I’ve been enjoying this new site which has aspirations of becoming what Living in China used to be – the Chinese blogosphere’s water cooler, where many of us used to hang out to enjoy the convenience of a comprehensive blog aggregator bringing us the lastest posts as they came in. It’s still in beta stage and there are some bugs to be ironed out, but it definitely has promise. I suggest you register your own blog there and take a look at how it works.
In the words of the site creator: “The Chinalyst is an informal community for China related English-language blogging. The goals of the community are to encourage the growth and development of English content about China and to serve as a platform for finding and discussing up-to-date China related information and news.
In order to achieve these goals, Chinalyst provides a steady stream of updates from member blogs writing about China, and community members are invited to read, comment, rate and discuss blogs content and related issues.
The Chinalyst is an equal opportunity community with no overarching agenda. All political leanings and viewpoints are welcome. Our mission is also yours if you choose to accept it. Chinalyst is an open community welcoming all China-related blogs and all interested readers.”
Let’s hope it takes off as intended.
1
By Steve
On the subject of new sites… you might like http://virtualreview.org/china I guess it’s in a similar vein to Chinalyst as it aggregates content not just from blogs but other media.
September 20, 2006 @ 5:20 am | Comment
2
By Philip Sen
I copy below a message I sent to Chinalyst – it’s been said before but it’s worth saying again:
A couple of years ago I was helping run Living in China. I left Shanghai in July 2005 after two years, and I’m now studying International Relations in Amsterdam.
First of all, you have my full support and praise for this venture and I wish you every success. Living in China was indeed an ambitious project, and indeed the Living on the Planet concept probably did get too big.
There are however other reasons why the project went down. Some of these are personal reasons of the people in charge; but others were due in part to the success of the site – the aggregator had so much content it simply became unmanageable. Some of the team, after a great deal of work, introduced a new content management system but in retrospect this was not entirely successful either. Lastly, my concept of LiC as the ‘manual human editor’ was to keep the front page as a showcase for the very best of China blogging. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people made unique contributions as the site matured, and I was left with the task of scouring the blogs every day I could, which proved to be a task too heavy for me.
So there’s some of the reasons for the shutdown of LiC – my main advice to you is ‘keep it simple’ – and that should ensure success.
September 20, 2006 @ 8:21 am | Comment
3
By richard
Phil, thanks for that great comment. In its heyday, Living in China was a dream come true and brought together the China blog community like no other force before or since. Maybe now, with so many diverse blogs, the LiC model is impractical, as it might sink under its own weight. It’ll be interesting to see how projects like Chinalyst fare,
September 20, 2006 @ 8:34 am | Comment
4
By The Humanaught
I’m also curious to see what happens with the Chinalyst. As some might know, I run The Hao Hao Report and there are some cross-overs between my site and fiLi’s. I’m definitely going with more of a KISS philosophy with HHR, but I can definitely see a need for the Chinalyst and I like the idea. Having an RSS reader full of China blogs already, I’m not sure how much I’ll use it, but time will tell.
September 20, 2006 @ 8:57 am | Comment
5
By fiLi
Thanks for the mention, Richard. I truly hope it would serve the China related blogging community well.
The discussions I’ve read in Peking Duck and other blogs regarding Living in China was a big motivation to try out the Chinalyst project. It seems that ever since LiC went down there was no real sense of a China blogging community. Seeing the wonderful HaoHao Report and the growing Taiwan blogging community I figured it’s worth giving it another try. I’m hoping Chinalyst would work out.
Although, as Ryan says, there are some similarities with HaoHao, I strongly believe HaoHao and Chinalyst would serve each other well, as HaoHao tags all available content on the web while Chinalyst is a blogging community oriented service. Chinalyst will complement HaoHao with built-in features like offering tagging for “Hao Hao” on everypost, making it easy to highlight exceptional content.
If you have any feedback or comment regarding Chinalyst – don’t hesitate to contact me, I would be more than happy to hear, and will do my best to implement the requests made and improve the service.
September 20, 2006 @ 11:06 am | Comment
6
By The Humanaught
Hey, now that’s a cool idea. 😉
September 20, 2006 @ 11:55 pm | Comment