Happy Chinese New Year from Hong Kong! It’s the second day of the lunar new year today. And the holiday’s the reason I’ve been able to blog so much.
The holiday is the only time over 200 million migrant workers get home to visit their family in their hometown–often the only time in the year they get to see their spouses and kids. So the freak snowstorms last week wreaked havoc on transportation systems (old news by now) meaning many couldn’t get home. So here’s a Web 2.0 app that tried to help:
As posted on the “China Web2.0 Review” (a blog in English) Google China posted a “Chinese New Year Holiday Mass Migration” mashup map. The map shows weather and status of roads and rails for major cities, with associated info links. Very useful. If you click today, things look much better. Here’s a thumbnail of how it looked during the chaos of last week:
As the blog points out, readers can’t directly post comments or new info (a la Web 2.0) but they can send emails to Google, which’ll be added. The silver lining: the CNY snow storm cloud may have helped dampen inflation in China.
