Is there someone on here that can give me some insight or know of anyone that coud give me insight on how I can get my local website on the front
page of a Yahoo or Google search to increase my business without it costing me 5 or 10k $$$? If so please share with me.

I thank you and my hungry over-eating children thank you.

thanks,

Don’t get me wrong, I like both blogs and I don’t want to turn this into a silly competition. But I just wanted to say that there are also many other blogs that contribute to the discussion and there is, to a certain extent, a sense of teamwork.

And yes, if you are short of time it is not a bad idea to stick to the big ones, they will (almost) always bring the interesting items to you before you can find them yourself browsing 100 blogs.

I agree with those who mention ESWN as the greatest contributor to Chinablogs, a kind of Grand Central Station for taking you to interesting places, if you will. I would never have found this page if not for the fact that ESWN had it on its “Recommended Photos/Videos/Readings” board.

While I’m at it, I want to say that I am appreciative of FOARP’s blog for its dogged persistence in pointing out, shall we say, perceived inconsistencies in promotional statements made by certain website(s). Whether FOARP is correct or not I don’t know, but the fact that FOARP bothered to fact-check something (and in effect, put him/herself on the line since visitors to his/her blog can fact-check his/her fact-checking to the extent those websites are checkable) has highlighted once again that “caveat lector” is the best approach for anything one reads on the web or anywhere else, no matter what the source.

This made reading the SCMP article “Slight detour in mainland’s consistent foreign exchange policy” by Jane Cai and Martin Zhou in Beijing Mar 02, 2009 very interesting, as I was expecting it to lead up to a more dramatic conclusion than the rather anticlimactic one that appeared:

“Mainland officials have been highly consistent on foreign exchange policy – keeping the yuan stable. But a deviation has occurred recently. China Briefing, an English-language magazine owned by consultancy Dezan Shira & Associates, reported on February 17 that Zhang Xiaoqiang, the deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), had commented that the yuan might drop as low as seven against the US dollar because of a weaker mainland economy….A China Briefing source told the South China Morning Post that the contentious part of the quote was indeed Mr Zhang’s original words, yet were “meant to be off the record”. “But apparently the translator didn’t get the message across to the [author],” he said. The author of the article, Chris Devonshire-Ellis, could not be reached for comment.”

Perhaps the SCMP journalists need to read more Chinablogs….

You made some good points in your previous comments, but re #cde, I think you are at least partly wrong. The guy actually had a blog at http://www.china-briefing.com/blog/ (it is down now, but you can still see lots of evidence by googling this URL) and for years he networked in the way bloggers do, through pingbacks, comments, syndication and all that. See for example how he himself sent posts to haohao: http://tinyurl.com/cjhfor, and pingbacked/commented many of the main “chinablogs”

CDE was a businessman, so what. I am an engineer, others are lawyers, consultants or researchers. Of course, blogging is normally not a full-time activity, and many use it to support their business. Re CDE’s fall: He could have been able to get away with it, as he did always in the past, if it weren’t for the intenet attacks originating from bloggers and twitterers, which showed the worst part of the story to all his clients. And it is not unreasonable to think that he resigned to avoid his presence hurting the reputation of C-Briefing. (but this point is unclear)

Anyway, it is silly to discuss what is and what is not a “chinablog”. I see you don’t like the term, and that is up to you. Possibly many of the blogs I refer to don’t like it either, I never asked them for permission to use it. For that matter, you could also try to define what IS actually a blog, and you might find out that many of them are just,like you say, “websites”. Look at the biggest of all, the Huffington Post, and tell me what is the difference with an online newspaper.

I defined the term chinablog in my article as “blogs about China in English”. A definition that is in itself vague, because blog is a vague term. Some of them don’t even define themselves as blogs, but rather as “university projects” or “news sites”. Whatever, by this term I was trying to refer to “the online community that interacts constantly about China using methods typical of blogs”, I hope now it is a bit more clear.

Again, have to disagree on the CDE matter. There is still a difference between websites and blogs. China Briefing has a website, very different from what you like to call “chinablogs’.

also, the fall of CDE came at the hands of the relevant government bodies and had nothing to do with blogs. CDE has proven in the past he cares little about bloggers (aside from an obsessive desire to shut them up). You and all the other ‘chinabloggers’ could have blogged until your fingertips fell off and it would have had no effect. I am afraid it was the government that did it!

In the meantime, I suggest you go to “view” and then “zoom in” in firefox, or equivalent option in other browsers. Normally they all have the possibility to increase or reduce zoom. I do it all the time in Chinese blogs because I find it really difficult to read the characters in small tyoe.

Could you please make the text size of the comments a little bit bigger? It’s really difficult for me.

Like Mark said above, cde was a businessman, yes, and he might not call himself a blogger. But if you think of it, his China briefing newsletter was nothing more than a Chinablog which he used to build a (fake) reputation. The guy had been active in blogs and forums here for years, doing comments and posts like every one of us.

Perhaps the Dow Jones journalist who sent the cable to HQ wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for this internet reputation. Otherwise, would a small consultancy company justify DJ publishing these news? It is all part of the China blogs/news phenomenon: demand of info exceeds supply.

And of course, the other part of the #cde affair (the fall of cde) could never have happened without the chinablogs.