I visited one Internet cafe about half an year ago and wrote a report (I could not find it on this site. Strange). I visited another one yesterday, as part of my goal to dive into the details of Internet in China. Here are some photos.

© Jian Shuo Wang

Internet bars, just as the Internet users in China, are highly diversed. There are very cheap bars with bad environment, there are also great bars like this. It is like a 5 star hotel facility. :-)

I wrote an article about the mapping of current Internet situation to the Internet history of America. The article was widely quoted, and it is the first article I wrote appearing at the home of furl.com and the most popular link page on del.cio.us today. I didn’t expect that. Some people challenged the idea of visiting Internet Cafe. I know it is now the best way to learn Internet, there are many more places to visit, like those schools, and the under-developed areas, Internet cafe is a good starting point.

I will continue to visit more Internet cafe. The observation is pretty consistent from the previous visit – 95% or more are on either game or watching DVD, but I am more interested in TALKing with the people there, instead of just watching. To check out the software installed on the computer, to see the history of page visited are also very educational for me. To avoid people claiming it is another commercial show again (some claimed that I claimed to dive into Internet bar as a commerical show), let me record some photos in the English version and prepare to write something more solid later…

P.S. shift of focus?

As I started to work for Kijiji, the scope of my view changed a lot. My focus changed dramatically from the city to the industry. Meanwhile, I become more public than before. The publicity sometimes does not allow me to write as personal as before, but as what I have decided at the very begining of this blog, PERSONAL is much more important than focus. It is as hard to keep writing personal at high publicity as to keep writing as low publicity. Let me try. :-)