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:

1. 10 More China Real Estate Stats and News Round-Up
2. Recommended Daily Requirements
3. Real Estate News Round Up for 2010-12-28

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

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.

Related posts:

1. Web Development in an International World
2. RightSite Launches in Private Beta
3. Mountain View Chapter of RightSite Fan Club is Formed

Better in beta, but not as good as it will get

Hi Gang! I’ve been absent from Mingtiandi again, but this time it’s been for a good reason – because we’ve been working all hours to launch RightSite.Asia into public beta. We were in private beta for a few months, madly chasing out the bugs and adding content to the site to make it ready for public viewing.  Consider this a big shout-out to all the people who helped us test the site and contributed their ideas.

During the last two months we have been able to accomplish some major tasks that make this public beta version of RightSite a huge improvement over the private beta. F’rinstance…

• Added more than 200 factories warehouses and other facilities to our directory
• Dug up another 40 industrial zones to complement the 1,500 already in the directory
• Created some groovy in-house advertising with the help of Paper Stone Scissors
• Added a directory of Shanghai’s industrial property agents
• Made sure the (*&^%$#@! site works right

Besides working on the site, we have been very busy the last month with building our team.  We are currently hiring interns for a few different areas, a content manager, and a marketing person. Overall, the response to our job advertisements has been very encouraging.  While the economic crisis makes it hard to earn money, it certainly makes it much easier to hire staff. I have been recruiting people off and on for the last six years in Shanghai , so I thought I would share a few notes about this year’s process and how it compares to prior years.

• Application volume — we are getting a much large volume of applicants than previous years. (duh)
• Big companies — a disproportionate number of the applicants are coming from big multinational companies.  Is it because these companies have tbe most experience in managing a downturn (and the local companies will catch up later) or is it just that the mutinationals steered themselves into a mess and now are bailing as fast as they can?
• Marketing — out of the positions that we are hiring for, Marketing Executive is by far the most applied for.  Are companies cutting their marketing staff more than other departments
• Hallucinogen use — we have received applications from a number of folks who have run through three or four jobs in the last two years but still want prime salaries. I thought downturns were when reality was supposed to set in?

But the biggest difference in hiring new team members this year is that we can do so at a sane pace.  One of the key indicators that it was time to sell my previous company when I did so back in 2007 was the challenges of recruiting. During 2006 and 2007 in Shanghai, companies recruiting staff were forced to accelerate and simplify their recruitment processes to ensure that they had a chance at the best candidates.  Quite simply, if companies did not take the first chance they had to hire someone, or agree to overpay, then they would have trouble hiring candidates.

That’s no way to run a business.

So in 2009, it seems that a bit of normalcy has returned to the market.  The numbers of truly desperate applicants are still fairly low — it’s more that the pace of hiring has returned to what it would be during the good times in the US or Europe.

With the recruitment opportunities available, and our sexy new beta site, RightSite should be able to rapidly establish itself as a productive forum for the industrial property community. Hope you will stop by the site and let us know what you think.

Related posts:

1. RightSite Launches in Private Beta

Beta Ray Bill is not part of the Private Beta

This week marks a big event in China’s industrial property history (or at least a big event for us) — the launch of RightSite’s private beta.

It only took about eight months of development, but the site is now fully functioning and ready for use.  However, just to be sure, we will be restricting the use of the site to invited users (thus the private part of private beta) until February 5th. Although this does restrict most people from using the site right away, this is not that much of a loss to us or our users since the site is basically empty of content right now.

We will be using this private beta period to accomplish a number of goals

Build up listings — we already have a database of 1500 industrial zones that we will be importing this week, but a property site needs actual property listings – individual factories, warehouses and other facilities.  We expect to be able to build up a list of at least 1000 such properties between now and December 31st.

Create community content — RightSite has an extensive community section which provides users with third-party research reports, instructional articles on conducting property transactions in China, a user-generated forum, and a tradeshow calendar. But right now, we just have the framework for all this and need to actually get content into this.  Most of the research reports and articles will come from third parties so we don’t have to write them ourselves, but we still expect this section of the site to take around 30 days to fill up.

Bug testing — Although we have extensively tested the site, there are always a few things that slip through, so we will be watching for bugs, glitches and other annoyances before we open up the site to large scale traffic.

So once we have our data industrial zone data imported this week, we will start the process of inviting selected individuals to try out the site.  If you would like an invite, just leave a comment here on Mingtiandi.

Related posts:

1. It’s Beta, Baby!
2. Event Marketing at RightSite
3. Huasun Group Terminates Private Placement

Hi Folks,

We are back online

We are back online here at Mingtiandi, and after eight months of site building and eleven months of company constructing, our new site, www.Rightsite.asia is nearly ready.  Here’s the latest.

Hosting Migration

We have been struggling with migrating this blog, our IDAAWorld.org site, and our email to a new host this week.  These are supposed to be routine processes, but due to my being something of a techno-dunce, and also due to the fact that things often don’t happen quite the way they are supposed to, it has taken a lot more time than expected to complete this migration.

But now you are looking at the same old Mingtiandi.com on a new host, Media Temple.  Everything seems to work, and the site seems a bit faster, so apart from a few dents in my skull from banging my head against the wall, life is pretty good.

RightSite Migration

At the same time that I have been moving the blog, our development team in India has been migrating our site to the same new host as Mingtiandi.com.  This has meant making sure that all elements of the new host are aligned and adjusted the same way as our development platform, and this has meant a few support emails to the hosting company for explanations, instructions and just plain assistance.  As I mentioned in a previous post, we are using Media Temple’s Gridserver hosting, and this seems to be working well for us so far. Here are the good and bad points if you may be considering this hosting product:

Advantages:

• Price — at $20/month it’s pretty cheap
• Dependability — As a cloud-based platform there is a lot of redundancy built in, so it should be reliable
• GUI Interface — We techno-phobes appreciate a control panel with pretty pictures and stuff to click on.  command line interfaces bring back very foggy memories of working at a dumb terminal trying to get a pdp 11/70 mainframe to spit out my freshman year term papers
• Scalability — Media Temple offers a very wide variety of services, so if we outgrow our current package, it should be fairly easy to upgrade
• Speed — even in China, the access times for this US-based service seem pretty ok (but we will see how things go once we actually populate the site with data)
• Knowledgeable support — the email support function has provided knowledgeable answers to some complex questions in a way that dummies like me can understand

Disadvantages:

• Limited root access — the GUI interface limits admin level tasks to the server administrator.  This means if I want someone to install or edit something on the site, other than text, then I end up giving our my server admin id – OUCH!
• No sudo access — although it runs on a Linux platform, the gridserver lacks the all important sudo — this means that our ability to perform admin functions is fairly limited
• Support speed – support replies can take 2-9 hours by email

Site Outlook

We are hoping to launch the private beta of RightSite.Asia on Monday, December 1.  Here’s what has to happen before then.

• Migration clean-up – there are few items that broken during the move, so it will take a couple of days to fix all of these
• Data import – our team spent months building a directory of more than 1,500 industrial zones across China. Now it’s time to import all that information into its new home on RightSite.
• DNS redirect – we will redirect our domain nameservers from our old temporary site to the new site on the new host.  And then it’s showtime!

Related posts:

1. Back in Town and Back to Building Companies
2. IDAA Online
3. Shandong’s Biggest Photovoltaic Facility Goes Online

For those of you tuning in at home, we are still hard at work on RightSite.Asia, and expecting to launch our beta version soon.  Here’s a quick run-down of the challenges we’re working on:

Chinese proofreading: we are still revising and proofreading the Chinese version of the site

Value lists: we have fixed the problem of arranging the values in our field menus in a natural order for each language (hooray).  But there are still a few English values lurking illicitly in the Chinese site

Style sheet: there are a few changes to be made in font colors and link colors in the site to make it more appealing to users

Property Requirements Location Preferences:  Our team had set up the fields for preferred location in the properties wanted section in the same way that they had set up the location fields in the properties available section.  Oops! We didn’t think that the actual locations wanted would be much more a general than the locations available, so now we need to re-structure these fields.

Linking Industrial Zones to their Subzones: Many large industrial zones include specialised subzones, such as Export Processing Zones, so we need to show the relationships between these zones.  Unfortunately, the existing structure only allowed for free text entry of subzone names. Now we are improving this to allow users to select a parent zone for any subzone from an auto-complete list of existing zones.

Browser Compatibility: There are many different software platforms out there to view RightSite on.  We are trying to make sure our site displays and functions properly on Windows, Mac and Linux, not to mention using Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari browsers.  This will take some time.

Loading the Site onto our Permanent Host:  Once we have finished the site, it needs to get set up on our permanent host.

Importing the Data: We have built listings of nearly 1,500 industrial zones, and we will need to import this information into RightSite.

With some luck, I believe that we can be installing RIghtSite onto its permanent webhost on the weekend of 22-23 November.  (Now that’s something to be thankful for). After the site is set up, we will import the data, and do some additional testing.

Look for a live, public beta version of RightSite on December 1st. We hope you will enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Pre-Flight Checklist
2. In the Home Stretch

For those of you who have been following this blog, you know that we are nearly done with RightSite.Asia, the region’s first bilingual website for industrial property.   After months of relentless site building, we are getting ready to wrap things up.

Except for one small problem.

This business of making things bilingual is more complicated than we realised. We are using a popular CMS (Content Management System) named Drupal to develop our site, and Drupal has a ready-made module called i18N that provides a structure for building a multi-lingual site. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

The challenge that we are facing is related to the way that the i18N internationalisatin module works. The module provides a framework for translating site content and displaying the content in separate but parallel versions of the site — one for each language.  However, for our site we only need to translate part of the site — our listings of industrial facilities, industrial zones and other information are all structured in such a way that translation is not necessary.  And we have no interest in maintaining a parallel set of listings for each language that we present the site in.  (We hope to someday add traditional Chinese versions of the site, as well as Japanese and Vietnamese versions).  However, we need the translation features of i18n for all other sections of the site.

Unfortunately, building a site that presents different types of content from different workflows in the same page is a bit challenging.  And my development team decided that it would be much easier for them to just run the entire site through the i18N module. “Sure, that makes a bit more work for the customer service team as they have to manually translate a few hundred listings a day, but what that’s their job, right?”

See what happens when teams don’t communicate?

So now the big bad boss — that’s me has had to give the development team the sad news that their plan (and the current product) is not acceptable.  The team now needs to revise our theme so that it can present listing information that is not processed through the i18N translation module, together with the content that has been processed through i18N, in the right language in both the English and Chinese versions of the site.

Hopefully this won’t cause any significant delays to the site, but it certainly won’t be easy.  Then again, given the current economic outlook in China (and around the world), there is not much reason to hurry.

In any case, I need to get back to learning a bit more about web design and development, otherwise I won’t know what not to accept.

Hope you’re having a happy week!

Related posts:

1. Building Our Own International Community
2. Is RightSite the Biggest Drupal Site in the World?
3. Lost in Translation

Never fear faithful readers!  RightSite is on it’s way to answer all your most personal questions about manufacturing and logistics facilities in Asia — you just have to wait a couple more weeks.

We have been busy the last few weeks fixing a few last technical glitches on the project and plowing through the translation. (I never realised that I had built such a complicated website until I had to make an entire second version of it in a language that I can’t read and link the two sites together into a single workflow).  But we are nearly done.

As of today, our project schedule looks like this:

Week of 13 October

• Finish final technical issues (mostly related to content translation workflow and localisation)
• Finalise hosting requirements for the site
• Complete the site translation process

Week of 20 October

• Proofread the Chinese content
• Resolve remaining browser compatibility issues
• Arrange web hosting

Week of 27 October

• Get site installed onto its new host and make it available at its URL

Week of 3 November

• User Acceptance Testing (this is our final chance to make sure it works before we pay the developers)

Ok, so this seems like a lot of steps, but considering that we have been working on the development of this site since April 2nd, we are feeling pretty good right now.  Tired, but good.

To give you a little preview of what to expect, I am attaching screenshots of the site as it currently appears, in both Chinese and English.

Related posts:

1. Still a Few Bugs in the System
2. Web Development in an International World