This article is more than 1 year old

Mind the Gap Saturday: Forums East and West

Part two: Are you GG or PPMM?

Watch your Majia

We can only hope that Chinese forums will be more like Digg in the sense of the "one person, one account" principle. If you have an account at the forum, you have an ID in Chinese netspeak. If you own more than one account - if you've sock puppets - you're in possession of majia (马甲) accounts.

Majia accounts are a bit controversial, but the controversy gets out of hand when it comes to the blocking of misbehaving members and in voting as well. Since majia people can easily create a second account and log in (and circumvent the block), they can just as well as cast a second vote in elections.

The trick then, of course, is to shy away from having more than one account - at least, more than one active account. If you've forgotten your password from that 1996 account - fair enough, go for a second account. But if you're registering 23,482,378 accounts to rig the polls or to prevent yourself from ever being blocked for misbehaving on forums - that's when the whole majia biz gets downright controversial.

Watch the IPR, ZT People

If you see a post with the letter ZT (short for zhuan tie (转贴)), you're witness to a post that was pretty much copied from other forums. In other words, this is not their own stuff - someone else did it.

If the ZT gets out of hand, we have big, bad IPR fistfights. However, much of the ZT-ing is often benign, and I've posted Chinese Mac shortcuts on the web with the remark: "Feel free to ZT this".

ZT-ed often are quick news bulletins related to the forum's topic, as well as quick or funny snips from across the web. Often, the ZT-ing is innocent: they're out to spread the wealth of knowledge, and probably not out to make money.

Nevertheless, ZT done wrong can breed IPR problems. If you must ZT, do so with care.

The tale of orz

You'll hear a lot about orz in forums in Hong Kong and Taiwan. A classic quote from a 2005 Boing Boing article should make all of this crystal clear:

Orz is a popular symbol, a pictograph, a fun stuff, a strong meme, a fashion and even a subculture in Far East Asia since last year [2004]. [It was] originally from Japan and spread soon to other [places] such as China and Taiwan. It illustrates a guy facing left and kneeling on the ground, the "o" means the head, the "r" means the hands and the body while the "z" means the legs. People use this pictograph to show they failed and they are [in] despair or in a sad mood [on] the internet. People often [do not] read orz [out loud], but spell it out in ordinary conversations.

So how far has this orz culture gone? There are now songs dedicated to the cult abbrev on the web, popular Taiwanese band Mayday has incorporated it into one of their songs, and orz has spread on over to the mainland.

At net speed.

Next week on Mind the Gap Saturday: We go inside the enterprise worlds and reveal what makes a traditional Chinese business tick, as well as why some people stay up late for work. See you next Saturday.

Copyright © 2007, Blognation.com.

This article first appeared on Blognation.

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like