Am I a Shoe Shine Boy?

I am delighted to discover that Daai Tou Laam wrote a post to correct me (although I disagree with him).  DTL said:

... I don't expect a correction, because folks are extremely hesitant to allow reality get in the way of pursuit of blog traffic ... (LfC's emphasis)

I assume you have read DTL's post.  If you are still wondering why the question of blog traffic is relevant here, consider this theory:-

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1. Without incoming links a blog is dead.

2. The bulk of the links to LfC are from EastSouthWestNorth and China Digital Times.

3. I said ESWN was again setting media agenda.

4. Presumably ESWN would be happy with the flattering remarks.  Presumably it will mean more links to LfC in the future as a reward.

5. There is now evidence which suggests that I was wrong and that ESWN is not as influential as I suggested.

6. I will not make a correction because I do not want to offend ESWN and lose my hard-earned brownie points.

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So what's the reality?  Suffice it to say that it is for you to decide.

Comments

[Tom - 大肚腩]

You wrote: "Again it is ESWN's full translation and comment which bring the story to the English-speaking world" and I said that wasn't true. ESWN's translation and comment DID NOT bring the story to the English-speaking world as the story was on the front-page of the South China Morning Post with partial translations and follow-up interviews with the lawyers.

And I personally don't believe a blog is dead without links, but that was the point of your whole post about being a third-tier blogger and not getting the links.

And then there is the fact that the third-tier blogger post did in fact get the attention from Roland that was desired and is now featured in his suggested reading.

Shoeshine boy? Not my term. Blogger struggling for recognition of your work and more readers? That was your description. When bloggers sound like that, I don't expect them to bite the hand that feeds their hitcounts.

[John Kennedy]

Who else is interested in the idea of a collaborated effort between 'China translation bloggers'?

I ask this question not just as part of the China tag at Global Voices, but as someone who spends the majority of each day following conversations on Chinese blogs, and someone who in whatever case considers ESWN, Danwei, CDT and many others as colleagues working on the same project, as much as I consider myself a part of the larger Global Voices website.

What I do at GV is essentially serve as a translation function. After a year of at least two translation posts each week, it's fair to say that the GV China space does not take sides or seek to align itself with any specific blog or promote any specific viewpoints. Granted, out of all the China bloggers, ESWN is linked to in GV China posts more than any other single blogger, but this has to do with GV's stated aim to present blogs as newsworthy alternatives to mainstream media and the fact that ESWN is often the only place where original blogging of major Chinese news events can be found.

For the first few months I would stay up late each night to see what ESWN and Danwei had posted for the day before beginning my own GV post, only so that I wouldn't end up repeating what was already out there, and the only difference now, a year into blogging full-time about China, is that there are many more blogs to keep track of. I have in the past contacted both ESWN and Danwei, but to the extent of roughly five e-mails each over the past year, and almost never in a 'let's do this or that' context.

Do you know what time Roland goes to bed? This was not a practical work situation, but with just the tip of the iceberg of what's going on in China making it into English each day, I wasn't and am still not willing to waste a single post. If I could at least rest assured that certain topics or incidents would be blogged, then I wouldn't end up wasting my time second-guessing myself or scrapping translations halfway through after seeing them pop up on ESWN. A wikipedia model of translation news blogging stands to offer so much more than a blog which is limited to copying, pasting and offering critiques on mainstream media news reports.

Does this interest anyone? Obviously, a group of China bloggers has already formed a more than loose network, but what's a blogger like myself, in a position and seriously determined to increase original English-language China news' surface area, to do?

[Rebecca MacKinnon]

John this is a hot idea. At very least you guys all need to be on IM or IRC with each other so you can check with each other who is doing what. But having a more coordinated effort and getting more people involved would be very exciting.

Whether you want to do coordination and translation on the wiki, then publish it to a blog, or whether you want the whole thing on a wiki would be something you'd want to look at.

The advantage of having your public output on a blog is that people can subscribe to the feed - and perhaps feeds of specific categories if content flow is heavy. But it would certainly make sense to use a wiki to organize and coordinate what people want to translate, who is doing what when, and perhaps having more than one person working on long translations.

But anywayysss.. go for it. You'll figure out the best approach by trying different things and seeing what works, and seeing what approach has greatest impact. I bet some of my bilingual students might be interested in helping out too.

[Rebecca MacKinnon]

To give credit where it's due, Roland has thrown this idea around in the past. See this 2005 piece from The Standard:
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=11&art_id=5573&sid=5396554&con_type=1
(sorry for the monster link but your blog won't let me use HTML). It ends like so:

"For his part Soong said he's pleased with the acclaim, but he'd welcome some collaborators and would like to expand his coverage.

"Maybe the time has come for Version 2.0 to go to Version 3.0," he said. "To find some like-minded people to do a group blog. For instance, I don't like global politics such as `Will China invade Taiwan in the next six months?' I don't have a clue.

"But if I have a group blog someone else can do that. If it becomes big enough maybe it can make a real difference.""

[Oiwan]

Yeah, how to coordinate the effort is an important question. I have discussed with ESWN many times about it as well... but organization is a major challenge. there is a big list of translators 300 created after the 1st chinese blogger conference, however, it doesn't seems to work... GVO chinese site is so far the most successful model, the project is very well defined and the translators circle seems to be rather closed.

another model is http://www.tlaxcala.es/ultima_hora.asp?lg=en

they put all the translated articles together and other websites are free to use. but i don't know how they are organized, a friend told me that it is via email discussion group. now i am trying to use this model for interlocals.

jacky wants to invest his energy on translation as well... maybe we can have more discussion when he get back to china.

[casey m]

If you are a shoe shine boy, I hope you're better than this guy, haha. Check out the video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=uPY-sGRIL30