The Wedding Mania

Even as a person who does not have a television, relying on 10 minutes NPR and several check of Twitter for news update, has finally realized how overwhelming this royal wedding is, in terms of it's media coverage.

The first British Royal wedding in the YouTube age, People magazine already launched a "Royal Watch" iPad app cost 7.99$. But what impressed me is how ambitious traditional media is on the coverage. The Advertising Age reports that and TLC will show 89 hours of oryal-related programming this week, CBS has sent off anchor Katie Couric for three nights live evening news (04/04, 2011). Of course, ABC, NBS, MSNBC, CNN, etc have almost the same extensive coverage.

Surprisingly, I found Chinese press is very low key about it. I cant even find a special editorial session on those portal websites. Only one Shanghai based English channel claims will live broadcast the wedding. Why THE romantic royal fairytale happy ending story was not well covered, even less coverage than a local celebrity wedding in Hainan province?

Just personal speculation: It's still a political event and the media have already received notice to be cautious on the coverage. To further explain, from the coverage of celebrity wedding, it is obvious that people like to read and comment on weddings at this Wei-Bo age. And this year, as the 100 year anniversary of Xin-Hi Revolution, which ended the feudalism and Sun Yatsen founded the historically called Republic of China. So people in Taiwan considers this is a very auspicious year and continuous coverage on the Taiwan celebrity wedding seems never ends. There's no reason the media is so unresponsive to this royal wedding other than special note.

Another thought is generally this culture is not cultivated by the royal tradition like the Europeans or the US ancestor. The event did not resonate too much to the audience since it is too far for day dream than a local celebrity. People do have the happy ending wish but rarely understand the British royal culture and it's meaning. For most people, it's just another luxury wedding and this is what I have read on the news, calculating the finance perspective rather than fantasize the wedding.

However, still, there are some people in China are extremely active on this news. I've read at least three different ceramic manufactures all claim they are chosen by the royal family to manufacture the dishes and gifts for the wedding. UK is not the only country that tries to make money out of this event. The same as Chinese, and even better, without paying anything for it.

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Will Facebook lose face in China

When the movie Social Network became Golden Globe Nominee and Oscar Nominee, Chinese fans made the following Chinese version poster "Everything happens in this movie is coincidental. All websites mentioned are made-up by the writers, please do not try to access, especially facebook.com." And of course, the movie about a website to many Chinese that never existed will not be released in China. But the website now seems to have a chance.

Last year we saw Mark Zuckerberg's China visit photo all over Chinese SNS, and his guide is Li-Yanhong, CEO of the dominant search engine Bai-Du. It stirred some speculation about the partnership. Now April 2011, rumors come again. Rumor here and there say that Facebook has made a contract with Baidu to enter China market by the end of 2011 the earliest.

How to work with the rigorous censorship, not repeating the same road of Google has been a main concern from US press. But after so many years, I totally believe BaiDu's emergency responding system to delete any sensitive posts. The partnership with Baidu will probably secure Facebook from making any politically wrong mistakes. Plus, I really don't see too many people talking about politics on social network sites as on microblog. My interest is if it can change the content of the SNS in China.

Right now, either Kaixin or RenRen, two major SNS lack original personal content. In the US Facebook is known for its user personality. But in China, most people will only forward (even not copy & past) other people's content, and even worse, most them are gossip news from TMZ kinda websites, just startling titles and sensual photos. Ren Ren might be better than Kaixin from my observation, but still reading the same posts most the time. If Facebook can fundamentally encourage people to share their own photos and thoughts that will change the current SNS quandary. There are many ways, through better mobile interface/site interface or campaign (so many "talented" Internet writers in China). Though it is indeed challenging in a country where no copyright laws (or laws in general) and people are enthusiasm about human powered search and ethic judgement ruthlessly.

Eventually, the worst thing could happen is not Facebook retreats from China mainland market but becomes a GFWed Facebook. The lethal rumor I heard is that Facebook will just make a Chinese version which is not connected to the global database. It will be so disappointing that Facebook completely surrenders to Chinese media censorship and GFW without even trying. That is totally losing face.