About one month ago I started publishing weekly newsletters of China real estate information here on Mingtiandi and the response has been stronger than I imagined.  More users sign up every day from several countries around the globe, and more than 30% of our 1830 readers are reading every edition.

So if response is that strong to a weekly update then, what could we do if we gave readers daily news? But Mingtiandi is not a direct revenue earner, so to start doing daily updates I needed a way to gather, edit and distribute information that wouldn’t take significant time.

The answer that I came up with is RSS. For those of you who are less technically inclined RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and most every website has an RSS feed of their content which allows them to distribute their information automatically.

But what I set out to do is to use RSS to collect, curate and publish information, and by using a variety of tools, I am now able to publish daily newsletters on China real estate without spending more than 20 minutes a day on the project. So here’s what I set up over the last few days.

Google Alerts to Collect Information

For years, I have been using Google Alerts to gather links to news on relevant keywords about real estate and other important topics. However, I recently changed these alerts to send information to their own RSS feed rather than send me an email notice.

Yahoo Pipes to Aggregate Alert Feeds

Because I have about 30 different Google Alerts set up, checking each of these individually could take too much time and include too many duplicate links, so I used a tool called Yahoo Pipes to aggregate all of my China real estate alert feeds into one big feed which is sorted by publication dates and duplicates removed.  It can even translate the titles and descriptions of Chinese articles to English. After this process, Yahoo Pipes then republishes this information as a new RSS feed.

Curating Links with Google Reader and Diigo

Now that my aggregated RSS feed is set up, I can review all of the news in Google Reader, to choose the most interesting stories for publication to my newsletter.  Once I find a qualifying story, I can bookmark it using the online bookmarking utility Diigo. This utility not only makes it easy to find these relevant stories later, but it also creates another RSS feed of the stories that I have tagged for publication.

Creating and Publishing Newsletters in Mailchimp

Perhaps the biggest time-saver of all are the RSS-driven email newsletter campaigns in Mailchimp.  The Mingtiandi newsletters are created from HTML templates which automatically pull the content from my RSS feed of stories that I tagged for publication.  No cutting and pasting, no uploading — I just program the application to publish a newsletter from the template at the time I want and out it goes.

Now the difference between these new daily campaigns and my weekly campaigns is that they publish only a digest of web links and don’t have Mingtiandi’s original content (which you get in the weekly mail). But until I cash out of RightSite for trillions of RMB, I have a job to do every day, and it doesn’t leave much time for updating a blog several times a day.

So the actual time required to create Mingtiandi’s daily email campaigns is just the 15-20 minutes required to read through the stories from the aggregated news alert feed and choose the stories for publication. Lots of information, daily broadcasts to a couple thousand readers, and just a little RSS-magic.

Related posts:

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2. Recommended Daily Requirements
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Reports in the media both in China and internationally last week brought attention to a conflict between new media regulations in China and online mapping services by foreign companies such as Google and Microsoft that seem destined to end access to Google and Bing maps in China. Unless the situation changes soon, these online services will likely be blocked in China sometime after July 1^st.

According to statements from China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, Google and Microsoft missed a March 31st deadline for applying for a license to publish maps under the new regulations. Google, at the same time, is saying that it is trying to find a way to fulfill the guidelines.

To many observers this is a continuation of the feud between Google and China’s government media regulators, but this should not necessarily be looked at as result of official pique or as part of some type of corporate grudge match. What appears to be happening is the Chinese government acknowledging the importance of the Internet as mass media and extending to the sector that same controls that it has long exerted over print and broadcast outlets.

The regulations in question were announced last year and place a number of restrictions on the online publications of maps. Official statements explaining the new law have stated that it is necessary “to avoid state secrets being disclosed and uncertified maps published online.”

While the regulations are apparently aimed at preventing the online publication of militarily or politically sensitive locations, they attempt to do so by requiring foreign publishers of online maps to only make available these maps in China through joint ventures with local Chinese companies, restrict sites located or hosted overseas from showing maps of China, and require any map services available in China to also host their servers in China. Given that media organisations operating in China, particularly local organisations, are subject to strict self-censorship, these regulations seem aimed at ensuring that online map publishers toe the government line.

What many of the recent reports cited above overlook is that it is no surprise that foreign companies “missed the deadline” for applying for map publishing licenses under the new regulations. To date Nokia is the only foreign company to receive a map publishing license and it succeeded in doing so only as a joint venture with a local Chinese company.

Since establishing a joint venture enterprise or partnership would presumably mean sharing intellectual property with their local partners, companies with substantial investment in mapping software such as Google are not likely to choose this route after their hacking experience in 2010.

China’s Media Regulations Catching Up to the Internet

But these rules do not reveal a shift in attitude towards media censorship within China’s government. What they do show is the restrictions on content that have long existed in the country’s print and broadcast media being applied to the previously more open online media sector. In China’s print media, the publication of maps has long been subject to severe restrictions.

In 2002 when I was publishing That’s Shanghai – a kind of Time Out for this city of 20 million people — many of our readers asked to have a map of the city published in the magazine showing points of interest or places covered in our stories. However, our government publishing partners (foreign print media companies in China can only publish in cooperation with a State-owned enterprise) informed us that creating even a restaurant map would require a license from the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping which involved complicated application processes and substantial fees. So the map never made it into the magazine, and many of our readers could never find their favorite places to eat.

When a few years later Google and other providers were able to publish maps on the Internet that showed many more details than we could have dreamed of in our magazine, and without any kind of license procedure, I envied the freedom that they enjoyed. However, now the regulations that players in China’s print sector were struggling with a decade ago have started to catch up with the Internet.

The Future of Regulation for China’s Internet Industry

Although there have been no clear statements about other upcoming restrictions similar to the new regulations on online maps, foreign companies in China’s Internet sector need to recognise that the government is wary of any media that they cannot control directly, and they expect to be able to apply strict censorship.

In print and broadcast media, the only way for foreign companies to operate in consumer media in China has been through cooperation with a local Chinese company – usually a state-owned enterprise – who maintained control over all content. Often this has meant sacrificing innovation and quality for obedience, but the government has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to make that choice.

For companies operating in the consumer Internet sector, they can expect more pressure to work in partnership with Chinese media organisations with whom the government is confident of their authority and comfortable with their relationships. And for Internet users in China, they can expect to start using maps from Baidu, Ddmap and other providers after July 1^st.

Related posts:

1. Baidu Maps Now Show Building Floor Plans
2. Why Foreign Media Companies Can’t Compete in China
3. Gaining Ground on Google

There was big news in the tech world today as sources within Google let it be known that the company was moving away from using Windows on its workstations.  At RightSite, we can only say, “What took you so long?”

As reported today in the Financial Times, Google has put in place measures that make it difficult for employees to get a Windows machine and encourage users to rely on either Mac OS X or Linux for their workstations.  As reported by the FT,

“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” said one Google employee.

At RightSite, where we are big proponents of free, open-source software (FOSS) we applaud this move. But we also have to wonder what took them so long.  Virtually since day one at RightSite we have been using Ubuntu Linux workstations, and there is very little that would make anyone on our team miss Windows.

And there is a whole lot more that makes us glad that we don’t use the world’s most security-exploited operating system.  One reason that RightSite goes open-source is because we are a poor startup operation that wants to stay legal.  But an even bigger reason we forgo Windows is that we don’t want the security hassles that come with Bill Gates OS baby.  Viruses, malware and other nasty stuff are very common in China, and instead of chasing staff to be careful about what they click on or hiring a squad of geeks to keep everyone’s machines clean, we just avoid most of the problems by not using Windows.

Not very often does RightSite get the jump on Google, but it’s nice to see those guys in Mountain View starting to catch up in the innovation game.

Try downloading Linux for your machine and see you next time here on Mingtiandi.

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As followers of this blog may know, RightSite was built using a content management system called Drupal, a development platform that seems to be going thermo-nuclear here in 2010.  While I have seen numerous examples of famous sites the world over being built in Drupal, including the official White House site, it has been suggested to me that RightSite may actually be the largest Drupal site in the world in terms of entries.

For those of you who are newcomers to this blog, RightSite.asia is the industrial real estate website operated by my company, RightSite. We are an online B2B platform for owners and occupiers to exchange information and arrange deals, as well as providing resources for facilitating real estate transactions.  But mostly we have listings.  Lots of listings. And this translates into a big site.

Big site in terms of lots of information.  RightSite now has more than 2700 detailed property listings, as well as listings of nearly 2000 industrial parks and economic zones all over China.  Put together, all of this information makes for a very large site. As of the latest count, RightSite had nearly 40,000 database nodes and the actual size of the database was more than 1 GB.

So does that make RightSite the biggest Drupal site in the world? I can find any data on this at this point.  But I would be willing to wager that we are still the biggest Drupal site in China.  And China is not a small place.

So does RightSite being big help you at all?  Not directly.  But by filling RightSite with this much data, we hope that we have established an important resource base for facilitating industrial real estate transactions. Now we are relying on the members of our community to keep contributing so that the site continues to support economic growth and industrial development across China.

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One of the key factors in the whether a startup is successful is how effectively the team collaborates in accomplishing their goals.  At RightSite we are a small team producing a very big website so we are always looking for tools that help us to share information and work together more efficiently, and setting up a company wiki or intranet is one of the key steps in attaining collaboration nirvana.

We use our intranet to share materials, especially documentation, on how RightSite works. Like any organisation in China, or team is constantly changing and we try to document all processes in the company and make sure this documentation is easily accessible and constantly updated.  Over the recent May holiday I downloaded Open Atrium and found it to be an easy to set up, free solution for building your own intranet in an afternoon.

Before you run away screaming, “I’m not a tech person,” let me add that I have no tech skills myself, and if you can set up a WordPress blog and have a hosting package somewhere, or even a server in your office, then you can set up Open Atrium without help.  If you can’t muster that much tech savvy, then get your office tech guy to set it up.

Open Atrium is a pre-packaged installation of the Drupal CMS that comes set up with a blog, a project management system, a calendar, an email notification system and a user management system. When I was working at Global Sources about 10 years ago we had a three person team developing an intranet system for our company.  The project lasted several months and I’m not sure the product was anywhere near as powerful as what you are now able to download for free and set up in an afternoon.

Prior to setting up Open Atrium, RightSite had been using Google Sites, but that later was blocked in China. We also looked at using Zoho’s Wiki app, but found that the free version had a ridiculously low storage capacity (we store a lot of reference documents) and the paid versions quickly started costing about US$20/month.  Considering that the server that hosts RightSite costs less than US$100/month the Zoho solution seemed too expensive.

Now we were able to get the entire system running in an afternoon, on the same server that hosts RightSite, and we will be set to start working more effectively. Specifically, I am hoping to reduce the training time for new hires, ensure that we stick to best practices more effectively and allow all team members to contribute ideas about how to run our company better.

There is no technology that can give you an effective company culture, but smart managers need to be on the lookout for easy to use tools that will help keep their companies on the right track (without costing them more than a new salesperson).

If any of you have input on Open Atrium, or on setting up Wiki systems, then I invite your ideas.

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While we may have created a few dodgy budgets at RightSite, we still haven’t figured out how to create a subversive spreadsheet. Despite this, it seems that while Google docs are accessible in China today, any of the spreadsheets that you may have created are not.

At this time, we are able to access the main Google docs page (docs.google.com), and access to text documents seems fine. However, the majority of attempts to access spreadsheets created in Google are futile. We are also unable to create new spreadsheets through Google.

We say the majority of attempts because my assistant was able to access one of our crucial spreadsheets this morning, which we downloaded from Google and then uploaded to Dropbox.

Since Google Sites (which we use for our RightSite Wiki) is still blocked we will have to migrate our wiki over to Zoho‘s wiki app as soon as we have the chance.

No idea why we were able to score this sporadic access, but if you can pry your precious spreadsheets out from behind the GFW then Dropbox is a good stopgap measure for document sharing. It doesn’t like having multiple users editing at one time, but is a good solution for less active sharing of docs and provides a good revision history.

We will let you know if things come back on line.

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1. Problems Accessing Google Docs in China
2. Today Babel Is Back
3. Google Maps Coming to An End in China as Censorship Spreads

It’s Saturday in Shanghai and that makes it time to celebrate another victory at RightSite.  We completed another week of productive work under substandard conditions.  We successfully produced a our latest newsletter, got about 90 new property listings added to our directory, and have gained considerable ground on completing our RightSite Pro features without having to physically assault our web development vendors.

All part of life at a start up.

When starting up a company we operate on the lowest possible budget that we can until we start generating a profit. That means that we often overwork our teams, our equipment, and even our offices.

So the office decided to fight back a bit this week.  On Tuesday the power suddenly went out at lunchtime, and after several adventures with circuit breakers, UPS, and shutting down the mail server, the phone server and the router, and some consultation with our neighborhood electrician, we figured out that one of the air conditioners had gone evil. (Air conditioners routinely double as heaters in China). At least by isolating the problem we were able to get electricity restored, although some of the team had a chilly afternoon.

So after the electrician was sent away, the air conditioner repairman was summoned. When he finally arrived the next day, and after blowing out the circuit breakers a few more times, we were able to find out that the air conditioner had lost a capacitor (or at least it kind of looked like a capacitor, but I’m not sure of the Chinese for capacitor)

Just imagine what we could have done under reasonable working conditions.

Our other victory of the week was resucitating my old desktop PC to put it to work as another server.  With the advent of our RightSite Pro products we will also be putting into place a training server that we will use to train our new staff and do testing on new features.  So the team from our IT vendor, Fusion were kind enough to help us fit out the machine with some new hard drives so that it could be set up for its new duties. Total cost of hardware — RMB 386

Once the new hardware was in place, we set up a server installation of Ubuntu Linux, Apache webserver software, MySQL and PHP. So now this old PC is running a LAMP stack and is ready for its new role as an in-house web server.  Total cost of software — RMB 0!  (Take that Bill Gates!)

There are things that RightSite willingly spends on — the development of our website, professional hosting of RightSite and the training and development of our staff. But in non-core areas, we don’t spend money that we don’t have.

Of course, working with equipment like this puts us in danger of more equipment adventures like we had earlier in the week, but that is part of the deal with start up. When we start bringing in more money, we start spending on more expensive systems.

In any case, this gave us an idea for another story on our website.  In the coming weeks, watch RightSite for a feature on crisis management planning in China!

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It’s been a while since I checked in here at Mingtiandi, but that’s only because of how much work we’ve had to do building RightSite.asia.

China Turns on the Sun

One of the benefits of building RightSite has been getting the opportunity to find out more about some of the intense industrial development going on in China.  During the last two years China has made a dramatic shift towards developing new energy and is starting to make progress towards establishing energy independence. I recently added a forum post on our RightSite forum that tells more about what is developing in China’s solar power industry, and I hope you will check it out if you have time.

After a short break I will be back with more updates on what’s been going on at RightSite.

See you soon…

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