First, Imagethief feels he owes his readers an apology. Anyone who has been with me for longer than a few months will have noticed that the last third of 2008 yielded a sparse crop of posts. For this I blame a very heavy workload and an increasingly demanding young son who deserves a certain share of my time lest I have to pay for years of "daddy didn't love me" therapy on top of braces, education, automotive repair services, etc.
There is also perhaps the tiniest hint of weariness about your correspondent. In four and a half years I have written 1,213 posts. God knows how many words that is, but given that the grand total revenue from Imagethief is $500, it doesn't add up to much of a rate.
Fortunately for my sense of self-worth, the point of this blog was never to make money, but to share my thoughts, meet people and have a good time. By those measures, and several others, Imagethief continues to be rewarding. To date there have been just over 575,000 visits and over 900,000 page views, plus something on the order of a million RSS reads. The Huffington Post it ain't, and not all of these are genuine eyeballs, but clearly someone is reading. A pleasing stat is that the average number of page views for the top-ten posts of the year continues to go up, even discounting for ringers and as overall page views slow along with posting volume. Complete stats can be found under the Site Meter bug at the bottom of the blogroll column.
As always, thanks to all readers for sticking with me, and especially to those people who take the time to comment, link or send e-mail. This blog would be much less interesting without the discussion and feedback.
Damn, what a year
So, what can we say about 2008 that hasn't aready been said? At the beginning of last year's annual retrospective I wrote that there was no such thing as a dull year in China. 2008 certainly didn't prove that theory wrong. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is with a slide I recently prepared for a client in order to put into perspective a massive telecommunications industry reorganization, something that would have been positively epic in most other years:
It seems hard to imagine that anything could compete with 2008, but the year is young and already we have the Great Recession and various net nanny paroxysms. And, of course, this will be a year of significant anniversaries. (Pause for dramatic beat...) So while we might not reach the epic heights of last year, I'm fairly sure 2009 will continue our tradition of no dull years.
But now it's time for the annual look back at the most read posts on Imagethief and the overlooked gems. For your consideration, here they are:
The most popular posts of 2008
Let me tell ya about Edison Chen's dirty photos (February 13)
94123 page views, 1982 subscription reads, 41 comments
What can I say about this post? It is beyond being simply the most widely viewed post on Imagethief. It dwarfs even popular posts by an order of magnitude. It outstrips by a factor of six the number two post of all time, another prurient ringer on Japanese nymphette Say@a Ir!e from May, 2005. Virtually all of these page views were from Google searches by (disappointed) people looking for the photos.
Jack Cafferty brews more trouble for CNN in China (April 16)
8123 page views, 1045 subscription reads, 185 comments
The all-time most commented post on Imagethief looks at CNN host Jack Cafferty's inflammatory comments about the Chinese government. CNN was already in Chinese Internet users' collective doghouse for allegedly biased coverage of the Tibet riots last March when Cafferty branded the government "goons and thugs". Smooth. But it made for good TV.
China Mobile knows where you are -- should you care? (January 28)
7423 page views, 1131 subscription reads, 19 comments
Why is it when Western mobile telephone operators get into location-based services it's a technological miracle, but when a Chinese one gets into them it's a sinister government plot to track everyone all the time?
Melamine in Sanlu milk powder? Now that's a crisis! (September 15)
7305 page views, 1508 subscription reads, 34 comments
The word "crisis" is often abused in discussion of corporate difficulties and public relations. Sanlu's melamine scandal gives us a master class in what constitutes a genuine corporate crisis. Appropriately, the company is no longer a going concern.
Sanlu melamine milk powder crisis becomes a national issue (September 17)
6779 page views, 1694 subscription reads, 18 comments
The second of my melamine crisis articles looks at the expansion of the issue beyond Sanlu to become a full-blown national issue. The echoes linger to this day.
China's iPhone Girl: Brilliant Apple PR or lucky accident? (September 6)
6611 page views, 1540 subscription reads, 14 comments
Yes, Apple is smart. But they're not that smart. Debunking speculation that "iPhone girl" was a plant.
Tibet and the trouble with unassailable national myths (March 19)
6291 page views, 2235 subscription reads, 33 comments
Published during the March riots, my analysis of how the Chinese government paints itself into a corner through its ironclad position on Tibetan development and happy Tibetans. Kindly linked to by Andrew Leonard, author of the excellent "How the World Works" blog on Salon.
5/12, 9/11 and three minutes on Monday afternoon (May 21)
6111 page views, 1476 subscription reads, 32 comments
In which your correspondent takes himself down to Tiananmen square to witness the memorial one week after the cataclysmic earthquake of May, 2008, and comes away with an acute sense of his foreignness.
Sina.com's anti-CNN banner (April 21)
4357 page views, 1015 subscription reads, 54 comments
China strikes back. Take that, Jack Cafferty!
The post-quake entertainment blackout (May 18)
4275 page views, 1180 subscription reads, 13 comments
Brief reflections on the blacking out of all televised entertainment in the days following the Sichuan quake.
Thirteen more personal favorites from 2008
Every year there are always a few posts that don't make the top ten but that I am particularly proud of or that I feel are important or simply capture whatever it is that keeps people coming back to this blog. Here are a few from 2008. Unlike in previous years I've grouped these by four main themes from the year plus an extra.
The Zachary Cycle
Imagethief's son was born on March 9th, which made 2008 interesting for Imagethief in ways that had nothing to do with China. Here are three posts about the anticipation and aftermath of my son's birth.
The baby is coming next week, pinhead! (February 27)
2783 page views, 1147 subscription reads, 36 comments
In which Imagethief fails to come to grips with the reality that he is about to become a father, and had better get his act together.
Illegal baby part 1: The strange case of the sluggish passport (June 30)
3908 page views, 1190 subscription reads, 41 comments
In which Imagethief takes the Singaporean embassy to task for their sluggish delivery of my son's Singaporean passport. I suggest that considering Singapore's demographic challenges the embassy should probably send me a fruit basket for contributing a citizen. Possibly by coincidence, they later send me a fruit basket.
Illegal Baby part 2: I fought the law and the law won (October 5)
2204 Page views, 1524 subscription reads, 28 comments
In which Imagethief and Mrs. Imagethief take little Zachary to the Beijing Entry and Exit Administration only to find out that we had missed a deadline we had no idea existed, had a technically illegal baby, and owed RMB5,000 in fines. No appeals will be heard.
The environment
An evergreen topic in China blogging (if you'll pardon the ironic choice of words). It's simply not possible to get through a year here without a certain number of pollution observations and rants. Here are three of the best.
Pardon me if I don't salute China's plastic bag ban (January 14)
3255 page views, 1385 subscription reads, 18 comments
And right after we take care of this, we'll worry about the important problems.
E-Z steps to make your own Beijing air at home (July 30th)
2593 page views, 1080 subscription reads, 10 comments
If you live somewhere with glorious clean air and you've always wondered what it would be like to live in Beijing in July, this is for you. You'll need a small dog...
Will we all burn in a fire made of mooncake packaging? (September 5)
2836 page views, 1297 subscription reads, 16 comments
Every year we go through this. It's the prostate examination of holiday gift traditions.
The Olympics
The mother-event of 2008. The thing we all counted counted down to for years. The elephant in the room. The six hundred pound gorilla. The coming-out party. The <insert cliche of your choice here>. Hard to believe it's a done deal, and no longer an expectation. After writing extensively about the buildup, I wrote less about the actual Games than I expected, and nothing at all about the events I actually attended. I figured it was well covered elsewhere. But there were a couple of things I got into.
Gymnasts, now and then (August 14)
3919 page views, 1134 subscription reads, 41 comments
A throwaway post comparing photos of the 2008 China gymnastics squad with the 1956 US squad sparks a heated comment thread.
More debate on He Kexin and "babygate" (August 21)
3202 page views, 1263 subscription reads, 37 comments
A follow-up on the controversy surrounding China's pint-sized female gymnasts and the revelation by bloggers of documents that appeared to support allegations that some of the gymnasts were underaged.
Why I don't care about the opening ceremony's fraudulent footprints (August 12)
3331 page views, 1028 subscription reads, 23 comments
Given the strict controls, all of Beijing was arguably a special effect for the Olympics. So who gives a darn about Lin Miaoke's lip-synch and some bogus fireworks? Sit back and enjoy the show...
Pop culture and national pride
God bless the volatile combination of celebrity and nationalism for inspiring some of my best rants of the year.
Movie ratings will put China on the express train to pornoville: Official (March 5)
3565 page views, 1408 subscription reads, 8 comments
It's only the tiniest of baby steps from movie ratings to full-on
anarchy, Sodom and Gomorrah, and possibly even foreign cartoons during
prime time. I think we'd better pass.
Pardon me, but who gives a damn about Gong Li anyway? (November 16)
2855 page views, 1118 subscription reads, 32 comments
Celebrities hurt the feelings of the Chinese people, part 1: In which innocent Chinese Singaporean actress Gong Li becomes collateral damage in Imagethief's efforts to make a point about reading too much into the online rantings of the fenqing.
If you're angry about Guns'n'Roses surely it must be 1991 (November 26)
1405 page views, 1355 subscription reads, 14 comments
Celebrities hurt the feelings of the Chinese people, part 2: You're enraged about Guns'n'Roses? Why not the Ziegfield Follies? Or Buddy Holly? Includes my favorite chart of the year: The 2008 pop culture relevance ranking (logarithmic scale).
Miscellaneous rants
Imagethief does Beijing's new Terminal 3 (April 8)
4019 page views, 997 subscription reads, 23 comments
So long to build, so quick to trash. Norman Foster should be ashamed of
himself. And this was written before I had to discover the ticket sales
office on the secret floor 3 1/2 that is impossible to get to from the
departure area without a 500 yard roundtrip. The elevators aren't
linked. The concessions... I could go on...
Previously on Imagethief:
Best of Imagethief 2007
Best of Imagethief 2006
Best of Imagethief 2004/5