iResearch has news about a new TV show:
China will soon begin broadcasting an anti-Internet addiction TV show, reports China Youth Daily.

The TV series is called ‘The Story of Shan Dian Mao’ and will have 38 episodes. The show was produced by the China Commission to Care for the Next Generation, China Youth League’s Online Movie and TV Center, and the China Youth Internet Association.

Problem is that they might not reach the intended target group, as those people are stuck behind their computer screen. Maybe they should also make a version available that can be downloaded?

In China Wikipedia has been blocked for several months now, and nobody knows when (or if) the site will be unblocked. Because I used the site quite often, I have been looking for alternative ways to get onto to the site. It is possible to browse the site through a proxy server, but I found a much easier solution: Gollum, The Wikipedia Browser

What is Gollum (entry, including hyperlinks, copied from Wikipedia)?:
Gollum Browser is a simplified Web browser that only opens articles from Wikipedia. Links external to Wikipedia are opened in the user’s regular browser. Gollum is opened from a regular browser and makes a window that puts the Wikipedia search bar on the toolbar. Gollum was created by Harald Hanek in 2005 using PHP and AJAX.

I have tried it for two weeks now, and am very satisfied it. In case you’re in China and want to use Wikipedia, give Gollum a try at http://gollum.easycp.de/en/

Today Christine de Baan from The Netherlands visited Toodou, where we showed her some of the video clips that people upload. Christine is quite well-known in cultural and art circles in Holland, and the reason of her visit is because she is the guest curator of an exhibition in the Netherlands Photography Museum on contemporary visual culture in China. The exhibition will open on June 10, 2006, coinciding with an exhibition on the new generation of Chinese architects in the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and a presentation of Chinese artists in the Boijimans van Beuningen Museum. Toodou will be part of this exhibition, and we discussed some ideas for this with her.

After our meeting we invited her for lunch in a very small restaurant just outside the office. Literally a whole-in-the-wall restaurant, it is almost in the open air and does not even have doors (note: it was only about +3 degrees Celcius outside)!

But the food is very fresh and tastes great. Actually, the colder it gets the better a hot soup, fried rice, fried noodles and fried vegetables taste. I was not sure if Christine would appreciate the restaurant, so I checked with her before going in. But she seemed to enjoy the new cultural experience. Very brave Christine! In case you read this, when you are back next time I will invite you to some more upscale places.

Gary and I have been talking about it for a while already, but as you can see from the posting below, now it is becoming quite serious: we plan to ride our mountain bikes from Lhasa in Tibet to Nepal’s capital city of Kathmandu. This is one of the most difficult bike rides in the world, not really because of the distance (it’s about 1050 kilometers), but especially because of the altitude. Most of this adventurous ride is far above 4000 meters, and there are some Himalayan mountain passes of over 5000 meter that we need to cross.

But the reward is that we will ride through some of the most beautiful and unspoilt sceneries that you can find on this planet. We plan to start our exotic trip in Lhasa where we will get used to the high altitude for about 3 days before setting off on our bikes. From then it will be bicycling every day for about 16-18 days. We will of course also do some sightseeing along the way, visiting monasteries and monastery towns that we pass through. We even plan to ride our bikes through the valley below the North Face of Mount Everest, and then ride up to Mount Everst base camp (5200m). The graph below gives an indication of the altitude, our plan is to do the trip a bit faster than the plan on the chart.

We will leave for Tibet on April 28 and plan to be back around May 19 from Nepal. We now have the idea to invite some other people to join us. The idea is to have a maximum of 8-10 people for the ride. We plan to hire two jeeps for the expedition that can carry most of the luggage and the tents, and that will carry oxygen equipment. Anybody interested can leave a message in the comments, or contact me at marcvanderchijs (at) gmail dot com. Make sure you are in an excellent condition if you plan to join. We do not have all the details yet, but these will follow in the next days and weeks.

It will not just be sportive event: because we are both highly involved on the Internet, we will cover it on our weblogs and we plan to put daily short video clips and podcasts on Toodou.com. We are also thinking to bring a small camera crew to make a documentary about the trip. If you have any additional ideas, let us know!

Saturday afternoon Gary and I had to discuss a couple of strategic issues and decided to meet in the Old China Hand Reading Room. It was a good place for a rainy, dark December afternoon. Inside it was warm and there was some nice background music. We managed the get the big table in the middle of the room in front of the bookshelves.

In 3 hours we managed to get a lot of stuff done, and at least two important decisions were made. The first one is related to Toodou, and we plan to officially announce it on January 6. We need to do a bit more research on feasibility and regulations before I can write about it here. The other one is more private: we picked a timeframe for our sportive event of 2006, the Lhasa – Khatmandu bike ride (more later in another post).

After having some drinks with the Dutch guys earlier in the evening (see post below this one), I went to a dinner party that Qi had organized for some close friends (mainly INSEAD graduates). I took David and Thijs along to the dinner, the more people the merrier right? We went to our favourite Thai restaurant, Coconut Paradise on Fumin Lu: authentic Thai food in a great location. The restaurant is located in a nicely decorated old villa, and in warmer weather you can have dinner in the garden.

Jim Feldkamp was back in Shanghai, and it was good to see him again. He used to be with Carrier in Shanghai, and is now setting up the China office for BBK consulting, a mid-sized management consulting company that specializes in helping manufacturing clients, primarily in the auto industry, on financial and operational issues. Also Matthew Peregrine-Jones joined the dinner, and impressed me with his Chinese skills by talking the whole night in Chinese to Gary’s girlfriend. I still have a long way to go…

After dinner we had some cocktails at South Beauty 881. The manager got us a cosy lounging area in the back of the bar, where we enjoyed a couple of B52’s. One interesting topic we talked about was sailing. Jim just sailed two regatta’s, one from Hong Kong to Hainan Island (where he got stuck because of a typhoon), and then one from Singapore to Thailand. And sailing freak Matthew (he competed in the world championship) just bought a 470 that would be shipped from Hong Kong next week. He still sails in open boats at the moment, even at temperatures just above zero degrees!

Late Friday afternoon I planned to have a meeting with two Dutch guys active in the Chinese film industry, film director David Verbeek and producer Jeroen Jedeloo about a new project at Toodou. Then I got a call from Thijs Bosma, a Dutch person who used to work with Media Republic in Amsterdam, and who is now looking to start an online business in Shanghai. He just arrived in Shanghai on Thursday, so I invited him as well to have a beer with us. Then I was introduced over the internet to another Dutch person, James Loudon, who works with Media Sky and the Shanghai Daily. They just started their first Buzzword pocast this week, so I invited him as well to get to know him and hear about their product. So there we were, 5 Dutch guys in the Toodou office having a couple of Reeb’s (Shanghainese beer) early Friday evening. We actually did not discuss much about the new project, but it was fun to speak Dutch for a change.

By the way, can anybody confirm whether the name Reeb was indeed invented by Mr. Freddy Heineken by inverting the word beeR?
(picture from left to right: David, Jeroen, James, Thijs and Marc)

This afternoon between 17:00-18:00 Beijing time I will be interviewed on China Radio International during the first hour of the program China Drive. The program can be listened to through http://en.chinabroadcast.cn/ (click on Easy FM link for the stream). Presenter James West will talk to me in English about podcasting and Toodou.

About the China Drive program, from the CRI website:
China Drive, your daily features magazine for your drive home, serves up lifestyle, entertainment, discussion and practical news you can use, Monday-Friday, 5-7pm on CRI Easy FM.

Bi-lingual presentation, practical information, silly stories, lively conversation, and features inspired music.

China Drive’s two co-hosts, business news anchor, sports reporter, and three dedicated features correspondents, present fun, creative and thought provoking stories from across the country.