Blog Relations

Interesting to see how Chinese bloggers are gaining power and influence. A blogger has attacked Starbucks’ presence in the Forbidden city, and now it looks like the coffee chain faces eviction from the ancient palace of the emperors. At least one American spin doctor in China is saying that Starbucks is probably one of the least tacky things about the way the authorities present their heritage.

But it’s good that the ordinary citizen bloggers are having their say, isn’t it? But perhaps not all is quite what it seems. The blogger in question is Rui Chenggang, a TV anchorman. Of course I do not know him, or his work, but I can’t help thinking that as a leading Chinese mainstream media person, he perhaps has official sanction for his view – or at least a sense of what would go down well with the official mandarins.

Perhaps the Chinese Government is using blogs to disseminate its message.

WordPress bloggers should beware of spam right now: Akismet, the integrated spam-catcher, appears to be down, or at least is showing “API Key invalid”. The spammers are running rampant. I would be very reluctant to have barriers to commenting, such as moderation or catchpas, so have just installed the very latest versions of Spam Karma 2, and Bad Behaviour. Also been thinking up a long list of dirty words to ban outright over at our kids’ site, Storynory.

P.S. Instead of reinstalling Akismet, I’ve added this plugin within a plugin to Spam Karma 2. SK2 checks comments against Akismet’s blacklist of bad commenters, giving you the best of these two plugins.

Problogging.com has sold the Blog Herald to an undisclosed buyer. I used to read it every day when it was edited and partly written by its founder, Duncan Riley, but then it had a really strong voice. It was first with the blog news, and full of rather crude opinions, and I couldn’t help reading it. Under new ownership, it just seemed to lose its personality. I just don’t think that blogs sell well. But despite that, it still claims 20,000 unique visitors a day, and a million unique pageviews a month.

Interesting things have been happening over on the blog I help write for a Seattle startup, Exbiblio. The management have announced a sudden cutback of the staff. I’ve been writing up both sides of the story.

I’m not sure that the Exbiblio blog has always been everything it promised – but this is the real stuff, I believe. It is a genuine experiment in openness when you are writing about cutbacks as they happen.