China has spent a great deal of time being portrayed as an oppressive force when it comes to information traveling into and out of the country. Talk of Internet censorship began to grab some steam in 2007, and the Communist Party hasn’t escaped that label since. Yet it’s critical for outside observers to take a few steps back from the day-to-day news cycle in order to get a more comprehensive view of where it’s been and where it may go in the months and years ahead. Here we give you one such timeline.

If we’ve managed to miss any items from recent past, share your picks in the comments!

Size Matters

As we can all now appreciate, portions of China’s populace have familiarized themselves with the Internet to varying degrees over the last several years. Still, there is a real big limit to their digital freedoms. It’s called the Great Firewall.

So it’s important to understand where the government wants to carry the country to recognize that opening is happening and will continue to happen in the years ahead. It’s important to recognize the financial highlights made in the press over past few years for what they are. Seven-, eight-, and nine-figure funding deals, along with talk of IPOs, has been consistent. This year’s news of gaming venture 9you is just one example. I gather from these events that commerce has become the dominant religion of the red jungle. Which means great things for the country as a whole.

Harsh Treatment

Of course, the road for people in China fortunate enough to experience the Web has been a rough one. Not too long ago it was a weekly practice for bloggers beyond the country’s borders to make note of banned websites and censorship and, in some cases, arrests.

Remember when Yahoo and Microsoft spoke openly of their compliance with the Chinese government’s pursuit of censorship?

Yahoo’s CEO was later forced to endure congressional questioning in the US as a result of its release of user information to Chinese authorities that led to the arrest of Shi Tao, a journalist in the country.

Suffice it to say that Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google eventually came to learn that such behavior wouldn’t be accepted by American regulators as “the way things must go in the world of international business,” and agreed last month to guidelines for managing ventures in places suspect of human rights abuses.

Amplified Concerns

Forward to 2008, when we’ve seen many multinational corporations endure conflicts with China’s network of regulators. At the start of the year, Google saw YouTube blocked for hosting material having to do with protests in Tibet. CNN was later blocked for toeing a “China-no-good” line (our phrasing, not CNN’s) leading up to the Olympics.

As noise on the matter increased, Western press outfits en masse began to question the Chinese government on the topic of Web access during the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. Weeks of lingering coverage poured fourth in the springtime and early- to mid-summer.

The Olympic Games Begin to Turn the Tide

But while it made news prior to the games’ commencement, once things really began and progressed through 3 weeks of athletic records broken and, followed by a closing ceremony as spectacular as the one which started the whole thing, few news outlets based outside the Chinese mainland managed to revisit the subject of access. Or if they did, it was not to dwell on the present and the immediate past, but to hypothesize on what China would become in subsequent seasons. The pomp certainly won out over the circumstance in the Chinese capital.

That meant good news for China. Great news, in fact. The entire spectacle was a resounding success. Commentators started to believe that changes for the better would be made as a result of the games. But it was not the only advantage gained by the nation, and more specifically, the people.

The Crisis in Sichuan Province

Before the games had begun, there was the crisis inflicted by the earthquake in Sichuan Province, which wrought massive amounts of damage to infrastructure and claimed tens of thousands of lives, many of them young of age.

The sheer enormity of the event drove the Chinese government to allow for conversation about crisis to flow largely without limits on the Web. That went as much for emergency response as conversation on the how and why for the damage dealt. Local officials were blamed severely for aiding in the propagation of poor construction practices.

Thus, the question for the Chinese people and the world beyond to then consider became one of the possibility of permanent openness. Given the fact that rebuilding will take a great deal of time to fully accomplish, one can hope there is some enduring benefit to be had from the disaster, however unfortunate it was to so many citizens.

Big Change Comes Slowly

Let’s stress China’s desire to adjust at its own pace. Since things quieted down from a height of intense awareness of limits in the middle of the year, other negatives have come to the fore, not including the matter of tainted baby food. Recent reports of hacks performed via China on the White House network, for instance, while not unprecedented, have raised numerous red flags in Washington as well as the cyber division of the US Air Force Space Command (formerly known as AFCYBER), among other departments

Yes, China’s movements in the tech space are rough, sporadic, and in many ways slow-going. But there’s reason to establish an optimistic view of the future. That’s because the way the ruling party has conducted itself as of late has become very, very market oriented. It may be a heavily controlled market, but growth behooves the controller to loosen its grip to allow for continued expansion.

International commerce is what has led China to grow by enormous bounds for the last several seasons, and it is what makes Chinese society and the government’s interaction with the rest of the world considerably more transparent and open to exploration by outsiders. That goes as much for news as entertainment, too. Just look at MySpace and Facebook’s recent dealings with the Chinese market and the competition they’ve encountered there in sites like Xiaonei, Xiaoyou.

Realistically speaking, China won’t emulate the West anytime soon. It may never go so far, in fact. But it will come considerably closer to a progressive cohesiveness as we travel into the next decade. There’s simply too much money on the table not to make that effort.

Imagery provided by iStockPhoto/bkindler

; China BackPacker

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Thanks to everyone for your enthusiasm over the China 2.0 Blogger Contest! We were impressed by all the contest entrants and had a tough decision to make. However, Melissa’s VisualCV (check it out here: http://www.visualcv.com/msconyers) put her in front of the pack. Melissa is an active blogger, has solid technology and China skills, and created a beautiful example of a VisualCV. Melissa depicted her experience, passion and talents, convincing the judges she is a perfect addition to the China 2.0 Tour. Congratulations, Melissa!

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Compete is out with their latest analysis report — this time it’s regarding the online Olympics coverage across the Web. NBC spent $900 million for exclusive rights for broadcasting the olympics so an easy assumption would be that they lead the online traffic and engagement race for the Beijing Olympics online viewing but Compete says that assumption would be incorrect.

As you can see in the chart below, Compete measured reach (unique visitors) between the top 5 Olympic coverage sites. Yahoo leads with 1.5 million unique visitors while NBC comes in with 1.2 million. NBC leads in engagement (time on site) by 5% over Yahoo. It will be interesting to see how long the traffic and engagement remains high at NBC and the others once the games have concluded.

From a CenterNetworks perspective, the Olympics have provided a good stream of traffic since the opening ceremonies. The traffic has slowed over the past few days but during the first three days we were doing quite well. In fact, in my traffic and ranking analysis, Techcrunch would win the Gold and we would take the Silver. I will note that we have asked the IOC to take a look to make sure that no "faking" (heightening, lip synching, etc.) went on with that valley blog.

The one question I have after reviewing the Compete analysis is whether it includes views and engagement through the Microsoft Silverlight player which is required to watch the Olympics coverage on NBC.

More CN Coverage:
– Docstoc
– Scribd
– Twitter

No doubt about it. Many eyes are tuning into the Summer Olympic Games. A record count, according to NBC Universal, which this Saturday divulged statistical details for the first day of its video-rich online venture, NBCOlympics.com.

But say you’re not satisfied with the thousands of hours of live and on-demand content promised by the broadcaster. As some of you had made known in a Mashable poll concerning Silverlight adoption, there are those who still choose to maintain allegiance to YouTube. That is to be expected, of course. The site’s users wasted no time in uploading video clips of the opening ceremony in Beijing before NBC had broadcasted the event on television, triggering headlines in the news media and a kind of cat-and-mouse chase to remove such material. The strength of the masses at work, as they say, eh?

If you count yourself part of that pack, the arrival of a Summer Games channel on YouTube, comprised of a steadily growing collection of videos from a panoply of broadcasters, may well satisfy some of those Olympic cravings. Bringing together material produced by the Associated Press, The New York Times, Getty Images, Reuters, France 24, The Travel Channel, Ground Report, Euronews, and Paralympic Sport TV, the Summer Games channel pulls highlights from sporting events as well as associated news stories and makes them available in a single location. No need to race against the YouTube police for recaps of Olympic proceedings. This page has backing from some of the biggest sources around.

Now, the obvious downside to the aggregated Summer Games feed is its delayed release. While NBCOlympics too makes it a point to emphasize its wealth of on-demand content, the Microsoft Silverlight-powered effort touts numerous live streaming options, which can prove enormously appealing when exercised to the fullest. The NBCOlympics site allows such things as synchronous viewing multiple video feeds, for example, either in a control room-like setting or in a picture-in-picture scenario. The experience made possible with those options, as some of Mashable readers have noted, is a commendable one indeed.

Nonetheless, the Summer Games page on YouTube, brought about by some of the largest news organizations in the world, presents something of a complementary view on happenings in Beijing. Whereas NBCOlympics focuses primarily on sport, the Summer Games page is also rich with original extras worth a glance as well. It is no real replacement to NBCOlympics, let alone a challenger. Instead, it’s something I would call “value-added” - despite its complete independence of the NBC-Microsoft project. Also, as Alex Weprin of Broadcasting & Cable points out, the channel acts as something of an alternative to an IOC-sanctioned YouTube channel made available to viewers in locations unencumbered by media rights exclusives.

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It’s easy to get wrapped up in all of the big name countries that go to the Olympics, such as the United States or Russia, but have you ever thought about those countries that don’t have as much money for a team or only have a few athletes who qualify?

My family has a tradition of picking one or two of the smaller countries that can only send one or two athletes to the games, and sort of “adopting” them for us to root for over the course of the competition. 

This year I am going to be watching Itte Detenamo in weightlifting.  He is from the Republic of Nauru, the world’s smallest island nation at only 8.1 square miles.  GO ITTE! 

Who are you picking?  Leave it in the comments!

Countries With 1 Athlete

Grenada - Grenada is a small Caribbean island northeast of Venezuela with a population of 110,000.  Their lone Olympian will be Rolande Moses, a Welterweight boxer who left Grenada at age 7, but still qualifies to represent his birth country.

Haiti - Another Caribbean country that is sending only one Olympian to the games to compete in boxing.  Azea Augustama will be contending in the  light heavyweight class, and is a former Golden Gloves champion.

Republic of Guinea - 67 kg Barry Mariama Dalanda will be representing the west African country on the woman’s team in Taekwondo.  The country has one of the largest mineral deposits in the world, but is considered one of the poorest because of instability in the region.

Republic of Nauru -The Republic of Nauru is the world’s smallest island nation at only 8.1 square miles. It is located northeast of Australia in the Micronesian South Pacific.  Their sole Olympic participant will be Itte Detenamo and he will be taking part in the weightlifting competition.

Republic of Niger - Named for the Niger River, Niger will be sending Lailatou Amadou Lele to contend for the gold medal in Taekwondo.

Republic of Togo - When you think of the sub-Saharan country, Judo is probably not the first sport that comes to mind.  However, that is exactly the sport the 81-kg Sacha Dananyoh will be participating in as a wild card.  (The site links to the official website of the country, which is in French)

Countries With 2 Athletes

Aruba - A Caribbean island nation that only measures 21 miles in length is sending two atheletes to the Beijing games.  Vis Fiderd will be participating in Judo and Jan Roodzant in swimming.

Bhutan - Located at the eastern end of the Himalaya Mountains, Bhutan is sending two archers to the games for the seventh time.  Tashi Peljor will compete for the men in archery and Droji Dema for the women.

British Virgin Islands - Though they are a British territory, they attend the Olympics separately from Britain.  Both participants, Tahesia Harrigan and Eric Matthias will be participating in track and field.

Brunei Darussalam - A nation located on the northern coast of Borneo, Brunei Darussalam will be sending Maria Grace Koh for swimming and Mohd Yazid Yatimi Yusof for track and field.

Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste - More commonly known as East Timor, is an island nation located to the northwest of Australia.  Both of the country’s Olympic athletes, Mariana Dias Ximenes and Augusto Ramos Soares, will be participating in track and field.

Islamic Republic of Mauritania -The country is represented by Bounkou Camara and Souleymane Chabal El Moctar, who will be competing in track and field.

Principality of Liechtenstein - Covering only 62 square miles, and primarily known for winter sports, the Principality of Liechtenstein will have two contestants at the summer games.  Marcel Tschopp will be running the marathon and Oliver Geissmann will be in the shooting competition.

Republic of Botswana - A land filled with cattle and diamonds, they are sending two boxers to the summer Olympics.  Khumiso Ikgopoleng will be boxing in the bantamweight class and Thato Batshegi will be in the featherweight class.

Republic of Chad - A landlocked country in the middle of Africa, making it extremely arid, is sending two track and field athletes to the games.  Hinikissia Albertine Ndikert and Moumi Sebergue will be the two to make it this time around.

Republic of Sierra Leone - Located in western Africa, the Republic of Sierra Leone has a tropical environment and will be sending Solomon Bayoh and Michaela Kargbo to both participate in track and field.

Somali Republic - A eastern African country, they will be sending Abdinasir Said Ibrahim and Samia Yusuf Omar to participate in track and field.

Sultanate of Oman - Located on the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula, Sultanate of Oman will be sending Allah Dad Al-Balushi to compete in shooting and Mohammed Al-Habsi in swimming.

All map images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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UStream, the free video streaming service, has added announced more social features very akin to the features YouTube and MySpace have available. Amongst the new features you’ll recognize, they’re adding bulletins, subscriptions, and followers (as well as a few management tools to go along with).

These additions make the social features somewhat more complete on the system. Before there was only the ability to subscribe to other producers and maintain your subscriptions, but with the addition the bulletins features (and the other management tasks relating to your followers), has the potential to really cement the developing community at the site with bi-directional communication.

As those of us who have decided to wade in hip-deep to Twitter and FriendFeed know, just as important as the tools to connect are the tools to block. Included in the update is just that functionality, which not only prevents you from seeing their updates but them from seeing yours as well.

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Source:Mashable!

Once every four years athletes from around the world come together to compete in the summer Olympics. This year they have traveled to Beijing, China, and with the games about to begin, we’ve gathered 25 sites to help you experience them and learn more.

Discover the various sports and athletes, create activities for the kids, and maybe even feed those that come over to watch the festivities with you.

What sports will you be watching and who will you be rooting for?  Leave your thoughts in the comment below and show support for the athletes of your home country, wherever that may be!

Informational

Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics - The official site of the host city for this summer’s games.  Has schedules, information on the venues, weather reports and more.

China.org.cn - China’s official site has its own Olympic section that differs from the official games’ site.  It has news from around China that impacts the games, simple words in Chinese you can learn that relate to the Olympics, weather reports and more.

International Association of Athletics Federations - The I.A.A.F. is, as the name implies, is the organization that oversees all of the various athletic federations.

International Olympic Committee - Home page of the governing body behind everything to do with the Olympics such as rules, city selections and so on.

London 2012 - London, England is the site of the next summer Olympics in 2012.

Olympic.cn - The official site of the Chinese Olympic Committee.

TeamUSA.org - The official site of the USA Olympic team for all of the various sports.  They also feature blogs written by a number of the athletes.

Vancouver 2010 - The official site of the next winter Olympics in Vancouver Canada in the year 2010.

News & Video

ABC - The Australian Broadcasting Company is covering the games for the land down under. Has profiles of Australian Olympic legends, a smog watch for the city of Beijing, and current athlete profiles.

BBC - The BBC website has in-depth interviews with athletes, interactive maps of the venues, offers versions of the site that are keyed towards an international viewer or can be switched over to the UK-centric version.

CBC - Canadian Broadcasting Company coverage of the 2008 summer Olympics.

ESPN - It’s only natural that the biggest sports network in the United States would have coverage. Besides the day-to-day coverage, they also have histories, athlete profiles, fan guides and more.

Fox Sports - Easy medal tracker for each country at the top of the page along with lengthy analysis on the chances of the USA in many of the sports.

NBC Olympics - The official network for the games in the United States, NBC’s site has detailed information on each of the different sports and the athletes that will be participating in each, along with too many features to properly list.

NBC Olympics On The Go - A service for Windows Vista users with Media Center.  Download the program, subscribe to your favorite events, and have them delivered directly to your computer so you can even watch them offline.

Sports Illustrated - Besides all of the usual trappings of a medal tracker, photos and the such, they also have reports on stars to watch out for in each sport and how they do this time around.

Yahoo Sports - Offers mobile updates as well as medal counts, detailed analysis and several more features.

Olympics For Kids

Dodger’s Olympic Lodge - The Canadian Broadcasting Company site for kids where there mascots Dodger and Phil will be covering the games in a kid friendly manner.

FactMonster.com - Has information on the latest Olympics as well as the results for the past few years with complete medal counts and break downs by sport.

FreeKidsCrafts.com - Has Olympic themed crafts for kids to do such as making beaded versions of the Olympic flag, medals you can print out, a paper torch like the one used for these games and more.

Kaboose.com - Features printable crafts, coloring pages with a sports theme, and interviews with Olympians who also happen to be mothers, to see how they juggle everything.

MakingFriends.com - Instructions for making flag pins, Olympic paper dolls, puppets and much more.

Recipes & Entertaining

AllRecipes.com - Has a few Olympic-themed recipes such as Olympic Ring Pizza that will add some flare to your party.

Epicurious.com - Over 300 recipes for those of you wishing to throw Olympic themed parties or gatherings.

Homecooking.about.com - Five recipes that are based in classic Greek cooking to help you get the feel of the original games.

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This is the second of two posts written by Dr. Mark Drapeau about government 2.0. Click here to read his first post, “Government 2.0: An Insider’s Perspective.”

In June 2008, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’ investigative arm, released a report stating that, “more than 4 years after September 11, the nation still lacked the government-wide policies and processes called for in law to provide a framework for guiding and integrating a myriad of ongoing efforts to share terrorism-related information critical to protecting our homeland.”

Simply put, people in the government aren’t talking to each other enough. As one person, I cannot pretend to solve this problem, nor even understand all of the issues involved. And understandably, the details of some of the workings of government are shielded from public consumption. But for our purposes here, I ask a slightly different question: Given that governments are inherently reactive, rather than proactive (I need give no examples), how can this be compatible with the rapidly evolving world of social software?

In what I think is a good trend, people associated with the government are using Web 2.0 (whether they know it or not). Increasingly, senior officials in the national security community have LinkedIn accounts and curiously dip their toes in the Facebook and Twitter waters, if only because they hear about these sites from their daughters or research assistants. The only way to truly understand the power of Web 2.0 is to participate in it, and even the smallest foray should be applauded.

Ironically, however, many government agencies block such sites for use at work. For example, I cannot access MySpace or YouTube from the computer in my office at the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) blocks most social networking sites besides LinkedIn. At least one part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) blocks Google Chat. Not only do these policies make little sense (there are legitimate research uses for all of these sites, while email, iTunes, and non-blocked websites are ‘abused’ daily), the policies are inconsistent.

Despite this, there are overt sprinklings of Web 2.0 influence all over the federal government. For example, in mid-2007, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sponsored a public blog about pandemic influenza, which I contributed to due to my work on global health security. This was a great early example of a government agency engaging with an interested, and in many cases, expert audience.

Contemporary government blogs include very solid efforts by two agencies that people love to hate: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and the U.S. Postal Service – the latter of which is a very creative effort. NASA has multiple Twitter-streams in the realm of micro-blogging, and they utilize YouTube and other new media to publicize their exciting work. More budding efforts abound.

There are also promising extra-governmental efforts. Perhaps most notable among them, GovLoop was built using Ning and in only seven weeks has attracted over 500 users from federal, state, and local governments. There was also an event entitled Social Media in Government, with the goal of the conference to “capture the power of social media in your organization, along with helpful tools, tips and techniques to get started.” Activities like these are already making it easier for public servants to share ideas and knowledge.

At a recent Washington, DC-area conference entitled ”Defense 2.0,” Opening Keynote speaker Michael Nelson pointed out that the Internet has ceased to be a tool, and has evolved into a place. And Marketing 101 teaches that you want to be in the places where your target audience is. For the government, whether interested in recruiting employees, talking to subject-matter experts, or collecting counter-terrorism intelligence, using “rich media” to participate in discussions on the Internet and get people to engage with their “brand” will be increasingly important.

But Defense 2.0 is still in its infancy, with a large gap between vision and reality. Thus far, Web 2.0 efforts, while some of them are very promising (for example, Intellipedia), have mainly occurred in isolation, with lack of coordination and no overall Government 2.0 theory, strategy, or framework for using these new social tools to best serve the American people. Here, I begin to describe the beginnings of such a framework.

Mainstream media coverage of the national security community largely involves “guns and ammo,” but increasingly U.S. armed forces leverage the power of other elements of government including diplomatic, intelligence, and economic components to conduct complex, “low-intensity” operations that involve far more than combat. These efforts also regularly involve groups outside the federal government, whether they are state and local responders, military forces of other nations, or global non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

“It’s the notion of unity of effort without unity of control,” says Dr. Linton Wells II, who has a background in the Navy, previously acted as the CIO of the entire U.S. military apparatus, and is now heavily involved with efforts to provide “transportable infrastructures” including inexpensive communications technologies to disaster-relief zones (see STAR-TIDES, below).

Because modern governments now think about military missions for national security in a much broader context, opportunities to use social software can best be divided into three very broad – and diverse – arenas. They are: (1) government internal information sharing, (2) creating and nurturing relationships with non-governmental entities, and (3) empowering people, particularly those in post-disaster, post-war, or impoverished situations. Understanding the pros and cons of incorporating Web 2.0 tools into each of these circumstances is the goal of a research project I have started at the National Defense University called Social Software for Security, or S3.

Internal governmental information sharing means different things to different people. The most commonly-stated objection to the incorporation of social software into national security operations is that malware could be implanted or the social tools could otherwise provide access into government systems, thereby reducing network integrity. However, a good deal of government information, while perhaps private, is not necessarily so much so that off-the-shelf Web 2.0 sites cannot be utilized – they do typically come with some security features.

Examples of such “less secure” information exchanges include Office Directors polling staffs about coordinating schedules or planning social events, Naval Postgraduate School students using iPods with audio/video to supplement lectures, Public Affairs monitoring media feeds about topics of interest, or Human Resources bringing soldiers’ families together using social networks that provide information about local areas. Paraphrasing what Maverick might say about this information, “If I told you, I would not have to kill you.”

In the realm of developing and nurturing a social network of government employees and non-governmental entities, social software also has numerous applications. Sites like kluster can enhance communication and not only help to promote organization within an amorphous and changing coalition, but also help groups discuss problems and arrive at actionable conclusions. Some very important entities, like the Defense Science Board and the Highlands Forum, involve groups of subject matter experts from inside and outside government interacting in various ad hoc ways to solve challenging problems in national security.

A global social network along these same lines is called STAR-TIDES, or Sustainable Technologies, Accelerated Research – Transportable Infrastructures for Development and Emergency Support. STAR-TIDES is a network of governmental, non-profit, academic, and other individuals dedicated to providing low-cost, transportable infrastructure for post-disaster, impoverished, or post-war individuals; including cheap mobile communications technologies.

In the social software space, STAR-TIDES has a Twitter stream detailing conferences attended, sponsored events, daily meetings, and the like. The network may also begin using sites like kluster or DeepDebate to go through an organized, collaborative decision-making process to arrive at actionable conclusions.

Finally, STAR-TIDES is utilizing mashups in their humanitarian efforts. One, constructed by InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases, and Disasters), is called Contacts Nearby. This program interfaces your Facebook biography with Google Maps (geographical information) and Twitter (archivable communications), allowing (say) a refugee to read about, geo-locate, and chat with a U.S. Marine unit, members of an Africa-based NGO, and other refugees with recycled, donated mobile phones. There is now similar software for the new iPhone which concentrates mainly on tagging and auto-tagging geo-located photographic information using mashups with other programs like your Google Calendar. All of these data can then be shared on blogs, wikis, and other social sites.

Related to this, online social communication – particularly scalable micro-blogs like Twitter – can also behave as an “early warning system” to rapidly detect natural disasters, and even localize their origins. As someone who researches the connection between infectious disease and international security, I have been thinking about its uses in the event of a pandemic outbreak. Could Twitter power users like Robert Scoble help to disseminate information on government posters like the one I recently created?

In the end, diverse missions will require differing social software. Many novice end users will probably know their mission requirements, but will not know which Web 2.0 tools are the best fit. As a first step towards helping such users, my Social Software for Security project has funded an effort by Desarae Veit to catalog more than 1,000 social networking sites and describe their properties that may be of use in government and humanitarian efforts – like whether they are mobile-enabled, if they are high or low bandwidth, if they are free to use, and so forth.

This information has now been incorporated into a public website that we have named Sniki, for Social Networking Wiki. To my knowledge, such a public, interactive database has not heretofore existed. I’m happy that the National Defense University could help to provide this resource to the Web 2.0 community, and in the spirit of social software I encourage you all to register on the site, edit it, and consider it yours!

Dr. Mark Drapeau is the 2006-2008 AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security policy of the National Defense University in Washington. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Government. He can be reached at mark.d.drapeau@ugov.gov via email.

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Source:Mashable!

Google on Wednesday announced that it has launched a music search service in China that allows users to access music legally online through its new service called Music Onebox.  According to the company, the service is backed by some record labels and will be supported by advertising revenue.

As the AP points out, paid music downloads in China are “practically nonexistent.”  According to most estimates, more than 99 percent of all downloaded files in China are pirated and legitimate sales represent less than 1 percent of the world’s total music revenue, reaching just $76 million.

Each time someone uses Google’s Music Onebox to find a song, they’re redirected to Top100.cn, which will offer them the opportunity to download the track for free.  The record labels will then incur the revenue coming from the advertising on the site.

There’s no way to tell if this new model will help curb piracy in China and record labels are more than a little hesitant to allow people to download songs and rely on advertising to turn a profit, but it’s the first step in the right direction that could see them come around and start trusting the Web a bit more.

That said, this will never come to the United States.  Let’s face it – iTunes is the world’s largest music retailer and people seem to be more than happy buying music that’s littered with DRM.  Realizing that, why would the music industry want to bring an ad-supported downloading business to US shores?  It wouldn’t make any sense.

The only reason record labels have agreed to stand behind Top100.cn is because they know they’re losing loads of cash in China as each day passes and more people pirate music.  Piracy isn’t just a problem in China, it’s so commonplace that hardly anyone knows someone that downloads songs legally.  Can the same be said for the US where the RIAA is trying its best to crackdown on the small percentage of pirates?  I didn’t think so.

Top100.cn is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt at making the Chinese turn to legitimate sources of music and curb piracy in the country.  If that ever happens, this service will die and the music industry will try to force DRM on every Chinese person, much like they do with the Western world today.

And as much as I would like to see a service like this in the US and abroad, it just won’t happen.

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