Month: March 2006

When it all falls apart, they’ll know who their friends were

Interesting article in The Nation about censorship and technology in China.

This opening paragraph says it all:

Back in the late 1990s, when I was working as a journalist in China, I happened to read Timothy Garton Ash’s The File. It’s a personal account about what happened in East Germany soon after the Berlin Wall fell, when East Germans were suddenly able to access their Stasi police files. As it turned out, secret police informants included neighbors, lovers, spouses and in some cases even people’s own children. One evening over dinner with some Chinese friends, I described the book and asked how they thought things might play out in a post-Communist China. One friend replied: “That day will come in China too. Then I’ll know who my real friends are.” The table fell silent.

Link here via beSpacific.

Alex Eckelberry

NOTICE:  This Blog contains information that may be indirectly or directly critical to the Chinese Government and hence may be in violation of Chinese Government Law.  If you reside in mainland China, do not read or even allow this blog to enter your thoughts!

Two services to deliver RSS feeds to your inbox

In my mind, there’s no better way to read RSS feeds than through your email program.  That’s why I’m a big fan of RSS Popper.  However, it only supports Outlook and Outlook Express.

Steve Bass over at PC World wrote recently about Squeet  — a service which delivers RSS feeds to any email.  If you want to sign up for this blog through Squeet, just click here and enter your email address.

He also mentions another service, Blogarithm, which one of his readers likes because “they will e-mail you daily with a list of what has changed on your favorite blogs, if anything. They give you the top couple of lines, so you can determine if you want to click through and read the rest.”

Sounds like a matter of personal preference. 

A side note:  On this blog are two RSS feeds: FeedBurner and Atom.  You can use either one. 

Alex Eckelberry