I’m back in Beijing after a very relaxing holiday, and astonishingly, already out from under the accumulated pile. Here are some good reads from around the Web today:

  • Pacific Epoch’s Elias Glenn has an interview (registration required) with Digital Media Group (DMG) CEO James Lim. DMG is the dominant subway LCD ad company in China, and plans a listing after the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Incidentally, Pacific Epoch has authored an excellent report on out-of-home LCD advertising in China; yes, there’s more to it than just Focus Media.
  • Tangos Chan at China Web 2.0 Review has taken new virtual world Novoking (see this earlier post) for a test-drive. Now in closed alpha testing–your faithful reporter has received an invite, but hasn’t signed on yet–Novoking sounds pretty promising–at least if you like virtual disco dancing: Tangos says he was gettin’ down on at a Novoking club with the company’s PR guy, Wang Ruibin, and that there are some 40 scripts for different dances. He also reports that the client is absolutely huge, weighing in at a whopping 334 megs–10 times the size of Second Life’s, and bigger than many hour-long TV shows. I’ll try and hop on this weekend and check it out. UPDATE: Gang Lu from The Mobinode has a very positive review of Novoking, along with some screenshots you should check out.
  • Global Voices China blogger John Kennedy adds his global voice to a growing choir of indignant China-based anglophone bloggers who’ve lambasted an Ars Technica report of October 4, which claimed that RSS feeds from abroad were being blocked in China. Yes, Feedburner feeds appear to be blocked, as are feeds using the http: protocol, says my colleague Thijs Jacobs (CORRECTION: Thijs tells me that the Feedburner website however is not blocked, and that if you’re using a desktop / online feed client, you should still be fine), but the Ars story (I love Ars Technica, for the record) seems to have exaggerated the extent of blocking. And the rumor spread and spread:

And while the majority of response among China-based bloggers was in fact not indignation at the distortion but immediate offerings of get-around solutions, it’s interesting noting not just how far the rumor spread, but what got added onto it, from alarm and calls for howling and waves of protest to a petition and calls for international condemnation to entertaining the notion of bartering with China’s entry into a major regional free trade agreement at TechCrunch and pages of discussion at Slashdot, to the point that when informed clarifications were soon after made, even the Committee to Protect Bloggers responded with somewhat of a flippant tone and still managed to perpetuate the rumor.

That’s all for now, boys and girls. I’ll be blogging next week’s AdTech conference for Media magazine, and will probably cross-post here.