We confess to not really knowing when it is and isn't ok to use the word "Mashup", so we're a little bit shy about announcing the availability of the complete FeedBurner Feed Management API, lest somebody do something cool with our API and some other 3rd party app and ask us if the result is a mashup. We understand that The Grey Album is a mashup, and that the Google Maps plus Flickr app is apparently a mashup, but where does it end? Is the legislative branch of the US Government really nothing more than a Senate/House mashup?

Fortunately, these heady matters are for the braintrust over at Wikipedia to answer, and we can go about our business of creating powerful new ways to burn, edit and retrieve analytics for FeedBurner feeds via our RESTful web services API. For those of you just joining the program, our new Feed Management API is sort of like a universal remote control for FeedBurner services. You can create, manage and remove feeds in your account without ever visiting feedburner.com. We suspect you'll never have to get off the couch again.

Much like our Awareness API, the Feed Management API is not for the faint of heart and will require some familiarity with XML and web services programming skillz to implement. There is complete documentation for the API, as well as a fairly thorough set of feed management examples using curl. We welcome any and all feedback. A number of customers and partners are already using the API, but there may still be some bugs hither and thither. Also note that the previously available Awareness API has been extended to support authenticated non-public use, for those folks who want to download their own stats remotely but don't want the data publicly available.

Tired of coming to FeedBurner to analyze your stats? Use the API. Tired of "logging in" via a "browser" to "edit" your feed "settings"? Use the API.

What can't you do with the API? Nothing, with one exception. The API has a built-in limit of 20 burned feeds per user id. We will ratchet this down even lower if it's abused, but that seems like a reasonable number to get started. If you want to burn and manage more than 20 feeds via the API for a single user, you should email our business development group: newbiz at feedburner dot com. Also, you will need to have a valid FeedBurner user account created from the Web site to play.

Customers and partners are granted special powers and the twenty feed limitation is removed. Some people might not refer to the elimination of an API restriction as "special powers," but we're suckers for dramatic language and hyperbole. We're done announcing now. Code amongst yourselves.

Their fake business model is to train a bunch of Chinese people to write like American bloggers, and develop a massive stable of popular websites that pretend to be personal blogs. They would make their money by charging clients for 'astroturfing' which means producing a fake grass roots movement for political or marketing ends. In other words, a client who wanted to promote a product would pay the company to have the product mentioned on their blogs.

There are some funny details about the business on the hoax blog:

Rather than just providing our writers with our list of hot topics we are also going to inundate them over the next few weeks with as much Western material as possible. Thanks to the abundance of cheap DVDs available in China we have essentially limitless source material. Our Western inundation will be split into Phase 1 & 2. Phase 1 will entail showing television shows during lunch and hosting nightly film-festivals with free American junk food. Jeff's CDs will also be played nonstop in the office. The goal of Phase 1 is to create a general backlog of knowledge for our authors to draw upon.

Phase 2 will be our effort to create a 'cultural caste' in the office in hopes of forming a microcosm of American society. The plan is to isolate the different blog groups from each other for a few weeks and during this time show each group specific material normally associated with the types of blogs they will be writing. We hope that the isolation will allow the groups to generate antipathy for each other and certain areas of American culture. The long term applications for this writer segmentation are endless. If actual disdain is developed between teams of writers than they may independantly bash each other on their blogs. Any sort of blog to blog interaction will make our blog library that much more realistic.

What if is this thing is not a hoax?

If that's the case, the misguided souls behind it will soon go insane as they try to train their Chinese staff to perfectly mimic the language and culture of American youths without leaving Shanghai, watching American TV or listening to American radio. Pirate DVDs can only get you so far.

Hong Kong uberblogger ESWN translated the letter and commented:

This letter was an open 15,000-word response from Lu directed to Zhao after the meeting, and was posted on the China Youth Daily intranet. Subsequently, the letter was leaked to the outside world and circulated widely on the Internet, keeping the censors very busy.

The letter contains some rather caustic remarks that show the author was pretty worked up, such as:

... Do you think that the group of people that you spoke to grew up eating feces? ...

...The interesting thing about this letter is that this is not some grand theory on political science coming out of a research institute. This is about the nuts-and-bolts of operating an established and esteemed newspaper, wherein journalistic professionalism comes into conflict with the outmoded party control mechanisms.

This summer, an established editor at the China Youth Daily wrote a letter to the newspapers editor in chief, criticizing him for "restraining editorial freedom and succumbing to party dogma" (South China Morning Post).

All very admirable. Unfortunately, the content of China Youth Daily has a long way to go to match the rhetoric of the internal letters of its editors.

Notes about China Youth Daily:

It has been published since 1951. Distributed nationwide, it has always had a large reader base because universities and high schools were forced to subscribe. Nonetheless, it is a good and well-respected Chinese newspaper. According to their website, China Youth Daily has sells about half a million copies every day.

The China Youth Daily is a different entity from Beijing Youth Daily. Although both were founded by the Communist Youth League, Beijing Youth Daily is now controlled by the Beijing municipal government and the Hong Kong listed Beijing Media Corporation, while China Youth Daily is controlled by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League.

Beijing Morning Post's cover, features a picture of rain in Beijing.

2. Rainfall in Beijing breaks up the heat and humidity, and the temperatures fell below to 19.7 C yesterday;

3. A multinational workshop on security cooperation for the Olympic Games in 2008 held by Beijing police;

4. M7.2 earthquake hits Shinkansen of Japan, injuring at least 58;

5. The Central Military Commission sets out new disciplinary regulations for the armed forces to fight corruption relating to military project construction, the purchase of materials, treatment of out-of-service equipment, sales and rent of military real estate, or the lending of military vehicles and plates.

Jobs being advertised on Danwei right now:

Shanghai: Sales and Account Manager for business information provider

Beijing: Management, technical and marketing positions at vitamin research and marketing company

Beijing: Graphic designer for print — Chinese nationals only 急聘：平面设计师

Hangzhou: Hotel Assistant Manager

Beijing / Shanghai: Technology Journalist

Shanghai: Subeditor for international news agency

Beijing: Interpreters for film production

Shanghai: Shanghai Daily seeks media sales professionals

I like myprogs.net because it introduces me to new softwares for OSX. But unlike other software directories, this one comes with recommendations.

想让更多人关注你的Blog吗？想让别人也联播你的Blog吗？

在Blog上加入“加到我的Blog联播”功能吧，只要在你的Blog上加入一段HTML代码就可以了，其中RSS地址需要换成你自己的，代码如下：

<a href="http://ts.xintiantang.com/addMe.do?rss=RSS地址" target="_blank"><img alt="加到我的Blog联播" src="http://ts.xintiantang.com/images/addToTS.gif" border="0"/></a>

欢迎联播我的Blog，点击下面这个图标就可以了：D

The Pink Republic of China

30,000,000: the troubles of China's homosexuals.

This a rough translation of the beginning of the feature article:

Surveys have shown that China's homosexual population could be as big as 30 million. According to statistics from Chinese forum portal ChinaBBS.com, there are more than 50 influential gay online forums... the actual number of gay online communities is considerable.

However, because of many factors, this vast group of people has always been unknown, and lived their lives in the closet. Because of physiological and psychological differences, difficulties in communication channels and lack of information, the outside world looks on homsexuals with ignorance and suspicion. This adds to the psychological burden and inner conflict that homosexuals may have, seriously influencing their lives and mental health.

After researching this article, Globe journalists recognize that this group is both special and normal. Some of them long to be regarded as normal, and also hope to be treated as equals in a more tolerant society. When interviewed, scientific experts and homosexuals alike all sais that respect from society and recognition by their families are the only things that will really improve the difficult position of homosexuals.

Just two weeks later, the state-owned newspaper China Daily published an article about a new course at Shanghai's prestigious Fudan University: Gay Studies:

Set to start in September, the course will examine the health, legal and social issues relating to homosexuality, said Sun Zhongxin, an associate professor of sociology who will lead the course.

"We hope this course, which is an optional one open to the whole university, will introduce the study of sexual orientation to more and more students," Sun told China Daily yesterday...

...Fudan University offered a small-intake homosexual studies course for graduates in 2003. Many undergraduates were also interested and applicants for the course numbered more than 1,500, according to Sun.

These stories represent a direct message from the state, from the central government contolled by the Communist Party: It's OK to be gay.

Conventional wisdom in the West suggests that 10% of any human population is gay, meaning there are more than 130 million gay Chinese. You might prefer Globe's figure of 30 million, which is equal to half the population of Great Britain.

The fact that influential organs of the central government have unambiguously recognized the rights of so many people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a cause for celebration — if you believe in old fashioned ideas about freedom.

Here’s a very good discussion on Slashdot that revolves around business reasons for a company to GPL their code. Some of those include:

Other people can fix your bugs and security holes for you No need to pay for beta testers Free development of new features, some of which you might not otherwise have thought of yourselves if you can get a development community started. Free positive P.

Waitaminute. I haven’t posted in a week. But that means there… is… nothing to post! Seriously, I’ve been busy with a few things and a few worries.

Blog联播网目前支持RSS 1.0和2.0，比如BlogWhy, MSN Spaces, DoNews, BlogBus, BoKee, BlogCN, HeXun, 365Key, Del.icio.us, FeedBurner等，将会支持Atom 1.0。登录后，你可以直接输入对应网站上的用户名就可以添加该Feed。