Clear-ish skies and Asian blogging

It's strange to report that the skies today in Beijing are blue(-ish) and the air is substantially clearer than the filth we were breathing in Hong Kong when I left this morning. Even stranger to hear from another Hong Kong-based friend who has just landed in Mumbai and found the same thing. Asia's World City needs either to pull up its environmental socks or on its gas mask.

With that off my chest (literally...splutter), we turn to blogging. We've written several times (most recently here) about the reports from Edelman and Technorati talking about trend-setting blogging in Asia. Now Hugo E. Martin reports on a Brand Republic piece which, when talking of blogging trends, notes:

• Asian markets are driving adoption, with China and South Korea leading the way in actively creating content and socialising online ...
• 72.3 % of blog readers in China also post online

Oh, and this is my first trip to China in which blogger.com blogs are not all blocked. I'm sure I could include some words which fall foul of the great fire wall minders. But I can see mine, Hugo's and others with no problem today. One day they might unblock the BBC too. Then the air will really begin to have become clearer.

Breathless at the Beijing Auto Show

Given the state of the air in Beijing (and Hong Kong is even worse these days), it is something of a cruel joke to use the phrase "breathless" in relation to cars in China. The country is set to overtake Japan to become the world's 2nd largest car market and the opening of last week's Beijing Auto Show seems to have generated a lot of excited and, dare I say, breathless commentary.

The China Rises blog includes two very excited posts including one which begins:

The annual auto show in China is one of the major automotive exhibits in the world today, up there with Detroit, Frankfurt and Tokyo.

Tim Johnson, the blog's author follows up with a second post which includes some fun pictures (his, so I'll not repost them here) of Maserati, Ferrari, Rolls-Royce and Porsche exhibits at the fair.

Tom Walsh of the Detroit Free Press suggests "With its deafening music, raffle drawings, flying acrobats and dance acts, and Disneyesque costumed donkeys, roosters, penguins and oranges strolling around, plus all the copycat cars and names, the atmosphere is more carnival than world-class business event". He goes, on though, to say "But Auto China 2006 is no more a pretender than its host country, China".

People are paying this event pretty serious attention and a variety of international auto industry B2B media are congregating around it. Crain's Automotive News has been organising a major conference in Beijing and recently launched the latest in the company's series of China e-newsletters (see here for previous posts on what they're up to) in the auto sector.