Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

Some preview videos have gone online for Singapore Airlines new campaign, and they’re beautiful! SingaporeAirlines11 describes them as:

Join us as we go behind the scenes to trace the romantic journey of the Singapore Girl around the world.
The complete journey with Singapore Airlines’ timeless icon unveils 5 February 2011.

Check out her journey through a few Asian countries:

Update: Check out this final cut, a single video featuring Singapore Girl assisting folks from various countries in one breathtaking, dizzying take!

This fortune cookie encourages you to get more fortune cookies:

It’s a funny, nearly recursive, fortune cookie meme!

Douban (豆瓣) is a popular Chinese user-submitted review community site. Unfortunately, most of the content is locked up to browsing, as only a few feeds are supported. If you want the latest comments, book/music/movie reviews, or individual author/comment thread feeds, you’re golden. But, what if you want a feed of activity on some tag, such as Japanese movies? Then you’re out of luck.

How do I get my feed?

Paste in a Douban tag URL (it will look like movie.douban.com/tag/2010) here, and click run. Then you will have a custom feed, you can click on “Get as RSS” and import that link into Google Reader:

What will it look like?

The feed will look like this:

What’s behind the scenes?

I’ve setup a simple solution to use Yahoo Pipes to scrape tag pages and produce beautiful RSS. I’ve created this Douban Movies Tags RSS, which you can input a URL to a tag page, such as 电影标签：2010, and get back an RSS feed you can subscribe to in Google Reader. The Yahoo Pipe is simple, and looks like this:

Yahoo will automatically periodically update the data and produce new feed items. I haven’t tested it on the other two sub-Doubans, the music/book reviews, so if you have some specific problem let me know!

With the latest Wikileaks release, the New York Times reports in Cables Obtained by WikiLeaks Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels that the Chinese goverment was behind the Google hacks which jeopardized the safety of political rights activists:

A global computer hacking effort: China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.

While this is no surprise, public confirmation of China’s big-brother activities will probably only harm efforts at improved international relations.

Photos from Harper’s Bazaar Indonesia: Seven Days in Tibet with model Zhang Fan. Tibet is a beautiful and strange place, far exotic compared to American pastures.

There are a few comments on the original post and a Baidu blog to check out!