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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 ...

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, ...

To have one ethnic minority erupt in angry rioting looks like misfortune. To have two erupt in angry rioting suggests that a rethink of the overall approach might be a good idea. Urumqi has been in chaos for the last 72 hours, and reports suggest that at least for the moment things are not improving. Considering all the obsessive attention paid to ...

After posting my thoughts about Jackie's controversial pronouncements at Bo'ao a couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail from Nick Mackie, the journalist who actually asked the question that kicked off the whole episode. As Nick points out, the question posed was in fact about show biz, but Jackie got into a bit of a stream of consciousness ...

...how do you reply? A: Well, if you're a Chinese government spokesperson you probably rarely pass up an opportunity to bury your positive points under much more quotable anger. James Fallows notes the predictably pyrotechnic response from Chinese government spokespeople following suggestions that China might be the source of the A/H1N1 (nee ...

Imagethief was interested to read a couple of articles in the past day or two criticizing social media in general, and Twitter in specific, for spreading misinformation about the swine flu outbreak. It might not be quite as salacious as rubbernecking a head-on train crash, but the collision of  Twitter + epidemic, two heavy-hitting news ...

What do you do when your product becomes the very symbol of everything that's causing popular rage to boil in the United States? Ask the executive jet industry, via the New York Times: The [executive jet] industry had already had a slowdown last fall, as the economy weakened. But its travails went from bad to worse in November when ...

Just had a read of Shaun Rein's latest Forbes column. Inspired by the fall-from-grace of uber-swimmer Michael Phelps, Shaun writes about the risks of using celebrities as spokespeople, especially in China: The Michael Phelps pot fiasco may blow over in the U.S., where attitudes about marijuana are comparatively relaxed, and where we now have ...

An interesting Bloomberg article late last week on Baidu's lagging stock price and market share following the multiple scandals that emerged late last year:Chen Chen was so disappointed when he learned that Baidu Inc.’s Web site led some patients to seek unlicensed medical care, he started making Web queries through Google Inc. instead. ...

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 ...