TripDingo

Dear Readers,

It’s time to say goodbye. Kango.com has come to its senses in deciding that bloggers in China really can’t blog much about United States travel-related topics because, well, they’re in China and it doesn’t make much sense to pay for content that has little direct relation to their U.S.-centric travel information aggregating semantic-search startup. You may be wondering why they ever sponsored content that had nothing to do with U.S. travel in the first place…and you’ll just have to keep wondering because I don’t really know the answer.

TripDingo.com, under me, your kangaroo and wallaby loving Dingo (cute but unoriginal yet domain-matching pseudonym that it is) focused largely on a random variety of issues, events, and experiences in and around Shanghai and China as a whole. This Friday will be the last day in which we will be paid for our content and then I’m outta here like Rhett Butler (wait, does that make Kango Scarlett O’Hara?). Naturally, I have no idea nor control over what Kango will do with this web-property and the existing content once I’m gone…but I thank all of my readers for their eyeballs and their contributions in the very brief stint I was manning the helm.

For those who are still keen on reading random commentary about China, the blogroll to the right has a few of my favorite links to some great blogs I follow daily. Danwei updates the most, but I find Imagethief to be particularly amusing to read. Of course, there’s always Elliot Ng and Min Guo’s aspiring CNreviews as well. Without my own little soapbox to stand on, I’ll probably increasingly comment (maybe even troll…just kidding…maybe) these other excellent blogs until and maybe, on a lark, one of them will consider me amusing enough to allow some guest-blogging (more fearsome things have happened before). Look for “Kai.”

I imagine TripDingo.com will be recycled or even reinvented by Kango to make a lot more sense to them and I’m sure they’ll find a great blogger to love wallabies and kangaroos as much as I do. I wish that individual or group of individuals the best of luck. Despite still being “almost alpha” with a private developing beta, Kango.com will be a great place for families, retirees, smitten mature couples, and other wholesome individuals to find the right destination or activity for them by bringing together the opinions, reviews, and experiences of everyone before them from all-around the web. If there’s one place to start scratching your itch to go somewhere while having as much information as you can at your fingertips, it’ll be Kango.com. For now, it’s just the United States. In the future, you can bet they’ll try conquering covering the world.

Hey, it’s what I’d do.

Cheers.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Elliot Ng, the VP of Marketing for Kango.com (who sponsors this blog) and having quite a few exchanges about the China blogosphere, entreprenuership, travel, technology, Shanghai nightlife, and the flows of information between China and the West (amongst many other things). Fantastic guy and I want to bake cookies for him already but I’ll jump straight into what I want to talk about in this post by referencing a post of his over at his blog, CNReviews.com:

There is an incredible one-way mirror (technically a two-way mirror) effect in the world today. People (ok, educated elites) in China have a high degree of awareness about what is going on in the US. But most people (including educated elites) in the US have a low degree of awareness of China.

Elliot then goes on to give an “especially clear” example of this one-sided “awareness” where a marketing director for a Chinese company shared that she watches the American TV shows Prison Break and Entourage. 

I have a few problems with Elliot’s statement (which I’m sure likely stems just from the lack of precision when using certain terms). For one, how are we defining “awareness?” Awareness of what? Of popular media entertainment? Social trends? Political trends? Societal values? Business environments? Professional norms? History? What? I could go on and on. Granted, there are more Chinese (absolute and per capita) who have exposure to American popular media than vice versa but is that sufficient to generalize “awareness?”  (more…)