chips, originally designed at Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley.

Dr. Dongarra said the Sunway’s theoretical peak performance was about 74 percent as fast as the fastest United States computer — the Jaguar supercomputer at the Department of Energy facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, made by Cray Inc. That machine is currently the third fastest on the list.

The Energy Department is planning three supercomputers that would run at 10 to 20 petaflops. And the United States is embarking on an effort to reach an exaflop, or one million trillion mathematical operations in a second, sometime before the end of the decade, though most computer scientists say the necessary technologies do not yet exist.

… lire la suite

Médias sociaux : gérer votre identité en couleurs

Pour paramétrer plus rapidement et facilement son compte sur un réseau social comme Facebook, une équipe allemande propose une application qui utilise des codes couleurs pour catégoriser les options.

Voir l’article de l’Atelier sur : gestion-de-vie-privee-tient-quelques-couleurs

« Basses » pratiques avec les touristes chinois aux Galeries Lafayette

Je vous invite vivement à lire l’article de Nathalie Omori, fondatrice et directrice de Zhenji sur son blog et surtout à visionner la vidéo TF1 …

Article complet : a-strange-trade-in-chinese-tourists-at-the-galeries-lafayette-in-paris

Vidéo : watch?v=sCw2RZVDx8k

J’ajouterai que cette publication est courageuse et nécessaire car le JT de TF1 cet été est passé inaperçu en raison des vacances.

Et personnellement,  je pense qu’il serait tant d’arrêter de « mépriser » les Chinois … ils pourraient bien aller dépenser leur argent ailleurs si nous ne faisons pas plus preuve d’éthique, de réciprocité et d’ouverture envers eux.

On verra bien à ce moment là qui perdra la face !

Maryline

la chine, nouvel eldorado du luxe ou l’europe, terre de conquêtes pour les marques du luxe chinoises ?

« Afin de conquérir le monde, il nous faut d’abord conquérir la Chine ».

« Ils ont tant d’or que c’est chose merveilleuse, comme je vous l’ai dit,

Et qu’ils ne savent qu’en faire… »

Marco Polo, Le livre des Merveilles

Nous le savons tous, la Chine est devenu ces dernières années le nouvel Eldorado des marques du luxe occidentales mais ce petit poème chinois devrait nous inspirer à tous un peu de sagesse et de recul

Il rêve

Le vieux pin –

Il n’est pas encore un Bouddha !

Et récemment, un de mes clients parti en juillet 2010 à l’exposition universelle de Shanghai, me confiait que lors d’une conférence destinée à sa business délégation (futures jeunes entrepreneurs en Chine)  me confiait que l’orateur chinois débuta son discours par un premier conseil : « surtout soyez humble et respectueux des valeurs et de la culture chinoise .. car n’oubliez pas que désormais nous dirigeons le monde » !

En effet, on peut se demander si nous ne devons pas inverser la question : L’Europe, l’Occident, nouvel eldorado de la Chine ?

… lire la suite