news.imagethief.com

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 ...

In the latest salvo in the largely hidden war over the right to distribute financial news in China, Xinhua has accused western media of being complicit in the financial crisis. This claim has been made elsewhere, most famously by Jon Stewart in his now legendary dissection of Jim Cramer. However, to hear it from Xinhua is, well, perhaps a bit ...

Nothing as timely as the blogs, I tell you. As everyone on the planet now knows, the Coke-Huiyuan deal has fallen through. It retrospect, it wasn't particularly surprising. It broke new ground in size, and public sentiment was never behind the deal. David Wolf and Dan Harris have both written good posts about this, and I recommend taking the time ...

An interesting read from author Clay Shirky. The first couple of paragraphs:Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, ...

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville has a long and interesting video segment on the return of Chinese migrant laborers to the land. The video is online, but the BBC doesn't support embedding. Quentin, perhaps you could have a word with them about that...

I've been wondering why the cranes atop the concrete skeleton going up across the street haven't started moving again, even though the lunar new year is well over. This very interesting LA Times article may have the answer:By [distressed real estate expert Jack Rodman's] calculations, 500 million square feet of commercial real estate has been ...

Danwei's Joel Martinsen has an interesting look at how different papers reported the recent gloomy economic news and the 2008 whole-year figures. Yes, there is some variation. Worth a read to see how different papers covered the numbers.   It's all good!  

Imagethief enjoyed a lovely two-and-a-half weeks in the US over Christmas and New Year, during which I paid very little attention to what was happening in China. At my peril, it turned out, since I got back to find that Bullog had been harmonized, Zhang Ziyi had undergone a rigorous bikini-line inspection in the Carribean, and more than ninety ...