Shervin Pishevar, president of web hosting site Freewebs, called for a boycott on Yahoo in a phone conversation. Pishevar called me from an airport and chatted about the now infamous incident this week when he asked Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, "Would you have cooperated with Nazi Germany?" and Terry refused to say no. Among other things, Shervin said he wants to start a nation-wide boycott of Yahoo in America.
So Neville Chamberl— wait, sorry, Terry Semel — spoke at D Conference this week, and an attendee asked the Yahoo CEO if he would have cooperated with Nazi Germany. (Terry's answer: Well...yes.) That cheeky attendee is Shervin Pishevar, COO of the Freewebs hosting service. His question, and Terry's cop-out, pissed off bloggers mad at Yahoo's lousy human rights record in China.
ConFonz, a favorite Valleywag roving correspondent, reports again from E3 — this time, I suspect, from the hotel bar. It's okay, it was Thursday night and everyone was drunk. But just for fun, Valleywag won't proofread this edition of ConFonz.
China blocked Technorati, the once thrice once-funded blog search leader, today. The company says it's getting reports of this and that it's investigating; no further comment about their plan of action, their attitude toward the Chinese market, or what the VCs think about getting banned before getting bought (they think it's brilliantly precocious, right?).
Guge, the Chinese-branded Google service, recently released a pansy-ass watercolor ad. Shanghai blog China Snippets posts a translation (here's the SWF with sound). The ad copy includes wannabe koans like "One piece of information is like one blade of grass. Together they build up a big, green, endless lawn."
This weekend in the New York Times Magazine, Clive Thompson deeply analyzes (for 10 pages! that's 100 pages in Internet time) Google's China entanglement. But some of the crooked stories feel like scenes from Inside Man — it's really fun to cheer for the bad guys. Maybe it's just leftover love from this old commercial, but Google rival Baidu seems crazy — crazy like a fox.
On his way to chat with President Bush (which will provoke something witty on Wonkette), Chinese president Hu Jintao swung by Seattle to see the "home of the future" and other modern wonders (some of which were actually made by Microsoft) at Microsoft HQ. It's pretty safe to assume these captions are true.
Today's slice-of-life vid is a clip titled "Yahoo China Relocation." Seems to be from a party celebrating the move at Beijing's Winterless Hotel. Highlight: the demure but bored ladies standing among the Yahoo banners.
The tech boom is in San Jose! No, San Francisco! New York! Ah, wait, it's in that bastion of freedom and progressive action — the People's Republic of China!
Yahoo makes a statement about Chinese censorship, sending news teams scrambling for more metaphorical file photos.
"I know you don't know," Chinese search company Baidu tells Google, dancing circles around it in this viral video. After the jump, I'll tell you what the hell Baidu is saying.
Silicon Valley Watcher's Tom Foremski has a brilliant solution to Google's censored China search: censor other sites too.
At the Davos conference, Google CEO Eric Schmidt explains how his company decided to launch a censored China search instead of letting China censor Google.com: "We actually did an Evil-Scale and figured out which is less evil."
Our man in China sends the above photo and reports:
