Shanzhai Surprise

Just a quick post to draw your atten­tion to this present­a­tion about Shanzhai phones in China. Shanzhai means some­thing like ‘mountain hideout’ and they are a kind of guer­rilla class of new devices appearing on the streets of Beijing.

The designs range from the batshit-​​​​crazy (but, yes, I want one):

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Five Reasons Social Media gets Gamed

It’s not too hard to connect this, which arrived in my inbox today:

with this, which arrived in my spam box today:

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Mobile before PC

Check out this forth­coming phone from Indian mobile man­u­fac­turer, Lava:

Notice anything unusual compared to the normal Nokia/​​Blackberry fare?

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The Big WoWThe Big WoW

Should people be allowed to be anonymous online? World of Warcraft developer Blizzard seems somewhat unde­cided. Earlier this week, it intro­duced a Real ID scheme that would force people to post under their real names on its forums. Following wide­spread protests at this movement of goal­posts — from pretty-​​​​much 12mn of

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This article has been withdrawnThis article has been withdrawn

guardian-nav

It used to contain my test of the Guardian news feed WordPress plugin.

De-​​​​activating the plugin disables all the articles con­nected to it, as shown here, changes the title of your post, removes the tags, all the content (not just the feed content, but whatever you had to say about it, too) and the

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Looking for my Cognitive SurplusLooking for my Cognitive Surplus

You’ll have come across the stories, talks and inter­views about Clay Shirky’s new book: Cognitive Surplus.

I think that all of us get – and recog­nise – the basic idea. Most of us spend/​​waste so very much time watching tele­vi­sion. That’s typ­ic­ally pretty passive. However, an increasing number of

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