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A few days ago, on the construction site across the main boulevard from where I live, a set of huge characters went up, exhorting the workers to ''close the gap, finish the building''. OK, twenty-foot characters seemed a bit excessive, but exhortations hung on the side of construction sites are pretty common in this town. Then it turned out that ...

A quick pointer to an excellent post at the Wall Street Journal's China Real Time blog, which busts several myths concerning Google in China that have been widely repeated in the past few days, including those concerning the health of Google's business in China, whether or not they already uncensored search results here, and more. From ...

Imagethief stumbled blearily to his computer this morning expecting a relaxed scan of the news but found the Chinese Twittersphere ablaze with the news of Google's bombshell blog post, which went up in the middle of the night early this morning our time. Titled ''A new approach to China'', the post, by Google's Senior Vice President for Corporate ...

As a general rule, Imagethief dislikes business books, especially instructional ones. I find them tedious and most of them age faster than caviar on a car dashboard. There are, however, exceptions. Most of these are either books based on journalistic reporting of business events, such as, say, Kurt Eichenwald's ''Conspiracy of Fools'', or on ...

Update: Due to the obnoxious autoplay of the two videos, I have removed the embedded versions so as not to drive  people who visit the site rather than using RSS totally insane. You can follow the links in the paragraph below to view parts one and two. -Will A couple of weeks ago I and Saina Silverman, late of Edelman and now independent, ...

On the sidelines of Ad:Tech Imagethief was cornered for a brief interview by the video sharing service Youku. The results are below. Won't be anything in this brief discussion that my audience doesn't already know, but you can check out the seasonal goatee. No Chinese subtitles, I'm afraid, which may explain why one of the two comments on ...

From the strange PR files comes this article in today's Shanghai Daily about the Guizhou provincial pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. The theme is apparently liquor and girls. This seems like a winner on many levels (after all, it worked for the NFL), but the implementation is a bit weird:The province will make the liquor the centerpiece of its ...

It's funny, listenable (if you like country) and tragic all at the same time: As an amateur musician and frequent shipper of expensive things like underwater photography gear, this resonates. H/T @melvinyuan. Note: If you're reading this on Facebook, the video will not display. Follow the link to the original blog post, below.

So Green Dam + Youth Escort blocks images based on skin tone. But what if I like Afro-porn? These, and other important questions are arising now that serious analysts (which is to say, people other than me), have had some time to dig into the capabilities of Jinhui's now infamous software package. The verdict is pretty much as you might have ...

Another day, another censorship-related thing to get bent out of shape about here in China.This week it's the dreaded ''Green Dam Youth Escort'' internet filtering software, which goes right to the head of the nominee list for the annual Imagethief ''branding that translates badly'' award. They can collect the statuette, a little plastic model of ...