By reading classmates’ contributions to the NMW Hong Kong Stories, I have found out more about the various facets of life in Hong Kong. As our classmates come from different backgrounds, some have provided an interesting in-depth look at individuals and organizations. Margaret’s articles on think tanks in Hong Kong are good examples that some MJ students have specialised knowledge. As the editor responsible for the overall presentation of four Hong Kong Stories’ items, I have the following suggestions and comments for the authors.
1. Social issues: Kwung Tong Redevleopment
The main report on the HK$30 billion redevelopment is interesting and informative. The quotes are good. But perhaps the author can shorten it by moving the parts on Mr Chu and Mr Ip to the report “Life in A Tiny Room” as they are all about how people live and make a living in the district. The photo gallery effectively conveys the warmth of an old community as well as illustrate the changes that it has undergone.
This is an interesting story but I do not see much discussion about changes in the district over the past ten years.
2. Politics: Hong Kong Think tanks
The articles are well-written and layout is web friendly as readers do not need to scroll down too much to finish the articles.
I am not sure if the questions-and-answers format works for the article ” How do think tanks operate? Civic Exchange as an illustration (I). It may look and read better if it is in essay form. I think the first article in this group of reports should be the one with the title “The development of the Hong Kong’s think tanks” . The one says “introduction” should be in the sidebar of the first article. The font should be Tahoma for consistency.
3. Arts and cultures: Hong Kong Film Festival
The article “Past and present of Hong Kong cinema” reads like a transcript of an interview. I think the opening sentence does not catch readers attention. Perhaps the author can start the article by saying “Hong Kong film industry held its market very well until the 1990s …” and then elaborate why the local cinema was on a decline and give the interviewee the voice by inserting the quotes in between. As the article “Film literacy” has nothing to do with Hong Kong or its cinema, can the author work on it to provide some connection between film literacy and Hong Kong’s cinema?
4. Tourism: Zero fee tours
These articles are good analysis of the zero fee tour phenomenon in Hong Kong. There are interesting details. The author employs effective use of quotes, i.e. Chen Cancan and the trustee who does not want to be identified, giving voice to the interviewees, who are the victims in these zero fee tours. It is also effective to break the main report into four pages. However, I think it is better to have at least one pictures for the first page of the report.
Link to Religion section in HK Stories Buddhism in Hong Kong.
My final project is taking shape. I’ve just finished the drafts of the three articles that will be my contribution to New Media Workshop’s Hong Kong Stories. The articles are: one on the overall changes of Buddhism and activities organized by Buddhist organizations, the other two focus on changes in academic studies of the religion and why it has become more popular in Hong Kong since the handover.
I did a telephone interview with the editor of the bi-weekly Buddhist publication Buddhist Compassion, Ms Elaine Chan, and gained a better understanding of the flourishing development of the religion and Buddhist organizations in Hong Kong. Many Hong Kong people interested in the religion have got greater access to the religion, thanks to a more modern approach to spreading the Buddha’s teaching adopted by Taiwanese Buddhist organizations. I was not able to have a face-to-face interview with Ms Chan because she has been busy with checking the blueprint of the latest issues of her publication. But I did visit her office in Wanchai and took photos. These pictures will illustrate my articles.
Yesterday I interviewed the very enthusiatic visiting professor at the Centre of Buddhist Studies at University of Hong Kong, Y. Karunadasa. He explained to me howthe academic approach adopted by the university was different from the traditional monastic approach in the past. And it is a major reason that Buddhism has become more appealing to the intellectuals in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s Buddhism has experienced a boom because the city has become a hub of different schools of the religion. Organizations from Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Tibet, among others, have established branches here to spread the Dharma (The Way). Buddhism and its studies have united people in Greater China as they have found spiritual ideology as the common ground, Professor Karunadasa said.
I will sort out the relevant websites and RSS feeds soon which will accompany my articles.
I have been liaising with several individuals interviews with them for my final project. I am aiming to talk to an executive of the association Buddhist Compassion to get a better understanding of the changes undergone by Buddhist organizations in Hong Kong over the past 10 years. The main point in my article is that whether the economic and political instability in the city has helped spur the growth of Buddhism in Hong Kong.
I would also like to verify a few points I have got through a discussion with the owner of the Buddhist Philosophy Bookstore. Has there been a significant increase in number of followers who are young professionals since the handover? Have Buddhist organizations been more proactive in helping those in need in the city? Have Buddhist organizations in Hong Kong remained apathetic towards politics? What will be the changes five years from now?
Another aspect of my project is the flourishing development of academic studies of Buddhism. I plan to talk to one of the professors at the Buddhist Studies Centre at University of Hong Kong. I would like to explore with him to see why there has been growth in interest in Buddhism as an academic study subject?
As for the new media elements in this project. I will incorporate a photo essay and audio MP3 file in my page. The audio will be a MP3 file of me explaining briefly why I am interested in this topic.
For my final project “The Changes of Buddhists’ Organizations and Their Activities in Hong Kong since the Handover”, I plan to do a series of short articles and will use several online media to link the various parts.
I plan to have a major long article that will outline the overall changes in attitude towards Buddhism among the population in Hong Kong as well as the activities organised by local monasteries and Buddhists’ organizations. Basically the religion has seen a growing following in recent years, particularly of young, better-educated professionals. This long article will also give the context of the changes in political and sociological terms.
Apart from this long article, my final project will be broken into three parts which will provide more in-depth analyses of the changes. The three shorter articles will look into three aspects related to the Buddhism and the activities organized by Buddhists’organizations in Hong Kong. The three aspects are: social welfare; academic studies; and commercial activities.
I will put links to external sources of information to enable viewers of these articles to explore the topic on their own further .
Considering the nature of the story, which is more like an analysis of changes, I will primarily rely on text. However, as James Foust reminds us that online journalists should keep in mind that [multi] media might allow the story to be told differently”, I will use some stand alone photo essay to highlight two aspects of my final project. One of them is the commercial/ tourism industry.I will illustrate it with pictures of Po Lin Monastery, Chi Lin Nunnery and the Nam Lin Tang Garden. The photo essay on how Buddhist organizations have contributed to the social welfare in Hong Kong will include images of Buddhist College and the elderly home and a host of medical services provided by the Chi Lin Nunnery.
In addition, I will have images embedded in the texts as illustrations, e.g. the subject matters being described and my interviewees. I think the photos in the text will help to create a certain mood for the articles.
Some audio MP3 clips will be included in my final project. First I think the audio clips may help to lend authenticity. Though they might be editted clips, the voice and intonations of my interviewees might help the users of my page to feel closer to the interviewees. In addition, these audio clips will be about information and ideas not covered in text.
As for the interactive elements in my final project, I plan to provide links to the local Buddhist bloggers I have identified in the course of this project. I want to put the users in touch with these bloggers so that they can delve more in depth into the subject with other people with similar interest. I will also encourage users and readers to leave their comments.
A resource page is essential. It will enable users to explore this subject matter on their own and look beyond what I have covered. I will group the links to sites based on the structure of my project, divided into three major aspects. Besides, I will provide the RSS feeds from relevant sites and blogs and will encourage them to do tagging through del.icio.us. by providing to them the tags I have got so far and as well as the tags by several other bloggers who share an interest in Buddhism.
One of the first bloggers in China, Isaac Mao, expressed confidence that many Chinese on the mainland are blogging their way to free-thinking. The Web 2.0 community and blogging form part of the “new social media” in the country. It’s a flat media in which news spreads very quickly, much faster than government-controlled media because government-controlled media represents only one voice, he said.
The social media, on the other hand, represents many voices. People connected by the Internet can generate many ideas and diversify their decisions and their perception. People have become more receptive to new ideas and therefore they seek better solutions to social problems. There is no single point of failure because it is so diverse that it is difficult to be shut down. He was also confident that Chinese could break through the central government’s existing tool for censorship - the Great Firewall (GFW).
Isaac was the speaker at a seminar on Chinese Grassroots Media: A Search for Free-thinking organized by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC), University of Hong Kong. He took an in-depth look at how ordinary people in China can make use of the Internet to improve the quality of social life. Through several projects by his Social Brain Foundation (SBF), he has charted the changes in people’s mind and behavior since 2002 when blogging was first introduced to China.
A native of Shanghai, Isaac is a real force in Chinese blogging community and a social entrepreneur, assistant professor at JMSC, Rebecca Mackinnon said in her introduction of the founder of cnblogs.org. He advocates online social networking and “incubates” projects for social good through his Social Brain Foundation. This February he made waves in the IT community with his open letter to the founders of Google, challenging them to support anti-censorship efforts and change its strategy in China. For more details, check out his site: isaacmao.com/meta
All human beings can be free-thinking individuals, Isaac said. We are totally capable of that because we are far more intelligent than other animals. But many people in China have continued to find barriers to free-thinking. He identified the factors that are preventing many people in China from becoming free-thinking individuals. Their intelligence is blocked. The barriers include values we receive at home, indoctrination at school, and social blockages installed by the government. As a result, we always think of things as simply “right” or “wrong”. It is a one-way path of thinking. We cannot diversify our ideas and we do not foster versatility. “One-tune harmony” rules in China, so where is diversity, Isaac asked.
One thing he found quite peculiar to Chinese is their “Stockholm syndrome” - they have been so oppressed that they have come to sympathize with their oppressors. On many occasions he found some people could be critical of the government in casual chats. However, they would defend the government and its decisions when they were being solicited for their opinions in formal interviews. Their behavior prompted Isaac to do a study of demographic model of Chinese thinking. Its conclusion is people in China just don’t honestly express their opinions in public.
Some survey findings showed that 90 percent of respondents chose silence; 7 percent put up a defense when China was criticized by overseas organizations; 1 percent were so-called “functional”, they used the Internet for self-promotion; and another 1 percent were aggressively using Internet to express themselves. “Don’t be surprised when you talk to people in those thinking models … they have blockages. Many [government officials] talk one way and act another way,” Isaac added.
But the good news is there is an emerging group of bloggers who have continued to defy conventions to become free-thinkers. In Isaac’s profile of these free-thinking individuals in China, they are mainly professionals with a lot of experiences in business and well-educated. They don’t mind what other people think of them and ignore or get around government’s intervention.
Blogging has helped to improve free-thinking among Chinese. It’s first introduced to the mainland in 2002 as a tool for self-organized learning activities, consisting of writing, creating, publishing and sharing information. People make use of blogs to exchange ideas and at the same time stimulating each other to think. After 2003 Isaac found that trust among bloggers had been fostered. People became connected, he said. As blogging has become more stable in China, his organization has had more teams working on blogs, some in a commercial way. By his estimates, there were a total of 600,000 bloggers in China in 2003. Some people were surprised at the rapid development of blogging in the country. “Blogging is a new social identity tool for Chinese. Bloggers want you to know them … many of them are professionals and they accumulate social capital [through blogging],” Isaac said.
The blogging community with a social conscience has developed and encouraged fellow bloggers to take part in some collaborative projects. Among these project is one in which a blogger appealed to hikers to each carry 1 kilogram of donated items in their backpacks when they were on their visit to rural areas. Over 40,000 hikers/ bloggers responded and helped to take around 400,000 kilograms of items to the rural areas in a little more than one year.
Another example of the growing power of bloggers is the “nail house” incident in Chongqing in Sichuan Province. The “nail house” story was picked up by bloggers first, Isaac said. After two months of coverage on the net, the traditional media began to pay attention and eventually reported on the plight of the couple who had refused to let the municipal government of Chongqing demolish their commercial premises without proper compensation. Irritated by the media frenzy, the authorities imposed a ban on all coverage of the nail house by the traditional media. However, bloggers defied the order. One of them, Zuola, had traveled to the city to meet up with the couple and continued putting news blog posts on the development of the story. His blog was viewed by 40,000 every day. Isaac said that last Monday the municipal government had finally given in and reached agreement with the couple. “It’s multiple pressure effect and bloggers have participated in that,” he said. “Zuola is the first grassroots reporter.”
Isaac thought that bloggers and the more traditional media complement each other. Some official meetings are closed to the media so the public rely on the bloggers for coverage. Bloggers also make use of their flexibility and by physically being where an event is unfolding. The nail house coverage is a good example.
China’s blogosphere has grown to a size of 40 million and 10 million of them are active bloggers. He said its Web 2.0 has bred 10 “flickrs” copycat programs, 100 “youtubes”, and 50 “myspaces”. As for Instant Messengers, QQ has 80 million users, MSN claims to have 40 million and Skype has 32 million. And the number just keeps growing.
“All the tools of Web 2.0 help people to give output,” Isaac said. When people searched for information posted online with Google four or five years ago, most of the search results were companies’ sites and portal sites. Now around 40 percent of the results are from the blogosphere, he continued.
It is becoming increasingly difficult for the government to prevent online social media from developing. “It is too late for them,” Isaac said. “The content has grown to a size that it is difficult to block access to them, though they have tremendous resources. They make laws, pass legislation, and put out administrative orders. They also make use of technical means like GFW. However, they have failed to block access to the increasing amount of information circulating on the Internet.”
But this is no reason to feel complacent. The government still put up three censorship “walls.” There is a wall to block gateway to many overseas sites. There is a wall regulating online publishing and networking. People are required to register their blogs with their real names. The third wall is a collection of banned keywords, such as Falungong and human rights. When people search for them, they get blank pages as a result. “The collection of [banned] keywords is growing very fast. Recent inclusions are ‘Jiang Jiemian’ and ‘Shanghai party secretary’,” Isaac said.
The chief objective of Isaac’s projects, including the Social Brain Foundation (SBF), is to foster free-thinking among people who are eager to express themselves. His projects aim to help people by providing technical support so that eventually they will learn how to help themselves to break through government censorship.
He helped us to visualize the concept with “the ladder to free access.” When most people find access to what they are looking for is blocked, they just give up. Some more persistent individuals use proxy. That is the next level. Unfortunately it does not work all the time. The more advanced tool of breaking through these walls is tunneling. There is something called Tor that enables people to browse the Internet anonymously and they can build tunnels to help others to use this tool. But the top tool is to make use of social media to pass the messages along. People should help others and themselves by constantly blogging.
SBF is a social incubator. It tests new ideas and their social applications and promotes social networking, Isaac said. “We are an action tank.” The foundation provides services on two platforms. The social platform has a blog memedia.cn. It is a weekly online journal that welcomes help in editing and contribution. It reflects the changes in the blogosphere. The other platform is education 2.0. The site oedu.org supports open online education. It aims to help people to become lifelong learners. It has helped some organization in Taiwan to build up its MIT localization course program for free. It has recruited help to translate the MIT’s coursework into Chinese. The foundation’s cnbloggercon.org holds its annual Chinese bloggers conference. This year’s edition might be held in Shenzhen. In addition, the foundation helps not-for-profit organizations to set up blogs and help them to prevent their blogs from being blocked by the government.
The foundation’s technical platform is constantly searching for the latest tools to combat censorship. He shared a few of them with the audience. There is the anti-GFW tool. For instance, RSS might help to pass through GFW (e.g. anothr.com). There is open ID that helps people to use their blogs as accounts to access other sites without having to register every time. It opens up the access and facilitates sharing of information. The foundation also supports Creative Commons that encourages people to respect others’ copyrights with attribution. Isaac is not worried about sharing the latest ways to get around the government’s GFW. “It’s a cat and mouse game. There are always more advanced tunnels and encryption system to surf the net anonymously … the censorship methods are too traditional. We use more advanced technology,” he said.
He advised that anyone who is interested in joining his project to set up a blog first. They should express themselves freely in their blogs and let people know them better by looking at the blogs. Then they will become trustful people and he will consider letting them join his projects. Apart from being a social entrepreneur, Isaac is a software architect and investor. He said he is constantly trying to balance his business interest and his social interest. He encourages people to contribute to social work. His organization may incubate projects that will become commercialized later.
Despite the rapid development in Chinese blogosphere, it has not reached its tipping point yet. Isaac expects that we would be near that point when the number of bloggers reaches 100 million with up to 30 million active participants. “There will be more collaboration based on trust … they will make an impact,” he said. On the other hand, the connection among human beings will become five degrees of separation. Singularity will become real, albeit step by step, he said.
So did Isaac get any reply from Google to his open letter? He said the company had acknowledged that they got the message and his suggestion. They said Google would explore solution but it’s a complex issue. The company did not want to make any move that would jeopardize its business interest in China. Isaac said the letter was not addressed to Google only. It was for other multinational companies with operations in China as well. If these companies were more open, they would benefit from having more users. Google lost some loyal users in China after it removed some keywords from its search engine. It’s a way by the users in China to protest and express their anger about the company’s self-censorship, he said.
vincent-4-apri.mp3
Vincent’s topic for the final project of this course is to do with how seriously global warming has affected Hong Kong for the past 10 years. He wants to look at the issue through several aspects: households, businesses, NGOs and government. Just a brief discussion with him of his project’s core ideas has prompted me to think about my own situation at home and ask myself “have I done my part towards protection of the environment?” If you also want to know how well you’ve been doing, check out the relevant posts in his blog!
Vincent’s undergraduate degree is geography at Baptist University and he has always paid close attention to the environmental issues in Hong Kong as well as other places around the world. In fact, his Master’s project also explores issues related to climate changes.
He started with the editing and updating of the page Hong Kong climate change in wikipedia. So far he has had success with getting information from government departments and he has been establishing contacts with NGOs.
Hong Kong has become warmer. A recent news report in SCMP said that winter in Hong Kong will disappear altogether in 100 years. A bit alarming but there is sound scientific basis to this sort of projection. With globalisation, Hong Kong’s climate changes are closely related to other places in the region. Part of the Hong Kong’s problem is traceable to the heavy industrialization and total of lack of government regulations in Guangdong Province. In part this is attributable to the lack of determination on the part of the central government to address the issue. But why Guangdong is so popular as an offshoring and outsourcing centre? This is thanks to the insatiable appetite to buy cheap things among the Amercian consumers.
It has almost become daily news that the air quality in Hong Kong has become so unbearable, if left untackled, there would be long-term economic damage to the city. We have heard that overseas businesses have begun to consider setting up regional headquarters or relocating their executives to other cities in the Southeast Asian region because of the pollution problem.
Here is a brief MP3 file of Vincent’s reflection of the work on his New Media final project.
Buddhism - a religion, a philosophy, a way of life
As a Hong Kong Chinese, I grew up living with Buddhist’s values at school and at home so much that I have stopped being conscious about it. But recently I have sort of ‘rediscovered’ the religion and have found it such a peaceful religion, especially amidst all this trouble around the world. I believe in no small part that the religious differences have somehow triggered the problem in, say for example, the Middle East. (For more on Buddhism in Hong Kong, please check out this site.)
My relatives and I, when we have the chance, discuss Buddhism a little bit, and listen to some Buddhist mantra and sutra set to nice tunes. For example, there is a collaboration between Tibetan Lama Gyurme and a French musician Jean-Philippe Rykiel. The music is a fusion of electronic and Lama’s chants. For a bit of sampling, please check out this site Narada.com. We also visit temples in Hong Kong, China and Thailand.
In this picture is an alabaster Burmese Buddha statue my relatives recently purchased from a shop in Bangkok. We were told that it was of Mandalay style. The inscription in Burmese at the base of the statue was a mystery to us. The Venerable Dhammapala at the Centre of Buddhist Studies at Hong Kong University helped us to ‘decipher’ it. It is basically about a Burmese couple commissioned the making of this statue in June 1912 and the merit is meant for Nibbana and shared with all beings.
The Venerable Dhammapla at Centre for Buddhist Studies. He maintains this site for Tung Lin Kok Yuen. I met him in person totally by chance one evening, though we had had some email contact before that.
Buddhists’ organisations in Hong Kong have long been involved in all facets of the local people’s life, including charities, welfare and education. The Hong Kong Buddhist College in Shamshuipo in Kowloon will celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2008.
Buddhist monasteries and temples are major tourist attractions in Hong Kong. The best known one is Po Lin Monastery which is now linked by the cable car Ngong Ping 360 on Lantau Island with the New Territories. We visited Po Lin on a gloomy, misty day in January. The cable car glided towards the monastery in the mist as the Big Buddha gazes from a distance amidst the cloud.
I recommend taking an extra 10 to 15 minutes to go to look at the Wisdom Path where you will find the Heart Sutra Inscription. The calligraphy was donated by Professor Jao Tsung-I, who is one of the patrons of HKU’s Buddhist Studies Centre. Each of these wooden columns is at least 5-metre tall. Studying them one by one when cool breeze sweeps past your ears, bringing along this sweet smell of the moist grass in this isolated, peaceful slope, is an interesting experience.
On a recent trip to Guangzhou, we visited a well-known Buddhist monastery called Guang Xiao Si . The sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism, Hui Neng, was trained here in the 7th century. I still feel inspired by the verses in one of his poems that emphasize “nothingness”. When I first visited this monastery as a child in the early 1980s, it was so dilapidated due to years of neglect. The main hall was off limit to visitors because the beams on the roof were broken. Tiles fell down and there were holes on the roof. Although the monastery seemed deserted, I was in awe by the history of the place as well as its layout. I felt at peace when I strolled through the garden in the shade of the Bhoddhi trees. Monks swept fallen leaves off the path. This picture shows the main hall after several years of extensive and thorough renovation. The monastery has received huge donations from the community. Somehow it has just become a bit too tacky for my taste. I think it has lost some of its previous atmosphere as a place for quiet meditation and worship.
The Internet is a great source of information. While we are enjoying the access and convenience of retrieving information from it, we should be aware of the copyright of the materials. To start with, checking the small print at the bottom of any site’s homepage is necessary. For example, here is one “Copyright (c) 2005 The University of Hong Kong. All rights reserved.” that you can see at the bottom of Hong Kong University’s site. Besides, we should develop the good habit of attribution as James Foust said in chapter 10 of Online Journalism.
Despite the doctrine of “objectivity”, many journalists do take on the role of advocates. Some of them have causes to champion. I guess among them is photo-journalist Andrew Heavens who is glad that the surplus images of the riots and the bloody suppression of the demonstrators by the government have been put into good use - they have helped to keep retainingthe world’s attention on the conflicts in Ethiopia and the continued sufferings inflicted on the people in the country. These images were posted in Flickrs and with copyright licensed through Creative Commons. Mr Heavens said in his post How I learned to stop worrying and love Creative Commons ” … lots of good things have come out of the fact that my cast-off photos are swimming around the internet with a CC license attached. People have written in checking to see if they can use them in textbooks, calendars, Ethiopian restaurant menus, novelty Amharic greeting cards.”
I totally agree with his point that “The greatest thing that Creative Commons does is give you work an extra lease of life. After the news event has passed on, the photographs are still out there, waiting for someone else to pick up on them, give them a new meaning and use them in a different setting.” In a way, it is a new way of collaboration.
New technology in distribution of content has prompted the media to change their mindset. I am all for the Congress’s ruling that cable companies in the US had to pay but they would set the prices that broadcasters could not veto the emerging cable technologies in Lawrence Lessig’s article Some like it hot. Peer-to-peer file sharing is a new way of distributing contents. So far no one is charging anything for providing peer-to-peer file-sharing, Lessig said.
I agree with both Heavens and Lessigs because with the rapid developments of Web 2.0. We all need a new set of copyright regulations that appropriately reflect the rapid changes. The regulations need to be sufficiently flexible to protect the rights of the creators while continue to foster creativity of those who would like to build on the works of the others.
Attribution is emphasized in Creative Commons. If my works, that are properly credited to me, are distributed widely and as a result give me maximum exposure (I believe this is what every journalist wants), it is beneficial both to me and the people whom have been inspired. Which just reminds me the environment in which I will be working - China and what is the state of its intellectual property rights. CC organised some activities in the country.
By Sylvia Chan, Wang Fei and Wilson Lau
For initial research of most topics, online information sources available on the Internet are both convenient and accessible. And when we mention “online information sources”, most of us will immediately associate them with “web page-based sources”. To this date, they are still considered the most important for journalists. However, the rapid development of Web 2.0 means that we have a much wide range of search tools (some of them go much beyond just searching tools, please see below) to choose from. Del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati represent the next generation of search tools which enable us to search, create our individual bookmarking and storage systems, and most importantly, to share them with anyone (practically anywhere) with similar interests and concerns.
Here we will discuss a bit the more traditional online information sources and the advantages and disadvantage of some relatively newer search tools. Some comments from our classmates quoted here are worth a look.
Traditional online web page-based online information sources
Although there are a lot of online sources, like Newsgroups and listservcs, journalists can make use of to get information, we would like to focus on web-page based sources, which is regarded as the most important for journalists by James Foust of Online Journalism. For example, journalists work on the beat on local current affairs should frequently check out this Hong Kong Government information centre website. Reporters who cover the trade and industry’s development should keep themselves updated on the latest trade developments with the site operated by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council.
These sites meet the criteria as outlined in Foust’s book. They should be more reliable sources for official information from the government. When you look at the Hong Kong government’s information site, you will see the top-level domain after the final period in the government site’s URL address, you see “gov”, indicating it is a government-run website. For the site of the Trade Development Council, it is a bit tricky as it is “dot com”. Because TDC is a quasi-government orgsanisation and it does not want to be identified as one. (In some cases, like trade fairs, it competes with the private sector with unfair advantage.) These are well-designed sites, with constantly updated information, high-quality writing, often in multi-languages.
But beware of false sites of large companies, like HSBC, created by criminals. Some customers of the bank have been sent email messages with link to the bogus site. They were asked to log into the false site for internet banking services and surrendered all of their personal information as a result.
An example that is more relevant to journalists is the incident in April 2006 in which a business columnist with the South China Morning Post Jake Van Der Kamp had to apologise to the Civic Party. Mr Van Der Kamp is known for his Monitor column that picks apart government and officials’ statements and identifies the contradictions in them. A local organisation called the Lion Rock Institute sent a spoof email to local news organisations on April 1st last year with a link to a bogus site of the then newly formed Civic Party. Despite some hints in the spoof like “a 41-person Anti-trust and competition policy bureau”, Mr Van Der Kamp thought it was the real deal and wrote some comments on the statements referring to the content in the bogus site. SCMP published it. When he realised that he had fallen into a trap and picked up leads from what was meant to be a joke, he had to apologise to the Civic Party in his column a few days later. Mr Van Der Kamp made two mistakes: 1. he should have verified the information by calling up the Civic Party. 2. he should have made use of the online searching tools available to check if the hyperlink in the email message was genuine. More details are available in this blog post by one of the creators of the bogus Civic Party’s site.
Newer online search tools: tagging and Technorati
Everyone would agree that “tagging” is great idea, which could enable some tiny companies like De.lic.ious as well as Flickr and Technorati could the market relying on nothing more than a personal computer and a broadband Internet connection. If we talk about tagging, we should mention the leading tag service de.lic.ious. It is a social bookmarking Web sites, it enable you save a web link, and associate it with labels, so any time anywhere, you can access your favorite URL’s from any computer. While in the past, we have to save useful bookmarks only in computer. Using tagging service like delicious, you could not only save bookmarks but also categorize and share tags and URLs with other surfers. It is quite helpful to research, cause usually, the traditional search engines, like Googles, simple searches yield far too many results to recall something specific. Using tags, the content that most users tagged will rise to the top of the list, there is some human thinking behind it. We know that automated search engines are constantly trying to think like people, but they are not human being. Del.icio.us developer said, tags are based on the user’s personal search experience, “the first few words that come to mind when you’re in a particular frame of mind,” which “tends to be how you’ll want to remember or discover the same thing or similar things in the future.”
We are not limited to one single tag under one article or pictures, we could assigns more tags, and Flickr also allow others to add tags to your own pictures. It is a great idea, especially for journalist, we read lots of articles in the web to learn and generate inspiration for our stories in the future. Usually, I save these stories in my computer, and if sometimes I try to use it, I use key-word to search it in the document. Now, if I found any article interesting and useful, I could tag it with different key-words. For example, I read a story about “Cyber-Bullying Is A Growing Menace To Kids”, and I could tag it with “Technology”; “insult”; “cyber” “cyber-bullying”; “school”; “education”; “kids”; “software” etc. The advantage is in case one day I can’t remember whether I bookmarked it under “technology” or “kids”; so I add all those words as tags and in the future I will find it straightaway by viewing my page of tags and clicking on any one of them. With tagging, actually ordinary people do not have to know what is systematic taxonomy. They can establish their own “category system.” Just like David said in his book <Everything is Miscellaneous>: “when knowledge was imprisoned on paper, it had to be stored in one place, under one address, with the help of internet and “Tags”, users could put one document in different “piles” at the same time. You could find this article in news websites or Google or someone’s blogs. Actually, tags are creating more straightforward classifications of Web documents or links, many new term or new words appeared, for example, one of the most popular tags created on the bookmarking service is “to_read,” a tag attached to links of pages users want to remember to read.
In Flickr, under the tag of “interestingness”, you will see an amazing set of images that are indeed interesting, you could say it is the tastes of the crowd, or you could say it proves the wisdom of the crowd. Actually, the major important idea behind the Del.icio.us is “sharing”, Why “tagging” are powerful because it is a way not only help you to search your own memory but also sharing others memory, discovering content tagged by others. It is an efficient way of research, which means you could find more, related content filed under those same tags. For example, when the public transport strike began in New York, photos began accumulating under the tag “transitstrike” and “nyc”, from this example, you could see how people using the idea of tagging to share. Tags made it easy for us to see what other people were collecting, writing or photographing. And it also could connect people of common interests. For example, there is a dating service called <consummating.com> which let users tag themselves, in this website, the popular one-word autobiographies include “redhead”, and “pierced”, “wine”. And also, in social networking site <43Things.com>, users create accounts and then share lists of goals and hopes. One of the most popular goals in a tag is “save money” and “learn to play the guitar”. Using the idea of tagging, people with common interests gathered together, and also, it is good for advertisers to targets its advertising. So if we look at the future of the tagging, we maybe could share more things, not only photos and articles but products like books etc; and you also could use tag to find our own stuff in our computer, tag to group our files instead of just searching for matches by file name, or in the text. For example, gmail allows users to add tags to emails; basically it allows you to add, filter or search for anything in email via tags. It could speed up the process of finding what you’re looking for.And finally, maybe we could create more new tagging ways, for example, BBC Radio allowed listeners to “tag” songs using their phones.
Disadvantages of Tagging
One of the disadvantages of the search function of technorati is that, the search results are limited. The search results are limited to blog posts, and the contents of the blogs have various quality. The information found may not be relevant. As Peter said in his blog post, he could hardly find a relevant blog in technorati and delicious. Another thing is that, the authority of the information found through technorati or del.icio.us is sometimes in question. Journalists can’t rely on search results of technorati or del.icio.us to get accurate information. Yet, the tools are good for journalists to find people’s general ideas about an issue. As Nick said, the search results are not good for academic research. Sky also said technorarti is not very useful when for searching on an esoteric subject.
On the other hand, many of our classmates said that google provide more useful search results. As Ardian said, Google did a great job in prioritizing the outcomes. The websites on the first page are more authoritative and trustworthy.
Tagging also brings about the problem of the tyranny of majority. If the majority is naming a tag with a certain keyword, people with other thoughts about the meaning of the keyword may not find the information on his mind. This may make some people misunderstand. As Nick said in his blog, the search results are not satisfactory as not much information found through technorati is related to what is on his mind.
While tagging does create social communities, the communities created has certain deficiency. Tagging is a new technology, and the users tend to be the younger generation. Actually, tagging requires the participation of lots of people with different backgrounds to maximize its benefits, so the benefits of the social communities created via tagging may be limited now.
Also, there is a problem that personal value precedes network value, for example, when tagging, people just use tags related to the information they need to find. They do not use tags which also represent other information in a certain blog post or article. For example, for a person interested in star ferry pier, if he finds an article with information about star ferry pier, the queen’s pier, and the
murray house, he would just use the tag star ferry pier and neglect queen’s pier and
murray house. Other people interested in those subjects may not benefit. Like kumar said, the problem raises a question about how one creates and runs the system that will ultimately determine its quality and foundations in the long run.
The search results of del.icio.us are dominated by English information. This may be due to the fact that more tagging has more Western users. This may lead to a lack of variety.
And some other problems. As Ann mentioned, the links in technorati are not filtered. People may click a link and find something that does not exist. Peter also said the use of tags to attract hits by spammers.
“My search on Google with the same key words “hong kong AND languages” gave me an overwhelmingly large number of results, but the information on the first a few pages seemed to be more useful to my project than that on Technorati,” Christina said in her assessment. “Contrary to Technorati results, Google results seemed to be more relevant and authoritative.”Helen said in her post for her research on Chinese medicine, Google search is more effective than those offered by del.icio.us and Technorati. ” … when I google “Chinese medicine inHong Kong”, it provided a bunch of websites reflecting the key words, which are definitely meet my demand. Seeing this, I come to a conclusion that Google is a more advanced searching engine, compared with Del.icio.us and Techonorai, which can narrow down the searching scale with more specific key words. The more information in details you can provide, the more content results you may acquire.”
Janice said in her post that she found it easier to evaluate the reliability of the sources from a search by Google than those from del.icio.us or technorati.
